Captain Midlands
comics character
Captain Midlands (Sid Ridley) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Captain Midlands was created by writer Paul Cornell and first penciled by Trevor Hairsine and first appeared in Wisdom #1 (January 2007).
Characterization
Captain Midlands is a patriotic British Army veteran and a British analogue of Captain America. An eighty-year-old Brummie superhero, Captain Midlands is often portrayed as a grumpy old git. His real name, "Rambling" Sid Ridley, is a combination of Kenneth Williams' Round the Horne character 'Rambling Sid Rumpo' and Arnold Ridley who played Private Godfrey in the sitcom Dad's Army.
Captain Midlands' nuanced role sees him more as a down-to-earth hero, with Paul Cornell describing him as:
the representative of my dad's generation, those who fought in World War II, which is still big in the British psyche. He also tends to look backwards, while Pete Wisdom looks forwards, thus also representing that trait of the British.
Fictional character biography
As part of the 1940s British Super-Soldier program, Sid Ridley is transformed into a "perfect" specimen of human development and conditioning then sent off to be part of the British Army's war effort.
After serving as Captain Midlands in World War II, Ridley somehow ended up in British Intelligence and eventually MI-13. Ridley also suggested that he had "knocked a girl up" (got her pregnant) and married her before she died in 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Captain Midlands” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.