If there’s a particularly acute drought of new titles, Wednesday sees us delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

On the week before Captain Britain & M.I.13 is lowered into the ground, still struggling, it’s interesting to take a look back at how the story started, in 2006’s ‘Rudiments of Wisdom’ mini-series. It was here that we were introduced to M.I.13, and remarkably little has changed since these early, days, with Paul Cornell hitting the right notes with sufficient strength first time around.

Pete Wisdom seems determined to single-handedly shake off the British establishment’s stuffy image, putting together an eccentric collection of foul-mouthed figures imaginable in response to a series of covert offensives by the country’s supernatural underbelly, but a completely different sort of mature-readers approach proves to be the solution to the problem. With hindsight, the immediately striking feature of the title is that it’s a bona fide team book, with Wisdom a doorway into this world, just as Brian Braddock has proved in the successor title. Despite the superficial nods to the MAX label, the writer primarily uses the freedom available to him to inject a slightly larger-than-life feel to the proceedings, with moments of straight-faced find-racing silliness such as Wisdom’s briefing on conduct when in Avalon complementing more traditional all-ages jokes such as the super spy running out of puff while leading the team. One part of foreshadowing aside, the issue functions as a self-contained piece, conforming more to one-shot rules than the mini-series ethic.

Trevor Hairsine’s is extremely variable as an artist, with his scratchy style having to walk a fine line between moodiness and ink-drenched obscurity. Here, he’s obvious on form, doing a fine job of maintaining a coherent tone in the issue, no matter how fantastical or mundane the locations to which Cornell dispatches his protagonists. There are a couple of corners cut here and there, but not enough to take the gloss off some extremely strong work. In terms of themes, the writer makes a bold gamble by having several characters articulating the main concept for the book, of Britain’s inability to escape its past, so openly, but subsequent issues vindicated this approach, with each story giving rise to one moment when it becomes clear just how this idea fits into the tale. The overall impression is of a superabundance of imagination- it’s hard to remember the last time so many memorable figures were introduced within the same issue of a comic.