Do British comics have a "Batman-like" character?

Just curious . . . with Batman seeming to be one of the most popular comic book characters these days, do British comic books have any equivalent version of a non-powered masked hero that fights crime and dresses as a creature of the night?

We've had several (well, non powered vigilantes, not necessarily "creatures of the night"), but none as successful. Britain doesn't really do superheroes the way America does; in fact, pretty much no other country does. British comics have a long tradition of masked vigilantes with gadgets, like King Cobra or X-Bow, or kid crimefighters like Billy the Cat, but they've never attained the public recognition of a Dan Dare, a Desperate Dan or a Judge Dredd. The closest to Batman might be The Spider, a now almost forgotten but in the sixties hugely popular character who appeared in Valiant.

Captain Britain would never sneak around in the middle of the night wearing dark clothes. It wouldn't be cricket.

The Spider was a great character, but he was a villain not a hero.

 
Does anyone remember Lew Stringer's Brickman?



 
Or Birdman and Chicken from Krazy

Philip K Ditko wrote:Does anyone remember Lew Stringer's Brickman?

I take it that was an example of a brickbat?   

Philip K Ditko wrote:The Spider was a great character, but he was a villain not a hero.
 

He was actually both. He started out as a crook, then became a crimefighter later, apparently just for the hell of it. A lot of his adventures were written by a jobbing American writer called Jerry Siegel. I'm not sure if he ever did any other comics related work.

I like Brickman