Was this the very first appearance of Joey Chapman / Union Jack III since he was first introduced nearly a decade earlier in Captain America #253-254?

Having decried Marvel's depiction of Irish accents, I suppose it's only neighbourly of me to scoff at Union Jack's accent here. I had to look up on the internet to see he's supposed to be a working class Mancunian. Could have fooled me!

@Ben, more or less. He was in Contest of Champions, if you count that.

It's interesting that the modern-day Union Jack was almost completely absent from the Marvel universe for almost a decade after he made his debut. But once we hit 1990 suddenly UJ started popping up quite a bit: this MCP story, a regular role in Knights of Pendragon from issue #7 onward, showing up in Byrne's Invaders reunion in Namor the Sub-Mariner #12, a miniseries by Ben Raab & John Cassaday, and so on.

Anyway, I do agree that it was a good idea to have a hero from the UK who was working class, since it seems like every other British hero in the Marvel universe had an aristocratic background. Well, unless you want to count Blade from Tomb of Dracula, but he was hardly ever written as British, and most of the time seemed to use a lot of American slang!

It's worth noting that in Namor, Misty acts like Colleen has just been moping around the house for months.

One of the main points of making Joey Chapman Union Jack was to get away from the aristocratic bent of UK heroes, at least during the war. But here he just becomes another argument for not trying to depict accents phonetically (I always hated Rogue's "Ah reckon..."). It detracts from any point the writer is trying to make.

There are better ways to depict variations in speech patterns but that would require a bit of research on the part of the scripters.

Did UJ call Captain Britain "a political poof"?

Sorry, that should have been "Colleen acts like Misty"...

Between this and the Knight and Fogg story in Spider-Man I'm baffled by how badly England was portrayed in 1990. I know cape comics have a long history of crappy portrayals of non-American countries, but I thought England would've been exempt from that. Guess not.

The ignorance of the writers about how Brits actually speak would explain how a slur like "poof" ended up in a comic though.

That's what I was wondering about. "Poof" doesn't sound bad to American ears, but it's a pretty horrid slur in the UK. Definitely not anything you'd want a good guy saying.

I never heard of the word "poof" before beyond the old school sound effect. What does it mean in the UK?

It's a slur against gay people, only slightly less offensive than f****t.

The art is Ye Olde English Caricature-y, but Nicieza's script, while not good, isn't as outmoded, and a rough "working class hero" like Chapman might well have called a posh hero like Captain Britain a "political poof," in the way, say, Captain Teamster in the U.S. circa 1990 would probably have some politically incorrect language in his repertoire. It's not hard to imagine USAgent (in his Superpatriot days, at least) calling someone, say, a "liberal pansy,"

I'm not defending the gratuitous slur or the quality of the story, but it does strike me as in character, at least the way Nicieza wants to write the character.

"Poof" is one of those cases where it just gets a 'pass' from North American audiences. I've noticed it get used a few times in BUFFY and the spin-off ANGEL (usually by Spike), both in the live-action tv and the current comic book continuation of the series.

That's probably because most North Americans don't know what it means and assume it's similar to "wimp".

Isn't Chapman gay himself? It seemed strongly implied in his first appearance.

BU, that may have been implied in his Cap appearance, but in Knights of Pendragon he develops an attraction to Kate McClellan. Not that he couldn't be bi.

I don't think there was any gay subtext to the Chapman Union Jack. It's a modern tic to assume two male characters who show up and are friends in an old story might (or are likely to) also be gay. This was generally not the case prior to comparative literature students and tumblr users trying to find gay subtext everywhere.

The point of the original Cap story was that a lower class Brit could also be a super-hero and Ken Falsworth was there as a swerve since you'd assume he would be the one to become the new Union Jack. I've often found British class themes get lost on Americans because social class in America is not perceived as being ultra-rigid by most Americans.

Buffy also had James Marsters flashing the backwards V-sign in the opening credits every week for about two seasons, and no one noticed. It's essentially the middle finger, and is considered equally vulgar...but American audiences (and network executives) apparently didn't know any better.

And the Avengers movie has Loki calling Black Widow a quim. Maybe Joss Whedon just likes exposing vulgar British slang to an oblivious US audience.

[shrugs] In his introduction in Captain America #253-254, his bond with Falsworth was portrayed in exactly the We-Can't-Say-It way Byrne later used for Northstar and Maggie Sawyer. You can never be sure of anything, of course, when all you have to go on is the-kids-won't-get-it hints, but I certainly wasn't looking for it when I saw it right there on the page...