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Last War in Albion

Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter Twelve: 1963

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Moore’s move into self-published and wholly independent comics had an obvious cost. The bulk of the Watchmen money had been spent failing to get Mad Love going, and none of Moore’s personal projects were advancing or earning money; A Small Killing was trapped under the crumbling wreckage of Victor Gollancz’s sale, Lost Girls and From Hell were coming out in Steve Bissette’s Taboo, which managed to produce seven issues in five years and only paid $100 per page, to be split between Moore and the artist, and Big Numbers simply didn’t exist. By 1992, Moore was broke and only nominally a comics writer, in that he simply did not have any current projects that were actually coming out anywhere.

And so in the spring of 1992, when Bissette approached him with an offer of work, Moore was receptive, even though it would mean wading back into the mainstream American comics industry that he had so definitively departed five years earlier. Bissette was in fact acting as a messenger—the job offer was from Jim Valentino, who wanted Moore and Bissette to do an issue of a comic called ShadowHawk. And in 1992, Jim Valentino was very possibly the single most interesting man in all of comics.

Valentino got his start in the late 70s/early 80s post-underground scene, appearing in anthologies like Dope Comix alongside underground veterans like Aline Kominsky-Crumb to tell the story of a bad trip on belladonna, or putting out his solo book Yer Basic Comix. He wrote a backup feature for Dave Sim’s Cerebus called normalman, about the one non-superpowered person in a world of superheroes, which eventually turned into a series, first at Sim’s Aardvark-Vanaheim, and then with Renegade Press when Deni Loubert effectively kept the title in the divorce, then went on to do a book of autobiographical comics called simply Valentino.

Eventually his career saw him drift into superheroes, and he settled into a job at Marvel writing and drawing Guardians of the Galaxy. This had been a longstanding minor property at Marvel, first created in 1969 by Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake along with Gene Colan. The team languished in obscurity for two decades hamstrung by the detail that they were from the 31st century and thus largely outside of Mravel continuity, but around the turn of the decade Tom DeFalco, then editor-in-chief at Marvel, saw the concept as a way to cash in on the popularity of the new Star Trek series. Coincidentally Jim Valentino had just worked up a proposal for the characters, having been a fan of the most substantial effort to date to make the spacefaring team work, a stretch of issues by Steve Gerber, who had long been notable as one of the figures in superhero comics with the closest ties to the underground, and so he joined the book as a writer/artist.

Valentino’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy offered a gradual evolution over the twenty-nine issues that he did. On the one hand, his roots as a cartoonist are evident, especially early on, but he was adept at using these as a springboard for clear, expressive storytelling.…

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Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter 11: A Small Killing

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“Within a fortnight it can all fall down, the luminous Wurlitzer palace of our youth: no luck, no school, no happy home. The job down at the skinning yards… the tide comes crashing in, and sweeps us all away.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Although the slow motion disaster of Big Numbers, along with his less ruinous but still time-consuming efforts on From Hell and Lost Girls, occupied much of Moore’s time in the wake of Watchmen, these sorts of projects—self-published or put out in friends’ self-published anthologies—were not what he’d initially imagined his post-DC career to be. As he put it, “my intentions at that time were that I would work for book publishers. I was getting an awful lot of offers from book publishers asking me to do graphic novels for them, which seemed like a good option to me because I’d own my copyright, I’d be dealing on more equitable, grown-up terms.” In practice this never materialized, in part because the graphic novel boom that was leading these book publishers to take interest in the medium was quickly being squandered by the actions of the very publishers Moore was leaving. In practice, Moore would only publish one work with such a publisher, a 96 page graphic novel called A Small Killing that he did for Victor Gollancz’s short-lived VG Graphics imprint.

Victor Gollancz was notable, at least in the late 1980s, as one of the UK’s most prominent family-owned businesses, existing since the 1920s and publishing authors such as George Orwell, Daphne du Maurier, Kingsley Amis, and John le Carré. In the 1960s the publisher became a notable science fiction publisher, developing an eye-catching yellow trade dress that stood out and helped establish the publisher as a brand unto itself. In 1990, however, in the midst of Moore’s work on A Small Killing, Gollancz was sold to the US publishing giant Houghton Mifflin, which in turn sold it on in 1992, with a third and final sale coming in 1998. Combined with the petering out of the graphic novel boom, A Small Killing became a niche title—it got an American edition from Dark Horse in 1993, and then came back into print in 2003 from Avatar as part of their authorized ransacking of Moore’s back catalog. Moore would eventually identify it as “the most underappreciated work that I’ve done.”

Working with Moore was Oscar Zarate, an Argentinian artist who grew up as a devoted fan of Alex Raymond and Hugo Pratt and worked as an assistant in the Argentinian industry before migrating to advertising and, in 1971, Europe, this latter move to escape the right-wing military government of Argentina. There he sought work and ended up working for the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, where he worked with writer Richard Appignanesi on  Lenin for Beginners and Freud for Beginners, part of the collective’s iconic For Beginners series, which used comics as a medium to explain the thought of prominent philosophers and scientists. He went on to illustrating comics adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe before, in 1987, connecting with comedian Alexei Sayle for a graphic novel called Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian.…

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Last War in Albion Book 3, Chapter 10: Big Numbers (Remainder)

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Hey folks. I’ve decided that the serialization of LWIA v3 is simply far too delayed, and that I’m going to get through it in a series of three omnibus posts so that it’s wrapped up before the 60th Anniversary Doctor Who Specials. Right now those are still set to be Patreon-exclusive, with roughly $370 a month to go before they happen on the site. You can help by backing my Patreon, where I’ve got reviews of the first five installments of Tales of the TARDIS up, with the last going up later today.

Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore became fascinated by fractals, or at least by what he thought fractals were.

The blue world spins below me, fragile as glass, a vast and delicate ornament. Naked creation crackling and streaming off in all directions. Clouds are not spheres. Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. These things are abstractions of reality. The geometry of nature, like the geometry of life itself, contains infinites.” – Grant Morrison, Animal Man

Allow a moment of fancy. It will not escape notice that Dewdney’s introduction sounds very much like something Alan Moore might write, and thus almost tailor made to capture his eye. Could this article in fact have been his introduction to the Mandelbrot set? Certainly Moore was an avid reader of popular science magazines. He generally favored New Scientist, but it’s easy to imagine him passing by a newsstand and seen the striking visualization of the set on the cover, a crackling flame tongue in all its mad and infinite detail. If so, and if he picked up the issue out of curiosity, what would he have learned? Much of the article consisted of semi-technical explanations of complex numbers and computer programs that would have sailed over his head, but his eye would surely have been caught by the thrilled descriptions of how “the numbers inside remain to drift or dance about. Close to the boundary minutely choreogrphed wanderings mark the onset of the instability. Here is an infinite regress of detail that astonishes us with its variety, its complexity and its strange beauty,” or the lush descriptions of the recurring patterns within the set: “a riot of organic-looking tendrils and curlicues sweeps out in whorls and rows. Magnifying a curlicue reveals yet another scene: it is made up of pairs of whorls joined by bridges of filigree.” Ultimately, however, one suspects the key detail, beyond the breathtaking illustrations, would have been the subheadline billing the Mandelbrot set as “the most complex object in mathematics” would surely have been eye-catching. (Indeed, Moore parroted the line in an interview, describing the Mandelbrot set as “the most complex shape in mathematics, and possibly the most complex shape in the universe.”)

It is worth unpacking that complexity a little. In the case of the Koch snowflake, zooming in on the image generates the same pattern. Pick a single point to zoom in on and you’ll see an endlessly repeating jagged series of triangles.…

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Crinkly and Complex (Book Three, Part 72: Numerocracy, Fractals)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The first issue of Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers was a lush and splendid object that positioned itself as a formal heir to Watchmen even as it rejected superheroes in favor of shopping malls and math.

Eventually, the snowflake’s edge becomes so crinkly and complex that its length, theoretically, is infinite. Its area, however, never exceeds the initial circle. Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crenelations of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. – Alan Moore, From Hell

As with Watchmen, Moore uses a detached, omniscient perspective. Indeed, he takes it even further than he did in Watchmen, where he could use Rorschach as a pseudo-narrator. Big Numbers has no equivalent character. The closest it comes to narration is a montage at the end of the first issue in which one of the character’s poems is contrasted with a series of single panels reviewing the various characters that the book has introduced. For the most part, however, Big Numbers is told with an impassive objectivity. It takes flights into individual subjectivities, as with the dream sequence in the opening sequence or a later sequence in which Mr. World, a psychiatric patient released into the “care of the community,” fantasizes about the violent murder of a fellow bus passenger, but even these subjectivities are treated with a level of objectivity, the internal landscapes of the characters being treated as just another thing to look at.

Part of this sense of distance is simply the sheer number of characters involved. Moore’s outline for the series features thirty-one separate characters along with one group of characters, three characters from a story within a story, one ghost, and a set of people in a model railway set that will be treated as characters. In the forty pages of Big Numbers #1, twenty of these are introduced overtly, along with the ghost, and another is positioned in the background of a panel. Even though the action is centered almost entirely on Hampton, it gives the impression of a startlingly broad portrait of the town—one that, by the time the bulk of the remaining characters are introduced in the second issue, spans from the town’s rich and powerful to its underclass, with policemen, construction workers, students, sex workers, shopkeepers, and more all represented within the sweep of its worldview. And by exploring the connections among these people, as works of this sort of sprawling social realist genre inevitably do, Big Numbers displays the same sort of meticulous clockwork precision as its predecessor. The overwhelming sense of the first issue is one of inevitability; that a town in Thatcher’s Britain can only face the arrival of a massive shopping mall in one way. Moore even discussed as much, noting that “What I wanted to do was to show the fragility of human community, human relationships, and then to put this shadow of a large and inhuman shopping mall, a monolith of purely economic concerns, that would cast its shadow over that community.…

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The Agency of a Talking Anteater (Book Three, Part 71: Big Numbers #1)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: On the back of his monster success with Watchmen, Alan Moore declared that he would be self-publishing a comic about shopping mall and algebra.

“It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form… and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater.” – Warren Ellis, “Grey Fog”

This declaration came in the context of Moore talking about his experiences self-publishing AARGH via his Mad Love imprint. This had been a decision made at the behest of Canadian writer/artist Dave Sim, who had found considerable success self-publishing his satirical Cerebus via his own press, Aardvark-Vanaheim. As Moore put it, “For years, this frosthardened son of the North has been standing there in his snowshoes, haranguing those of us within the bullpens and sheepdips of mainstream comics from an uncompromised position that’s been increasingly difficult to refute. ‘Hey! Why work for them guys? You must be some kinda stupid hosers, eh?’” It must be stressed, however, that Sim was in many ways a latter day William Blake—a singular and visionary talent who could not possibly have had the career he wanted on any terms other than his own. Blake, when this comparison was put to him in a 2020 seance, scoffed that “at least my gender politics weren’t that bad,” and it is notable that Moore would eventually terminate his relationship with Sim after Sim appended an introduction to an interview they did together explaining that “it would be really nice if, as a 50th birthday present, I could just type ‘IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD COME OUT OF ALAN, THOU VILE AND ACCURSED.’ And have it work. Just like that when Alan read it. But, alas, I don’t think demonic possession—at least of the sort that Alan seems to have involved himself with—works that way” before digressing into a bit of Biblical exegesis to the effect of “women are hella icky.” Which is to say that, as effective an evangelist for self-publishing as he was, ultimately what worked for Dave Sim was not inherently likely to work for anyone else.

Equally, in a world in which Dave Sim was prominently advocating for self-publishing (and had not yet publicly accused Moore of being demonically possessed), Moore was never going to not try it. A central concern of his triptych of magna opera was the basic fact that these were his great works. They would not be owned by a vast American media company that could endlessly license them off in a cynical bid to bilk as much money as possible from rabid fans of malls and algebra. This was, for Moore, the point every bit as much as his creative interests. From Hell and Lost Girls both found their initial homes in Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology, published via his own Spiderbaby Grafix, but for The Mandelbrot Set, or, as it eventually ended up being named, Big Numbers, Moore decided to put it out via Mad Love, investing the bulk of his profits from Watchmen (save for some with which he bought his parents a greenhouse) into the endeavor, with his wife Phyllis and partner Deborah Delano handling the business end of it.…

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Striplights and Software (Book Three, Part 70: Shopping Malls)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Moore found his worldview rapidly evolving in the wake of Watchmen.

“It’s a new world, Arcane. It’s full of shopping malls and striplights and software. The dark corners are being pushed back a little more every day.” – Alan Moore, Saga of the Swamp Thing

These evolutions were already in progress, however, as Moore contemplated what he wanted his next major project to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he remained ambitious. Watchmen would have been a perfectly fine career capstone for most people. Indeed, Watchmen was already substantially more ambitious than what most people would attempt, which was at once its virtue and its tragedy. But Moore was surely rankled by the fact that his magnum opus sat in the control of a company he disdained and was steadily sliding towards outright despising. On top of that, he was only thirty-five. There was plenty of time for Moore to write another work of the scale of Watchmen.

In fact, he would decide to write three projects of that sort of scale and ambition, each picking up on different aspects of Watchmen. One of these was From Hell, which saw Moore expand his idea of using a murder and detective story to understand a larger world away from a narrative device for a comic book universe and into an interrogation of the 20th century itself via the Jack the Ripper murders. Another was Lost Girls, which saw Moore give his recurring interest in sexuality as a theme its fullest realization.

It was the third project, however, that was the biggest, most ambitious, and most fascinating thing Moore would work on during the period—a work of audacious formalist complexity that would delve into the storytelling tools he had developed for Watchmen and build an entire philosophical worldview out of them. Moore’s first description of it came in an interview published in February 1988, where he proclaimed that “ I want to do a graphic novel about shopping malls.” Clarifying this willfully puzzling remark, he explained that the comic would be “about a number of things. What happens is that an American shopping mall of Californian scale, one of those monstrous, minature cities you seem to have over there in LA, is erected in this small town in the middle of England.”

This captures one of the essential things about the shopping mall, which is that it was a distinctly American phenomenon even as it was exported to the world, emerging out of the specific concerns of post-World War II America. It is helpful, since Moore sets up the contrast himself, to contrast this with the UK. Both countries experienced a post-War economic boom. In the UK, this involved the creation of the welfare state, and, on a housing level, things like the new towns scheme and the “renovation” of the terraces into tower blocks. These were mixed blessings at best, as Moore trenchantly observed at numerous points during his career, and indeed their failings would be an implicit part of his malls project.…

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Tombs and Seances and Murders (Book Three, Part 69: Brought to Light)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore made savvy use of his artist in Brought to Light, offering a wordy and dense history of the CIA for Sienkiewicz to offer his abstract and often terrifying illustrations to.

You wonder why the children of America are obsessed with death? You wonder why rock groups that look like corpses and zombie comic-book heroes are so goddamn popular here? It’s just the same way your Victorians loved their tombs and seances and murders. The American Empire is dead and does not know it. Like your empire before it, it’s only aware of the truth in its sleep.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

The eagle presents himself as a salesman, and launches into a pitch, though for what exactly is not clear. The content, however, is a history of the CIA, narrated to the reader over twenty-one of the comic’s thirty pages. This is a complicated frame for a story that could have been presented more straightforwardly, but it gives Moore several advantages. The eagle functions as an unreliable narrator—a point that’s made emphatically clear at the outset, when he talks about the CIA’s relationship with Congress in terms of how “My wife, she holds the purse strings, see? I gotta account for every cent. As for laying down the law… hell, she practically drafted a Bill ‘o Rights!… Bitch watches my every move. Still, there’s ways an’ means. What she don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her.” (This stylized dialogue provides the unquestionable highlight of the Gary Lloyd audio adaptation, with Alan Moore voicing the eagle in a style that could be described as “the voice he’d developed for ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ on several lines of cocaine” but is frankly far better simply sought out and experienced for one’s self.)

This gave Moore three separate ways of revealing information. On the most basic level, he could simply have the eagle convey some historical fact—for instance, that “over in Cuba this friendly dictator named Fulgencio Batista ad been running things along with Santos Trafficante, the Mafia’s man in havana, Cuba’s capital. Batista ignored the drugs, gambling, and prostitution for a cut of the profits… Suddenly, in 1959, this socialist, Fidel Castro, an’ his buddy Ché Guevara overthrew Batista in a so-called popular revolution. Under Castro, Trafficante and the mob hadda leave Cuba.” But he could also lean into the eagle’s status as an unreliable narrator, such as the following sentence, “Say watcha like, the Mafia represent free enterprise, which we, as a company, are sworn to protect.” On top of this, he still has Sienkiewicz’s illustrations, so he can then devote two panels to the eagle lighting a cigar (“Havana cigars—best smoke inna world”) and taking a long drag on it, implicitly commenting on the way in which the CIA and its officers enriched themselves on Cuba.

The unreliable narrator also allows Moore to inject some humor into what is not exactly inherently entertaining subject matter. So, for instance, talking about the use of a Pepsi bottling plant in Laos as a front for a heroin-running operation, Moore has the eagle dryly remark that “later we decided that things went better with Coke.”…

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Languages of Apocalypse (Book Three, Part 68: Bill Sienkiewicz)

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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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The Great, Warm, Red-White-and-Blue Beating Heart of This Beleaguered Country (Book Three, Part 67: The Christic Institute)

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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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Ordinary Torture (Book Three, Part 66: The CIA)

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Content warning: Images of physical mutilation

Previously in Last War in Albion: Joyce Brabner, after getting into the world of comics by becoming a major figure in Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic American Splendor (and marrying Pekar in the process), is contacted by the Christic Institute, run by Daniel Sheehan, a lawyer who came to prominence during the Karen Silkwood case.

You’re tuning it out. I can see your ocular focus shifting. You’ve been trained to handle interrogation, in a very specific way. I bet you can even bypass ordinary torture. And none of these people picked it u. Because DHS is formed out of sixteen domestic agencies. And you’re from the Central Intelligence Agency. – Warren Ellis, Jack Cross

Silkwood’s family ultimately sued Kerr-McGee for negligence in the original plutonium poisoning, successfully recovering $1.38 million dollars in a settlement; Sheehan was among the attorneys in the case, and founded the institute in the wake of their success to pursue similar cases, using civil suits to right wrongs that the criminal justice system had proved inadequate for.

This was often a successful strategy—in one of their early cases, for instance, the Institute represented survivors of the Greensboro massacre, in which white supremacists shot and killed five participants in a “Death to the Klan” rally. State and federal prosecutions failed to secure any convictions, and so the Christic Institute led a successful civil suit to secure justice. But it is important to stress the degree to which the Christic Institute’s strategy was also one of public relations. Sheehan was always, in part, a legal impresario, and one who was prone to making sure he was prominently centered in stories about the group. This meant that the Institute could often be a blunt instrument; one media article about it quotes the leader of another public interest group as saying that “Danny Sheehan is to investigating what a depth charge is to sports fishing.” This bluntness would ultimately have significant consequences.

In 1984, the Institute represented Stacey Lynn Merkt, who had been arrested transporting refugees from El Salvador on behalf of the Catholic American Sanctuary Movement. In the course of working this case, Sheehan was visited by multiple religious leaders who repeated claims passed by unnamed government officials that the Sanctuary Movement was in fact smuggling known terrorists into the country. Perturbed by this dedicated misinformation campaign, the Institute began investigating their source, and soon found itself investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II. During the War the US had set up the Office of Strategic Services, its first effort at an intelligence agency. At its head was General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who quickly developed a taste for extravagant covert operations, dropping agents behind enemy lines to commit sabotage or exploring complicated gadgets and tactics—at one point he was investigating how to use bats as a bomb delivery system. In late 1944, Donovan wrote to Franklin Roosevelt arguing for the establishment of a permanent intelligence service.…

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