I’m always on the lookout for Captain Britain bargains on eBay, be they cards, art, badges or action figures. So imagine my delight when I not only came across a Captain Britain action figure from 1999 I hadn’t seen before, but then won the item as well.
Here’s the figure.
Instantly there are a couple of things on the figure that leap out at you, firstly it’s labelled Previews exclusive, Previews referring to the monthly comic book catalogue, so I’m imagining the figure might have been scarce or even non-existent outside of comic shops.
The next thing that caught my eye was just who is Captain Britain packaged with?
It’s sort of hard to see from this angle but I’m 99.9% certain it’s Lockheed the companion of Kitty Pryde Caps’ Excalibur team-mate, whose inclusion is suspect, which I will get to later.
Why Lockheed? Well the jury is still out on that one. Anyway the figure also comes with an exclusive trading card which because I won’t open the packet this is about as close as we’re going to get to it.
Now Captain Britain merchandise to me lives or fails on how they describe Cap, so let’s flip the box and see how this one does.
Not to bad though Captain Britain is not powerless without his suit but as this was 1999 that might not have been in Cap continuity at the time so I’m going to ignore it.
Finally I’m always intrigued to see what other superheroes were part of this range. The box lists Wolverine – who I believe Marvel are contractually bound to always release as an action figure – Black Bolt, and Shang-Chi. Interestingly if you study the first picture of the Cap figure you will notice Wolverine and the other heroes figures are all based on comics; whereas Captain Britain is based on a trade paperback which collects his adventures. This collection is the series of adventures from before Cap joined Excalibur and met Kitty Pryde and Lockheed, so as I said earlier the dragon’s inclusion is suspect to say the least.
Despite these two minor errors I’m quite taken with the new addition to my Captain Britain merchandise collection and considering the figure is 15 years old it’s in very good condition and now sits proudly on my shelf – out of direct sunlight don’t worry.
If you want to read about my other odd Captain Britain figure then click here.
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