Elizabeth Sandifer

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Bill Sienkiewicz got his start as a Neal Adams imitator drawing Marvel’s Batman imitator Moon Knight, but eventually moved on to a more prestigious project: New Mutants.

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence. – Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights

This was one of the books in the X-Men line, written by Chris Claremont, then at the apex of his clout as a major figure in the industry. New Mutants was a book focused on the younger generation of mutant characters. Among these was Dani Moonstar, a Native American mutant. From the earliest issues of New Mutants it became clear that Dani was haunted by a bear spirit—one that had previously killed her parents. A year and a half into the book’s run, as Claremont prepared to pay off this story, he grew frustrated of working with Sal Buscema. As Claremont saw it, “[Buscema] looked like everything else. And I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be very much a kid-centric book. There needed to be a totally different visual sense.” And so he turned to Sienkiewicz.

For his part, Sienkiewicz had been on a kick of reading Hunter S. Thompson, with the memorably grotesque art of Ralph Steadman, and watching David Lynch films, and so when Claremont came to him with a story that took place largely in an abstracted spirit world and a mandate to bring a distinctive visual sense, he cut loose. Reasoning that “the benefit of dealing with dream logic and nightmares is that anything goes,” Sienkiewicz embraced a harsh and abstract line that made characters feel as though they had been clawed into the page, less drawn than scratched. His Demon Bear was a towering monolith of crazed eyes, murderous teeth, savage claws, and the vague yet terrifying implication of a snout. The result was moody, kinetic, and like nothing mainstream superhero comics had seen before. It was not, to be clear, that Sienkiewicz was creating new techniques; ultimately he was simply importing concepts from the fine art world (in which he had trained before seeking a career in comics) that the stodgy comics industry had largely neglected—the same concepts that artists like Dave McKean and Duncan Fegredo would hit on as well. But Sienkiewicz’s run on New Mutants was the first time these techniques had been employed in a mainstream American comic. It was also a massive hit, and Sienkiewicz ended up spending a year on the book instead of the originally planned three issues, introducing the cybernetic alien Warlock, who, in Sienkiewicz’s conception, was an shifting mass of circuitry that got to cyberpunk horror a full five years before the twin 1989 releases of Tetsuo the Iron Man and “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does.”

Sienkiewicz’s work on New Mutants was aided by the particular dynamic he had with Claremont, who, in 1984, was arguably the single most mainstream writer in superhero comics.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The CIA was very bad, and then there was a bombing in La Penca, Nicaragua, that injured a journalist, Tony Avrigan.

In this, the eleventh hour, with the world poised on the brink of Red Armageddon, it is vital that we, as a nation, should rally around those symbols that are closest to the great, warm, red-white-and-blue beating heart of this beleaguered country. They are our hope and our inspiration, the legends that urge our people onward even in times of deepest crisis. -Alan Moore, Watchmen

Subsequent investigation revealed that “Per Anker Hansen’ was in fact a man named Vital Roberto Gaguine, an Argentinian leftist who had traveled to La Penca along with Swedish journalist Peter Torbiörnsson. Tobiörnsson was in fact a Sandinista sympathizer who had worked closely with a Nicaraguan intelligence unit called the Fifth Directorate, run out of the Interior Ministry by Tomás Borge, although he has always maintained that he simply thought Gaguine was a spy and not a bomber, and in his later career worked to expose the details of Sandinista involvement in the bombing. This has not entirely satisfied Honey, however, who, not unreasonably, points out that pinning the blame on the Sandinistas would have benefitted the Reagan administration, who instead stonewalled and obfuscated the investigation, and who points out a number of aspects of the bombing that remain unexplained.

The details of Gaguine’s involvement and Torbiörnsson’s complicity, however, did not begin to emerge until 1993, and Torbiörnsson’s full involvement did not emerge until 2009. Long before all of this, when the bulk of the evidence to be unearthed was still related to the CIA theory, Avirgan and Honey found themselves in touch with the Christic Institute, who felt that the evidence they had collected tied in with their ongoing investigations of the CIA. Ultimately Avirgan and the Christic Institute filed a $24 million lawsuit against a wide spread of people alleged to have been responsible for a conspiracy to commit the La Penca bombing along with drug and arms trafficking, illegal assassination programs, and more. It should be stressed that many of the underlying claims in the lawsuit were ultimately well-documented—the Iran-Contra scandal was, after all, real, and the lawsuit was filed months before it emerged into popular awareness. And, more to the point, the CIA really was responsible for a host of illegal activities including drug smuggling and illegal assassinations.

Despite its prescience, however, Avirgan v. Hull was a deeply ambitious lawsuit, and the Christic Institute had bad luck in drawing James Lawrence King as the judge. King was a Nixon appointee who would have a long career of conservative and pro-government rulings, and on June 23rd 1988 he dismissed the case, declaring that the Christic Institute’s case consisted of “unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first-hand knowledge” and levying one million dollars in fines against the Institute for filing a frivolous suit.

It is undoubtedly the case that King was a particularly hostile judge, and opinion was sharply divided on whether his dismissal and penalties were unduly harsh, but even writers who are sympathetic to the Institute’s aims tend to suggest that the lawsuit was deeply flawed.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore contributed a story to Joyce Brabner’s Real War Stories project. Brabner got into comics, as she tells it, by appearing in one—specifically Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the lawyers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled cement tree-stump of the Boroughs. – Alan Moore, Jerusalem

American Splendor gradually evolved from the meandering anecdotal form into more long form and piercing accounts of Pekar and his life. Many of the stories were simply several page accounts of conversations Pekar had with various people in Cleveland, while others offered more piercing accounts of Pekar, his anxiety, stubbornness, and sense of himself. A story in American Splendor #3 entitled “Awakening to the Terror of a New Day,” for instance, starts with Pekar on the phone with his ex-wife, trying to get back together, only to be rebuffed, at which point he loses his temper at her and is castigated for it, concluding that “I shouldna lost my temper. That’s one reason chicks don’t dig me. They’re scared a’ me.” He lays down in bed, wakes up anxious, masturbates, and is left feeling hollow and empty inside. He takes a bath, reflecting on his job, and how he doesn’t want to get out of the tub. “Sometimes I wish I could freak out,” he thinks, “have a nervous breakdown, anything to get away from the same routine.” Instead he rises from the tub, gets dressed, grouching about how his clothes are tattered but how he doesn’t want to spend money on new ones because “what could be more ridiculous than fat slobs spendin’ a lot a’ money on clothes. They’re gonna look lousy anyway.” He has breakfast, leaves for work, and decides on the walk that he should take the civic service exam and look for a government job. The comic ends with him sitting at the bus stop, resolving that “I gotta take the days one at a time… make a plan an’ try t’ follow it out. I might be able t’ make it if I get my ass in gear. I’ll check out the gover’mint gig scene an’ think over where I stand with th’ chicks I know. Mybe I’m overlooking someone. T’day’s Thursday. Tomorra’s Firday. Saturday I c’n sleep late.” A final caption notes that “Man looks wherever he can for hope,” and the strip ends. It’s elliptical, willfully unsatisfying, but more than anything is simply a poignant reflection on working class life in Cleveland in the 1970s.

Pekar’s work drew a number of admirers, although the comic remained a niche operation that ran at a steady but sustainable loss.…

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Before we get started, an update: my new Patreon, which I had to start from scratch after Patreon informed me that it was not possible to simply convert my Patreon of nine years over to per-month billing, is still $2400 a month short of the old one, which is an absolutely terrifying hit to my income. This new Patreon gives you more content—all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and more—for less money than the old one, and if you want my work to continue I really implore you to support it.

Especially because, as of a few minutes ago, all Patrons got access to a pre-release ebook of Last War in Albion Volume 3, featuring this amazing cover.

So if you’re not currently a supporter of my work on Patreon, please do consider changing that.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having finished his outstanding obligations to DC and free at last to pursue his own interests, Alan Moore moved on to other things.

There are things that happen out on the most violent edge of human experience that eclipse fiction by their sheer intensity – that you simply could not ever invent. The many accounts I’ve read of human experience in wartime reveal degrees of courage, cruelty, cowardice and even kindness that are beyond imagination. Next to that, fantasy means almost nothing. – Garth Ennis, interview with Unwinnable

One of the first of these things would see Alan Moore make his final trip to the United States in October of 1987, a few months after the publication of Watchmen #12. Although he was still a couple of months away from finishing his work on V for Vendetta, he did not visit the DC offices at all. Instead he went to Washington DC, where he met with members of a law firm called the Chrsitic Institute and with the American comics writer Joyce Brabner.

Moore had already worked with Brabner before on a volume called Real War Stories, published by Eclipse Comics the same month that Watchmen and Swamp Thing concluded. This was a comic produced with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, which, as Brabner explained it, “needed a tool to reach teenagers with information about the military. This was during the peacetime draft, when they were looking for smart white kids to sign up, and they had a very aggressive recruiting campaign around the time Top Gun was in the theatres.” The CCCO had originally envisioned and had the budget for a small indie book, but Brabner successfully argued that in order to have any impact on its intended audience “it had to be a color book with popular artists and writers if we were going to get the kids,” and so she worked with Eclipse Comics to bring the project to fruition. Moore’s explanation for his interest in the project, printed (along with similar statements from other contributors) at the outset of the comic, was simple: “Because I have a deep aversion to all forms of violence and war, and if I have to explain, I must fall back on the pacifist slogan that says ‘A bayonet is an instrument with a worker on either end of it.’”…

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