Elizabeth Sandifer

CW: Pornographic imagery and quotes.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan’s “Shade the Changing Woman” arc coincided with the rise of online transgender culture on Usenet, particularly the creation of the group alt.transgendered, which was intended as a place for resource sharing within the trans community.

“The first time was when you were eleven and you put on your sister’s tights, wasn’t it Barry? No one would understand if you told them, would they? You wanted to order those court shoes and that black dress from the catalogue but you lost your nerve.” -Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

This high-minded purpose for the group was, unsurprisingly, not entirely realized, and a number of posts strayed in more lurid directions. One early one, for instance, was posted under the header “Troubled” and consisted of an obvious fantasy presented as a true story. “I am really troubled by a tough decision to make. To stay as I am now or to undergo another corrective surgery,” it began. “All this happened 2 months ago when a series of coincidences and mistakes lead to my present problem.” The post then explains how they were in the hospital for a minor urological procedure only to have a mixup in name tags that resulted in them getting a surprise vaginoplasty. This is described with a familiar sense of fascinated horror as their initial outrage fades to a sort of puzzled consideration of accepting the hand fate has supposedly dealt them. “The surgeon told me about several options – another surgery to reconstruct the penis and testis but it would not be the same and I would be infertile, remain as such, or take estrogen and get a breast implant. He also added that it would be easier to lead a more normal female life (sexually) than a reconstruction to lead a life as a male. Now I am really confused as I didn’t really mind being a male and never thought of becoming a female until now. A stent is placed in my artificial vagina to keep it patent and I was told that I won’t need it if I chose to become a male. I am not taking any estrogen, but still my voice is changing slightly and I noticed loss in facial hair.” In a followup a couple weeks later they come to terms with it, deciding that “I feel the same after this tragic event. So why bother to go thru another surgery” before closing their message with the warning, “Masturbation is not like it use to be even though the surgeons have left a small piece of erectile tissue as the clitoris.”

This post was certainly an outlier for the group, and most of the replies noted its obviously fictitious nature, but posts in the same vein were common. Another early post talks about how the poster was forced to cross-dress by their parents who “thought it would be cute to see their son in their daughter’s dress” but who now has an uncontrollable desire to crossdress and pass, despite their almost Rorschach-like insistance that they “go to the gun range shooting once in awhile.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Of Milligan’s early DC work, it is his time writing Batman stories that exposed him to the largest audience.

“They make absolutely no sense. It’s a literal death trap. Riddler’s rules mean there’s no way to win this game.” -Kieron Gillen, “The Riddle”

Things began to settle down in Milligan’s next story, the two-part “The Golem of Gotham,” which uses the extended space to tell a moving and effective story of the long legacy of trauma in which a Holocaust survivor creates a golem to fight back against neo-nazi gangs and must them confront the golem going out of control. And his fourth, “Identity Crisis,” sees him merging his penchant for the bizarre and the grotesque with his obligatory upbringing on Future Shocks to create  story about madness and delusion that resolves with appealing tidiness. 

Milligan took a few issues off for Louise Simonson to do some issues after “Identity Crisis” before returning again for two more stories. One of these, “The Idiot,” was a four-part crossover with Batman that showed Milligan at his most undisciplined and excessive, but the other, “The Bomb,” was an effective little tragedy about a woman held prisoner by the military because she’s a living bomb in which Milligan shows a deft command of characterization and the emotional beats. Another break of a few issues followed before Milligan came back for one more, “The Library of Souls,” a serial killer mystery about a man with a radical idea for restructuring the Dewey Decimal System.

This last issue captures a strange sort of dualism. Milligan has by this point mastered a sort of simple directness—a renegade serial killer librarian is the sort of goofy nothing upon which literally hundreds of issues of Batman comics had been written before Milligan. His take is weird and has a dark undercurrent, but it’s still fundamentally a disposable piece of pop culture detritus meant to be consumed, smiled at, and forgotten in somebody’s longbox. A few months later he demonstrated his complete acclimation to the form with a forty-eight page one-shot called Catwoman Defiant that was at last utterly devoid of any spark, soul, or interest—a generic potboiler of no note whatsoever. Within the arc of a career that began with Milligan being rashly, defiantly difficult, this marks a strange and bitter sort of triumph.

But it also, in many ways, shows the fatal flaw of Milligan—the thing that would ultimately preclude him from the heights that Moore, Morrison, or Gaiman could and did reach. Where Morrison could also flex from the ambitious conceptualism of Bible John to a silly origin story of the Justice League’s home base, they were also capable of occupying spaces in between, as they did in much of Animal Man. Milligan, meanwhile, could only ever sit at the two extremes of the spectrum. He could pen difficult, unapproachable, but clearly brilliant comics or he could pen goofy, disposable, basically fun to read comics, but he could not combine the two—his growth at the latter came at the strange expense of his ability to incorporate the elements that had made his earlier work distinctive.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan, once he broke out at DC in earnest, did so on a number of fronts, including taking over Animal Man from Grant Morrison. The core text, however, remains Shade the Changing Man.

“Barbatos will lead us to the hidden casket of immortality and life eternal. All is prepared for the ceremony of the bat.” -Grant Morrison, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne

Back on the book on which the bulk of Milligan’s reputation was ultimately built, meanwhile, Milligan settled into someting of a status quo, which Milligan finally slows down to explain in the fourth issue, which sees Shade trapped in the Area of Madness following his confrontation with the Kennedy assassination. Here he confronts the American Scream in the form of a skeletal Uncle Sam, and recalls his life back on Meta, where he was a hopelessly romantic child—“a little martyr, a poet trickster. I used to stare at flowers, rage at death, cry at sunsets.” He was from there recruited by Wizor to become a Changing Man, sent to learn about Earth, and eventually given the Madness Vest. This both serves to finally fill in some of the comic’s backstory, which had previously largely been glossed over by a confused and uncertain Shade, and as the impetus to slightly redesign the character to look less like Troy Grenzer, giving him instead a mop of red hair and an ostentatious mod jacket adorned by what would become the character’s trademark design, a bevy of monochrome bullseye designs. This established a sort of core thematic engine for the book, with Shade as a mod poet confronting the dark madness of America. 

This, of course, paralleled the underlying creative reality of the book, which was that it was written by a British man who was seeking to comment on America for an American audience. In many ways this constituted a significant evolution of the already successful perspective offered by the Kennedy two-parter. There Milligan had succeeded with a sort of intellectual detachment, like a scientist studying a specimen. Here, however, Milligan allies himself with something more romantic—a competing (and, it must be noted, distinctly British) vision of madness that Milligan is presenting as a tonic to the American one. It is difficult not to read this as, at least in part, a claim about the British invasion writers at large.

Milligan put this perspective to use in the next arc, another two-parter this time focusing on Hollywood. Much of the arc was muddied and unsatisfying—a broad satire of Hollywood cliches that cast too wide a net to say anything too interesting. Nevertheless, it gets through on an ecstatically clever reveal in which, after a lengthy “who is the American Scream possessing to cause all this chaos” plot, the answer turns out to be a movie camera that is trapping the characters in “a kind of crazy, illogical, multi-layered movie” based purely on cinematic tropes and the visual language of film, utterly untethered to any human concern or sense of narrative and purpose.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The first issue of Shade the Changing Man saw Kathy George attempt to witness the execution of her parents’ murderer, Troy Grenzer, only to have him end up on her back seat claiming to have been possessed by an alien entity, Shade.

“Funny thing, after JFK died in Dallas, lotta crackpots started claiming company involvement. They said a background bum in assassination photographs was Howard Hunt, disguised. They said Jack Ruby, who shot Kennedy’s assassin before he could stand trial, had mafia connections. So he had mob connections. These days, who don’t?” -Alan Moore, Brought to Light

Understandably dubious, Kathy takes Grenzer/Shade to a hotel room, and the story catches up with its beginning. In a development surprising only to people who didn’t read the name of the series, Kathy does not carry through with her plan to murder him, and instead she and Shade find themselves on a road trip tracking some mysterious entity from the Area of Madness known only as the American Scream. The particulars of what this evocative but far from self-explanatory setup became clear over the next two issues, which see Shade and Kathy pulled by the M-Vest into the orbit of a Kennedy conspiracy theorist whose obsessions the American Scream has latched onto and begun amplifying in strange and unexpected ways. 

The Kennedy assassination is an event that puts the peculiarities of this era of the War in a strange and sharp relief. In 1990, when Milligan tackled the topic, the assassination was still less than thirty years ago—more recent than the comics themselves. And yet by the early 21st century the assassination of JFK would come to feel like strangely ancient history. Some of this, unquestionably, is due to the events of the early 21st century and the way in which September 11th, 2001 would supplant November 22nd, 1963 as a transformative date in American history ensnared by a web of conspiracy theories. But it also comes down to Kennedy himself. In 1990 he would have been an elderly man, but in no way too old to still be a prominent figure in American public life; then-President George H.W. Bush was only seven years younger than Kennedy would have been, and Reagan, out of office just three years, was six years older. His brother was still a US Senator. But in the decades that followed the living connections to JFK dwindled. Jackie Kennedy died in 1994, JFK Jr. In a fatal plane crash in 1999, Ted Kennedy a decade later. People who vividly remember the Kennedy assassination will stick around for a while yet, but already it’s become something that happened in people’s childhoods; in a few decades it will slip entirely from living memory. 

In 1990, however, the assassination remained firmly relevant. Oliver Stone’s film JFK was a year away from theaters, while the books it was based on had come out the two years prior. In many ways, this was the height of the assassination’s pop culture relevance.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan made a name for himself in the British market through a series of collaborations with Brendan McCarthy, most notably the banned-from-Crisis comic Skin, about a skinhead thalidomide baby.

“They gave him a silver coffin. They walked behind his coffin, with the Irishers, and Al himself paid for five thousand dollars’ worth of flowers! And after that, if anybody said anything nasty about the Sicilians they said it quiet, and they said it where nobody could hear them talking.” -Neil Gaiman, Violent Cases

It is not entirely clear when Milligan was first tapped by DC. Notably, and unlike other combatants in this phase of the War, DC was not his entrypoint to the American market; he’d published Strange Days with Eclipse back in 1984, and subsequently put out The Johnny Nemo Magazine with them and Paradax with Canadian publisher Vortex Comics. This would have surely meant he was on Berger and Giordano’s radar by the time of the famed February 1987 trip to the UK, where they no doubt met with more writers than just Morrison and Gaiman. In a 1993 interview Milligan described how DC “were asking me to work for the, so I wasn’t going to them. They were phoning up saying ‘Peter you should write something for us. You should do a mini-series, you should do an ongoing series.’” This isn’t entirely incompatible with the idea that Milligan pitched back in February 1987, but it’s notable that his first work for DC, Skreemer, while still a “for mature readers” book edited by Karen Berger in the same basic style as her other imports, did not debut until mid-1989, well after Morrison and Gaiman’s debuts.

But Skreemer stands apart from other first projects by UK imports in other ways as well. Morrison and Gaiman’s first projects were both done according to a very specific template: take an obscure DC character and revamp them, broadly speaking, the same way Alan Moore did Swamp Thing. Even Gaiman’s second project, Sandman, was explicitly set in the DC Universe and at least vaguely connected to an old vintage property. Skreemer, on the other hand, was a standalone miniseries outside of DC continuity. This is always a tougher sell, and to attempt it as a new creator without a proven track record is either an act of hubris or sheer perversity. 

This sense continued with the actual content of Skreemer—a violent sci-fi gangster comic told non-linearly and jumping freely among multiple timelines with little indication of sequencing saved for a desaturated color palate on the flashback sequences. This was, in other words, a difficult book. Milligan hs joked that DC “were all keen for writers to be themselves. As long as you were exactly like Alan Moore,” but he was notable as the only one of the initial wave to handle this mandate by trying to work with the structural and narrative techniques of Watchmen, weaving a narrative connected by visual and symbolic transitions as much as by straightforward narrative causality.…

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