There was so much I liked about this comic series. The premise is delightful: in an alternate universe the age of Marvel superheroes starts 300-odd years early for mysterious reasons, which Queen Elizabeth's physician Doctor Strange and spymaster Nick Fury must unravel. Looming large in the background is the future of England after Elizabeth's death, when mutant- and magic-hating King James of Scotland is likely to ascend to the throne. The art by Andy Kubert and color work by Richard Isanove are pitch perfect, making a fairly traditional superhero comic book format feel both modern and vibrant at the same time as it's representing fictional events from centuries ago. The collected edition of issues 1-8 also includes the comic script by Gaiman and concept art for several characters, so it felt like a decent value add beyond the single issues.

But there were two major issues that impacted my ability to fully enjoy the series. First was how the women characters throughout felt generally passive, weak or lacking in agency, in spite of their potential. Take Virginia Dare, who has significant powers but voyages to England at the behest of her father and relies on her American-Indian bodyguard Rojhaz for protection (more on him shortly), or Wanda Maximoff, who's overshadowed significantly by her brother Petros and their boss. Clea Strange has an interesting partnership with her husband but again he drives the action. And Susan Storm

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is sexually exploited and then knocks Natasha Romanova unconscious and calls her "whore"

. So yeah, not exactly close to a feminist text.

Rojhaz is the other major issue with this series, and unfortunately

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the entire plot hinges on him: he is actually Steve Rogers, or Captain America, sent back in time. I can see how Neil Gaiman maybe thought this was a progressive idea at the time: make Captain America Native American. Except he just made him a white man pretending to be Native American. As Chad Barbour wrote in his paper "When Captain American Was an Indian: Heroic Masculinity, National Identity, and Appropriation":

In this negotiation of the Captain's representative status, these stories follow a typical pattern of performing Indianness (while marginalizing Native peoples) to establish and perpetuate an authentic white American identity.

Rojhaz doesn't just marginalize Native peoples by leaving the ones that found him after he was thrown back in time, to save the white colonists at Roanoke, VA. He also shows that he has never troubled himself to consider the darker parts of his country's past, and is even prepared to sacrifice the multiverse to save the white colonists at Roanoke, for the sake of the future, white-dominated country that he loves. In that way we see that Steve Rogers' America goes back before American independence but doesn't go back further than colonization. It's not a good look.

Were the series ever to be adapted the first issue could probably be adjusted, as we've seen with improved representations in The Sandman, but I don't know that the second one could be.