Panel Vision - Camelot 3000

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Every culture has a handful of fundamental tales that are forever retold, decade-to-decade.  In the Western canon, one such tale is the story of King Arthur, a romantic fiction theoretically based on the deeds of a real man in the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginnings of organized, European civilization.   Every decade since the dawn of modern pop culture has had its own take on the Arthur myth- 1953’s straightforward adventure film Knights of the Round Table, 1967’s musical Camelot was so popular the mythology became intertwined with the Kennedy administration. 

1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail brought ‘70s cynicism and satire to the material while 1981’s Excalibur afforded the legend the scale and pageantry of a blockbuster epic.  In 1995 First Knight doubled down on a romantic vision of King Arthur, and in 2004 we got an ostensibly more realistic version of the story with King Arthur.  Now, on the eve of the 2010’s take on the classic legend, I thought I’d look back on my favorite retelling of the classic tale, a piece of high-concept weirdness from 1983 entitled Camelot 3000. 

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword 1st Trailer

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I’ve been saying for a couple years now that the fantasy genre is unmoored.  It’s basically a slogan of these articles because it lets me talk about form and style and genre history, the stuff I know the most about.  However, I’m starting to wonder how true that actually is anymore.  After a decade at the top of the blockbuster fantasy has definitely receded in the 2010s, producing fewer Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings level sagas in comparison to the success of superheroes and sci-fi properties. 

That translated to a thoroughly unsure nature for the first few years of the decade, especially when it turned out The Hobbit wasn’t as successful as everyone was gearing up for it to be.  However, as we pass the midpoint of the decade and begin the slow trickle towards its twilight years it’s starting to seem more and more like the new defining affect of fantasy is what I call Number Zero stories.  I’ll get into what that means in a little bit but there’s no greater example of it than the fact WB is giving Guy Ritchie the reigns of a new big budget King Arthur movie.

Panel Vision - Captain Britain: Crooked World

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Alan Moore is one of those unique authors in the realm of comics that most people are aware of without really experiencing his full volume of work.  Most folks know Moore for Watchmen, V for Vendetta, or The Killing Joke, maybe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Marvelman if they’re particularly comic book minded.  I understand this impetus to an extent as the thin shaft of Moore’s work that’s widely known comes without the continuity baggage of his early work or the uncomfortable lewdness of his recent endeavors.  However this has left a ton of his great stuff unknown to a lot of readers, one such comic is his excellent Captain Britain stuff. 

In this review I’ll only be focusing on one key story that Moore wrote ‘Crooked World,’ but there are a ton of other great Captain Britain stories by him to check out.  Captain Britain- Crooked World just came to mind because a lot of its key elements have been popping up recently between Marvel’s Secret War comic, the recent Captain Britain and the Mighty Defenders mini-series, and the oncoming Captain America 3: Civil War.  All of these trends flow from the same source that is this comic.