Excalibur (Comic Book)/Characters

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Main Characters

Captain Britain/Brian Braddock

• Back from the Dead: Again and again.
• Cain and Abel: Brian's older brother Jamie is an utterly insane Reality Warper.
• The Chosen Many: The multiversal Captain Britain Corps.
• Expy: Captain Britain was originally an expy of Captain America. This was deconstructed in Captain Britain and MI: 13 where Captain Britain says how much he admires Captain America and how he'd like to be a patriotic symbol just like Captain America, but there are a lot of things in the way. Later, he is resurrected by Merlin, who knits together a multitude of Union Jacks into a human body - making the Captain, like the flag he wears and the country he represents, a single being made of multiple parts; "One Thing That Contains Many".
• Drowning My Sorrows: This was a major subplot for a large part of early Excalibur.
• Fisher King: Captain Britain has a magical connection with the British Isles.
• Flying Brick
• Genius Bruiser: Not often shown, but Brian's background is in physics and he's as happy in a lab as on a battlefield.
• Ineffectual Loner: Justified; for about half of Excalibur there was a spell on him to screw him up if he took independent action.
• The Good Captain
• The Hero
• Heroic Resolve
• Nice Guy
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head

Meggan Puceanu/Gloriana

• Arch Enemy: Dormammu
• Beware the Nice Ones: Sweet as they come, but mess with her friends and you'll live to regret it. As the rulers of Hell have found out.
• Character Development: She started out as a frightened young girl and gradually learned to take control of her powers and her life, Took a Level in Badass and gradually became a strong, confident woman. And then they killed her off. And then she became a rebel leader in Hell, took another level in badass, and is now Back from the Dead.
• Does Not Like Shoes
• Empathic Shapeshifter: The Trope Namer.
• Friend to All Children
• Friend to All Living Things: Has an empathic link with nature, including plants, wildlife, weather patterns, and so on; sensitive to the pain and damage of those around her, and has extensive healing abilities among her wide arsenal of talents. When possible she will also offer compassion to technical antagonists who are not genuinely bad people, and for example managed to talk Darkoth into seeing reason.
• Gender Bender: The potential Squick downside to the othervise virtually perfect idealised girlfriend scenario, although she usually tends to dislike and avoid it.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Very possessive of Brian, and most definitely does not like either Saturnine or Sat-Yr-9.
• Heroic Sacrifice
• Her Story Repeats Itself: For most of her childhood she was locked up in a caravan and then was kidnapped by an evil Government Conspiracy and put in a concentration camp. Later on she stumbled upon a van full of mutant kids who had been kidnapped by a morally-ambiguous Government Conspiracy and, seeing the obvious parallels, she tried to free them. This led to her gaining control of her powers and all her subsequent Character Development.
• Like a Badass Out of Hell
• Magical Girlfriend
• Mama Bear: Meggan is a very nurturing sort, and only tends to "upstage" her husband if someone is in the process of hurting and overpowering him... whereupon she angrily takes them down in one punch, as a bullying otherdimensional copy of Hercules found out the hard way.
• Martial Pacifist
• The Messiah: Among other things she has resurrected a virtually dead planet, including bringing fallen warriors back to life, and created a small refuge paradise in one of Marvel's multitudes of eternal torture owens.
• Nice Girl
• No Social Skills: Her parents kept her hidden for her own safety. She had no contact with other human beings and they couldn't be there for her for much of the time, so she spent most of her childhood sitting in a caravan, watching TV. This makes her (in Captain Britain's words): "Unusual... And very excitable."
• Only One Name: Until very recently
• Pillars of Moral Character: Probably the genuinely kindest and most idealistic of all Marvel's superheroines, and also easily one of the most powerful, being a rare case of when the technical "sidekick" girlfriend is actually far more dangerous.
• Power Perversion Potential: Meggan is far too pure to ever use her power in an outright disgusting or degenerate fashion, although she isn't above experimenting with and modifying her appearance into one that Brian will find attractive, or to use it for undercover disguises together with Brian if the police needs help. However, she has stated that she finds outright impersonations morally offensive, but will go along if others ask her to in a situation that sufficiently demands it.
• Roma
• She's All Grown Up (Justified): She started off as a weird bat-like creature. As a result of gaining control of her shapeshifting powers she transformed into a beautiful woman.
• Superpower Lottery: She literally has almost any type of power that she knows a reference for, but is a kind and gentle person, who prefers to handle things in as restrained manner as possible.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Meggan is arguably the most powerful known metamorph in the Marvel Universe this side of The Magus. She can literally turn into pretty much anything. Sand, water, Godzilla... you name it. It also gives her more or less every superpower in existence up to and beyond Silver Surfer levels (but less than actual Cosmic Entities), either through automatic reactive evolution to hostile environments, or through copying any character she knows about, and she doesn't need to fully duplicate their form (nor shift gender) to do it. However, she is limited by how much magical power she has available in the environment.

Black Knight/Dane Whitman

• Artifact of Doom: Dane's swords have a nasty habit of being this.
• Canon Discontinuity: In the 1990s Heroes For Hire series, Dane received the Sword of Light and the Shield of Night... and they've promptly been ignored in every series since.
• Civvie Spandex: Dane currently wears a helmet and leather jacket over ordinary clothes.
• Continuity Snarl: Just how many Ebony Swords are out there, anyway?
• Cool Horse: Two genetically engineered flying horses, and one robot horse. Currently using one of the flying horses.
• Cool Swords: The Ebony Sword and the Sword of Light.
• Fish Out of Temporal Water: Dane once spent some time in the Crusades.
• Legacy Character: The title of the Black Knight has run in Dane's family since the Crusades.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Physics, mechanical engineering, genetic engineering...
• Unfortunate Implications: That time in the Crusades? Didn't go down too well with Faiza's father...
• Unstoppable Rage: The effect Dane's cursed swords usually have on him.

Faiza Hussein

• Audience Surrogate
• The Chick
• Cool Sword: She wields the legendary sword Excalibur.
• Death by Origin Story
• Fan Girl: She's a superhero fangirl.
• Healing Hands (also a subversion: she has control over living organisms; so she could use her powers to kill if she wanted.)
• Jumped At the Call: All she had to do was convince her parents...
• The Medic: She's a doctor and she has super powers that can be used to heal.
• Most Common Superpower: Averted.
• Not Wearing Tights: Faiza sticks to civilian clothes.
  • Until she started wearing knight's armor of course
• Technical Pacifist: She won't use her powers or her sword to kill. Demons don't count.
  • They're called Mindless Ones for a reason.
• Twofer Token Minority: Although her creator, Paul Cornell, insists that he doesn't like the way Superheroes are forced to be "standard bearers for whole communities" and he wants to make more of her than just another Captain Ethnic.

Pete Wisdom

• Alternate Company Equivalent: There's an old fan theory that he was an attempt to make Marvel's equivalent to John Constantine.
• Author Avatar: Of Warren Ellis while he was writing him. Probably why no one else could quite write him the same afterward.
• The Atoner
• Badass
• Badass Longcoat
• Character Development: Pete Wisdom has abandoned the trenchcoats and the cigarettes, given up the drinking and womanising (well... mostly) and the cynical attitude. He comes across as having been shaken by his experiences; he's gotten more professional, wiser and sadder than he was before. There were signs of this in the Pryde/Wisdom limited series and this has continued into Captain Britain and MI:13.
• Handsome Lech: Frank Tieri flanderized him into a Kavorka Man.
• Heartbroken Badass
• Hitman with a Heart: He used to be part of an amoral government-funded Black Ops organization, until he decided that they had crossed the Moral Event Horizon, and that he had to quit. His employers weren't exactly pleased with this.
• Dark and Troubled Past
• Deadpan Snarker
• Die for Our Ship
• Ensemble Darkhorse
• Eyepatch of Power: When he got one in X-Force, it turned out that he didn't need it. He was only wearing it to invoke this trope. And for its effect on the ladies.
• Faking the Dead: His friends saw him get shot in the head. They mourned him and held a funeral for him. He turned up, months later, Not Quite Dead. Apparently it was all some kind of trick.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: It has been suggested that his "hot knives" are a reference to hot knifing (slang for taking cannabis).
• The Lancer
• May-December Romance: With Kitty Pryde. She was approximately 18 at the time, but he's (apparently) older than Colossus, so the large age gap is still there.
• Not Wearing Tights: Everyone else can wear what they like, but Pete Wisdom sticks with his suit.
• Nineties Anti-Hero
• Playing with Fire: His mutant power to to create knifelike spouts of flame from his fingertips.
• Secret Public Identity
• Shoot the Dog: He's usually the one to do this.
• Smoking Is Cool
• Stock Super Powers: He can shoot blades of red hot energy from his fingertips.
• Trenchcoat Brigade: In the original Excalibur series.
• Trickster Mentor: To X-Force.
• Warren Ellis: Warren's first well-known trademark style character.

Spitfire/Jacqueline Falsworth-Crichton

• Action Girl
• Arch Enemy: Baroness Blood. It's Personal.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted... although she quickly recovers.
• Dark and Troubled Past
• Fountain of Youth: She got rejuvenated thanks to a transfusion of blood from Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch.
• Fragile Speedster: Spitfire gets beaten up a lot in this series. Good thing she can heal.
• Healing Factor
• Our Vampires Are Different
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: She's eighty or ninety years old, but looks like the same young woman she was sixty years ago.
• Required Secondary Powers: She has enhanced endurance and toughness and all the usual secondary powers required for super speed.
• Stiff Upper Lip: (Lying in a pool of her own blood, having broken nearly every bone in her body) "Can't move. Probably bought it. How terribly dull."

Blade

• Sixth Ranger

Kylun

• Arch Enemy: Necrom
• Cat Boy
• The Chosen One
• Cool Swords: They're hard and sharp enough to cut rock and harm otherwise invulnerable beings. And they're enchanted so they cannot hurt the pure of heart.
• Fridge Logic: If his only mutant power is to perfectly reproduce any given sound, how did he grow up to become a Beast Man? He looked completely human as a kid.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: An unusual example, given that it happened before the character was introduced to the team. Kylun was only supposed to be about four years old, but had spent enough time in an Alternate Universe that he had aged up to adulthood.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: He has the mutant power of perfectly reproducing any given sound. Yeah. Of course, it turns out to be extremely useful on more than one occasion.

John the Skrull

John the Skrull was an alien invader who was sent to Earth when Beatlemania was at its height, intending to use their enormous popularity to Take Over the World. Things got a bit out of hand, and the Skrull Beatles found that their lives were turning into an Affectionate Parody of the lives of The Beatles, complete with their version of Yoko Oh No (Captain Boko of the Kree Liberation Army) and eventually disbanded. Naturally, John the Skrull soon found himself warming to humanity and decided that he rather liked this Insignificant Little Blue Planet. He joined MI: 13 to try and protect the Earth (specifically the UK) from paranormal threats. He was killed during the Skrull invasion of Earth.

• Defector From Decadence
• Humanity Ensues
• Johnny We Hardly Knew Ya
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves (from the Skrull perspective, at least).
• Shape Shifter
• Shapeshifter Weapon
• Voluntary Shapeshifting

Colossus/Piotr Rasputin

See X-Men.

Dazzler/Alison Blaire

See Dazzler.

Juggernaut/Cain Marko

See X-Men.

Nightcrawler/Kurt Wagner

See X-Men.

Nocturne/Josephine T.J. Wagner

Phoenix/Rachel Summers

See X-Men.

Psylocke/Elizabeth Braddock

See X-Men.

Sage/Tessa

See X-Men.

Shadowcat/Kitty Pryde

See X-Men.

Wolfsbane/Rahne Sinclair

See New Mutants.

Secondary Characters

Captain Midlands

• Badass Grandpa
• British Accents: He speaks with a Brummie accent.
• Catch Phrase: "You can't stop Captain Midlands!"
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Perhaps because British people seem to find his character concept inherently humorous.
• Expy: He's a spoof version of Captain America.
  • Except that he's an Expy of the Captains Britain.
• Shotgun Wedding: He implies that he was forced to marry a girl after he "got her knocked up".
• Funetik Aksent
• Weapon of Choice: A shield, of course.

Courtney Ross

• Badass Normal: Especially for a banker. Being Captain Britain's ex was good for her.
• Canon Immigrant: From the Marvel UK line.
• Deadpan Snarker: How she coped with life-or-death situations.
• Dropped A Bridge On Her
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Not her death itself, but the final two-parter leading up to it has her taking on Murderworld, and handling herself extraordinarily well even before Excalibur shows up.
• Kill and Replace: By her evil alternate universe counterpart, Sat-Yr-9. It does not pay to be the exact physical duplicate of a ruthless otherdimensional dictator.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: If you hadn't read Captain Britain's Marvel UK adventures, you would have met her in Issue 1 and said goodbye in Issue 5.

Villains

The Fury

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot (Subverted): The Fury does exactly what it was programmed to do: Kill all Superhumans.
• Badass Decay: The Fury has gone from a terrifying, world-destroying abomination to being slapped down by a single team of X-men wannabes who didn't even take any casualties in the process.
• Crush! Kill! Destroy!: This is exactly what it was meant to do.
• Curb Stomp Battle: the Fury's first battle with Captain Britain.
• Knight of Cerebus
• The Determinator:
• The Worf Effect: In its first appearance it killed all the superheroes of an entire world.
• The Juggernaut.
• Viva La Evolution

Mad Jim Jaspers

• Cloudcuckoolander
• The Mad Hatter
• Reality Warper
• Villain Decay
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Lampshaded- it's a side-effect of his powers.