Hemingway Or Stallone?

Now that I've piqued your interest, let me tell you that it's a post about New Excalibur. I'll pause here to let your disappointment sink in. Savor the feeling, savor it!

So I've been thinking about what Claremont is shooting for with Albion, tone-wise. We've got a character born into a war, who's known nothing but violence all his life, one day given an opportunity at power that could change that, end the fighting. All he has to do is make a choice. And he did, just not the choice the people making the offer expected. Isn't that always the way it goes? Roma, being an Indian giver, tries to take the power away, but Merlyn's a swell guy, figures that would be kind of a jerk move and lets Albion keep the power, hoping things will turn out well. Of course, Roma has to screw everything up by threatening to return someday and take the power back after all. Which brings us more or less to Albion wanting to destroy Captain Britain as a sort of payback towards Roma, ostensibly for all the people he figures she's successfully screwed over like she intends to do to him.

My first reaction was that Albion's a petty, small man. He ends the war, good for him, but civilization is a shambles, and he's off taking out a grudge on someone who's never done anything to him (Captain Britain). Even when he first visits another reality (and kills its Captain Britain), revenge is foremost on his mind. He proclaims this much nicer looking place to be his and his buddies now. Again, that's swell for him, but does he think about using some of their not-decimated, not apparently war-directed, technology to try and improve the lot of the people on his world? No, he does not. Which makes pretty good sense for the story. He's the villain (I think), and it's a pretty classic villain move to be only concerned with taking care of your wants, to the detriment of others who could benefit as well.

But then I started to think about it a little more. His war was the First World War (only drug out over three generations), and that's the war of the so-called "Lost Generation". People who saw at the time, unimaginable loss of life, and some lost faith in the Victorian ideals their parents raised them on (generalizing here). Albion marches into another reality, where things look clean, and peaceful, and he doesn't see a place where he could find help for his world, he sees a place to conquer and claim as his. The idea of people getting along, cooperating for a greater good doesn't hold much stock to a person who saw people kill each other for a century over a convoluted bunch of alliance treaties and an assassination (if their First World War is anything like ours).

But then I thought about how casually he uses violence, cutting people's heads off at the drop of a hat (probably dropping along with the head it sat on, I know it's an easy quip, but what the hell). That first Captain Britain he met apologized for attacking in haste, for barging in without waiting to get all the facts. He still gets an neckline haircut. Albion is a solider that can't (or more likely won't) stop killing. He's used to waging war, he's exceedingly good at it. Dealing with famine and disease, what does he know about that? What good (as he notes) is his strength against those things? So in that regard, he's more like Stallone in Rambo:First Blood - a soldier just sort of waiting for a chance to be put in action. Rambo may not have been looking for a war, but as was noted by Colonel Trautwein, he did plenty to help it along. Neither Albion nor Rambo really seems to fit in with a peacetime setting, but battle? That's something they know a little about. For better or worse, it's a place that makes sense to these two fictional characters (I use "fictional" to emphasize that this is in no way a discussion of the effects of actual war on actual real people, as I know jack-all about that personally.)

So I'm not sure which one I think is more applicable. I'm leaning towards Rambo, based on what we saw of Albion's origin. He seems to be less of a reflective type, and more of a doer. Not really inclined to spend time contemplating what they can learn from the loss of life because of the war. So that's my attempt to tie New Excalibur #18 in with both a highly-publicized era of literature and art, and '80s action films. So, how'd I do? What are your thoughts overall?