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Last War in Albion

Warriors in the Vale of Entuthon-Benython (The Last War in Albion Part 6: Captain Clyde and Scotland)

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Greetings, faithful readers! As part of an effort to figure out how to make The Last War in Albion something I can fit in as part of a professional career, I’m trying an experiment. This is the first post of Chapter Two, focusing on Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde and his work in Starblazer. Chapter Two will be running weekly until September 19th. But the entirety of Chapter Two – all five posts – is already for sale as a digital single (albeit without its images, for a variety of reasons). It’s $2.99 on Amazon (and comparably priced for the UK) and $1.99 on Smashwords. The lower price is due to Amazon having quirks about royalties and my wanting all sales channels to be equal amounts of money for me – I discovered these quirks too late to do anything about it this time, but in the future will try to find some little bit of bonus content for the Amazon version to provide some vague sense of moral balance in the world. The digital single for Chapter Two also includes Chapter One as a bonus. So this time the price gets you about 20,000 words of content, though future editions will probably be about half that at the same price.


This is one of several ideas I have for how to make a profit off of The Last War in Albion, and so this is not some “pay money or I’ll terminate the project” thing. But equally, if none of the ideas to get this to be a source of income work out it’s ultimately not a project I’ll be able to devote much time to. So, you know, buying the digital single of this and future chapters is an effective way of helping make sure this project remains viable.

Right now this is an experiment, and the cover art is thus rudimentary. If it goes even remotely well I’ll get some proper cover art and probably make some other bits of fine-tuning for future chapters, and this will be a thing that happens every five or six entries. If it only sells two copies then we’ll sigh and never speak of this again. But for now, if you’re enjoying the project, please pick up the digital single of Chapters One and Two, and keep buying future singles as they come out. It is, I hope, a small and reasonable price to pay to help give work like this the support it needs to happen.

Either way, as ever, thanks for reading. – Philosophizin’ Phil Sandifer

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: The time is 1979. Grant Morrison, a 17-year-old Scotsman, has begun to write and draw comics for the short-lived but well-meaning attempt at an adult comics magazine Near Myths. These comics, like Near Myths itself, are heavily indebted to the literary new wave movement in science fiction and fantasy, a movement that was spearheaded, in the UK, by writers like J.G.…

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Not Born So Much As Ground Like Pigment From His Times (The Last War in Albion Part 5: Luther Arkwright and William Blake)

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“Not born so such as ground like pigment from his times”

– Alan Moore, Angel Passage, 2001
[previously] The text becomes a cut-up invocation that puts Burroughs to shame, describing how “in the garden of Gethesemene Kali becomes Miranda take this my ankh the egyptian sign of life renounce the ways of violence Luther the tabla beat faster the star changes to a distant Balalaika Siberian winds howl” against a backdrop of copulating demons drawn in sinewy shadow.” This is all, however, too late to have influenced Morrison’s work directly – The Adventures of Luther Arkwright #6 contains only material prepared after Near Myths. Rather this demonstrates the extent to which Morrison’s early strips firmly belong in an existent literary and artistic tradition. 
Figure 30: Grant Morrison spending
five minutes scribbling Luther Arkwright
for Valkyrie Press in 1989

Even still, for all that Morrison insists, admittedly with self-depricating panache, that he dismissed Talbot because “I was a punk, and I didn’t need things to be slick as long as they had conviction and personality,” the direct influence is compelling. Morrison’s artwork evolves over his time on Near Myths, adopting a heavier shadow and thicker line that owes a clear debt to Talbot (as well as to the squarer-jawed action style of then-DC Comics based superhero artist Neal Adams, discussions of whose work bookend the chapter of Supergods in which Talbot and Near Myths are discussed). Morrison’s final Near Myths story, “The Checkmate Man,” feels more like Luther Arkwright, both in its structure and style. Morrison’s copyright notice on the strip separates the script from the art, dating the script back to 1977, as though mindful of the similarities and wanting to make sure everybody knew he’d come up with it independently.

But the anxiety of influence is not particularly interesting in this case, as we’ve seen. Morrison’s work fits clearly into an overall tradition in which all of these things – dandy secret agents leaping among worlds and having psychedelic revelations – were downright common. What’s interesting is not the question of when Morrison became aware of Talbot’s work any more than it’s whether Ballard or Moorcock is the larger influence on Gideon Stargrave. There’s no reason not to believe Morrison when he says that Near Myths “introduced me to Bryan Talbot,” a statement that seems to consciously hedge against the possibility that “The Vatican Conspiracy” is, as Talbot alleges, plagiarized from the similarly named “The Papist Affair.” Given that Stargrave appears in issue #3 of Near Myths several months after Arkwright’s debut, it’s entirely possible that Morrison was self-consciously tweaking the comic’s head feature with a glitzed-up experimental parody of its abandoned first version. It would, after all, be a perfect reflection of Jerry Cornelius’s first story’s status as a rewrite of some early Elric yarns. Equally, however, it’s just possible that Morrison and Talbot individually hit what was obviously hanging in the air like cannabis smoke hung over social meetings in Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop.
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This Zen-Crazed Aerial Madman Just Won’t Take No For An Answer (The Last War in Albion Part 4: Michael Moorcock, Luther Arkwright)

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“This Zen-crazed aerial madman just won’t take no for an answer”

-Grant Morrison, The Invisibles #18, 1996
[previously] The Cornelius books are characterized by large quantities of philosophical dialogue in amidst the action set pieces, which often fade towards the background. A few chapters after the yowling passenger Cornelius recalls a conversation where “a girl had once asked him, stroking the muscles of his stomach, ‘what do you achieve by the destruction of the odd library? There are so many. How much can one man do?’ ‘What he can,’ Cornelius had told her, rolling on her. ‘It’s History that’s caused all the trouble in the past.’” Moorcock has commented that the Cornelius books are populated by “characters who are aware of the psychological implications of their statements and actions. That is they are as aware of the unconscious as the conscious. In that sense it was a rejection of modernist techniques as found in Joyce, Woolf and so on. My view was that we had moved on from needing to make that sort of observation.” Instead Moorcock’s characters, as he describes it, “tend to anticipate one another’s statements and short-cut their own,” engaging in an endlessly anticipated and reiterated philosophical dialogue that plays out over the superficial frame of the heroic fantasy stories.
In this regard the Cornelius line can be thought of as the archetypal Moorcock work – the one that explores the way in which the same basic story structure that underpins all of the iterations of the Eternal Champion changes and shifts as the world around it does. The later Cornelius stories arbitrarily change the frame and rules of the story from chapter to chapter without particular explanation.
Figure 22: Barbarians and Mods juxtaposed in “Time is a
Four Letter Word,” from Near Myths #2, 1979 (Click images
to expand)
To suggest that it is possible that a fictional multiverse in which one primary character is a dandy action hero who lives in an eternally shifting world and another – the most prominent, in fact – is a sword and sorcery barbarian figure whose world blends in with the present day at times might have been an influence on the writer of the Gideon Stargrave stories or “Time is a Four Letter Word” seems almost too obvious to be worthwhile. Of course Moorcock was a major influence on Grant Morrison’s earliest comics work, and, more to the point, on much of his subsequent work.
The question of why Moorcock, who was after all usually perfectly happy to let others play with his fictional concepts, lashed out so angrily at Morrison for his Cornelius pastiche is interesting, but not entirely germane at this point in the war’s development. Suffice it to say that Morrison is quite justified in his exasperation when he points to his later works and asks “can anyone tell me from which Michael Moorcock novels Zenith and Animal Man were plagiarized,” but that it is equally clear that Morrison was influenced by the entire new wave literary tradition Moorcock came out of, and that it is in many ways very easy to draw direct links between Moorcock’s work and his. 
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This Dread World and the Rolling of Wheels (The Last War in Albion Part 3: William S. Burroughs, Michael Moorcock)

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“This dread world and the rolling of wheels” -William Blake, The Book of Urizen, 1794

Figure 17: The working class neighborhood of Northampton
Alan Moore grew up in was called The Boroughs
[previously] Burroughs provides no such easy access route, and is beloved less by the academic consensus than by generations of committed counterculture figures who, like Ballard and Moorcock, “weren’t so much influenced by him as inspired by him.” At times not so much a writer than a stunningly competent criminal, Burroughs effectively hit on the brilliant scheme of supporting a drug habit by writing about it. Famed for shooting his wife to death in an ill-advised drunken William Tell impression, Burroughs’s style is an obvious antecedent for Ballard’s harshly visceral lists in The Atrocity Exhibition. His masterpiece is Naked Lunch, an unstructured ramble of a book that was the subject of several landmark obscenity trials, all of which it won. It wanders from misadventure to misadventure, steadily dissolving reality into a paranoid dreamscape that seems to have been Burroughs’s drugfucked experience channeled onto the page, a world where “One Friday Fats siphoned himself into The Plaza, a transulcent-grey foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamprey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow black erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk,” a paragraph that exists as part of a sprawling multi-paragraph sentence with no end in sight.
Figure 18: Heroin
Burroughs transitioned this into a literary career such that a reasonable circle of admirers that improbably allowed him to live a heroin-addicted lifestyle until the ripe old age of 83, sustaining a pleasant existence in Lawrence, Kansas where he could have his drugs without the preying cityscape waiting to devour him. But his paranoia was not merely of the perverted rabbit hole of criminal culture that urban drug culture offered him. Rather, he feared the very technology of language, describing it as a “control machine” that was indistinguishable from his own addiction in its tyranny over his thought. This sort of paranoia struck a chord as the technological utopias of the post-World War II era fully gave way to a more unsettled pre-apocalyptic nightmare of nuclear war led human science to become what Iain M. Banks, vanguard of the post-new wave generation of science fiction in the UK, described in 1996 as an Outside Context Problem – something that “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” As science became dangerous so did science’s imaginative dimension.
Burroughs, like many figures within and without the war, was overtly an occultist, creating with British performance artist Brion Gysin the cut-up technique, in which written works are physically shredded into strips and remixed to produce new phrases, a practice Burroughs believed to have actual magical import, to the extent that he joined the chaos magic organization the Illuminates of Thanateros late in life. His parallelism with Grant Morrison’s later work is profound enough that it is tempting to suggest him as the real origin for Morrison’s Near Myths stories.
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Mary Sticks to the Alleyways, Where the Light and Noise of the City is Screened Out A Little (The Last War in Albion Part 2: Near Myths, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs)

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“Mary sticks to the alleyways, where the light and noise of the city is screened out a little”

-Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan #8, 1998
Figure 12: “The Checkmate Man” features more marital
strife than high-concept assassination antics – Near
Myths #5, 1980 (Click to enlarge)
[previously] It is in some ways very much like the Gideon Stargrave stories and “Time is a Four Letter Word” – full of jumps across time and space and an ever-shifting universe. But where those stories focus on the action, “The Checkmate Man” takes an entirely different approach. The only part of it that could be described as an action scene takes place on the first page, and the remaining nine pages consist of Conrad, the eponymous assassin, reflecting on the stress and horror of his job. It’s a surprisingly intimate character piece, miles from Morrison’s other Near Myths work. There’s also a degree of thought that’s been put into the setting that isn’t present in Morrison’s other Near Myths work – a throwaway bit about attempting to prevent the Lincoln assassination only to have him die in an accident the next day speaks volumes about the world of “The Checkmate Man” and the way in which the CIA program he’s a part of only changes the world through death and destruction. The result is that the closing page, where Conrad realizes that all the George Orwell books have vanished from his bookshelf before forgetting that he even cares about it, is haunting in its scope, revealing the real effects of Conrad’s CIA-backed sanitization of history. 
While “The Checkmate Man,” which is, in fact, quite good, better foreshadows Morrison’s future career, it is also, oddly, the Near Myths story that Morrison has not meaningfully brought up in interviews. While he points to “Time is a Four Letter Word” as being “based around the simultaneity of time concept Alan Moore himself is so fond of these days” and returns to Stargrave in a number of ways, “The Checkmate Man” is, despite being the best of his Near Myths stories and the one that actually presents a credible case for the idea that Morrison was, in 1979/80, out ahead of the field, the one piece Morrison seems content to relegate to the status of juvenilia and trivia. It is, by all appearances, Gideon Stargrave who best captures the spirit of what Morrison was doing in Near Myths. And thus it is Gideon Stargrave that it is most important to contextualize in the larger comics scene of 1979. The Near Myths stories are, after all, a small rock in a larger formation, and it is at this point more helpful to establish some of the underlying conceptual strata. 
Figure 13: Gideon Stargrave makes a
surprise return in The Invisibles #17, 1996
Morrison has, in interviews, gone back and forth on what his inspirations for Gideon Stargrave. His most common claim is Michael Moorcock. In a 1997 interview he said, of his reuse of the character in The Invisibles, that “King Mob’s ‘Gideon Stargrave’ stories are direct quotes from the Michael Moorcock-inspired short stories I wrote obsessively when I was 17,” which is to say, his Near Myths contributions.
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To Leap From One Universe To Another, Unafraid! That’s Sorcerer’s Work! (The Last War in Albion Part 1: Near Myths, Gideon Stargrave)

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“To leap from one universe to another, unafraid! That’s sorcerer’s work!” – Grant Morrison, Zatanna #1, 2005
Figure 5: A particular story from the slush pile, from
Watchmen #12, 1987
[previously] The remaining nature of the war will be revealed in the telling. All that remains is the task of selecting a beginning point and commencing the narrative proper. By virtue of one of the major figures being extremely invested in it, that beginning point will be the publication of Grant Morrison’s first paid comics work, a five-page story entitled “Time is a Four Letter Word.” This is a decision with consequences. The nature of the war, as previously stated, is that its effects span much of history. “Time is a Four Letter Word” is akin to an outcrop of rock. In truth it stands upon tens of miles of buried rock – a geologic strata spanning in every direction. The visible layer is a mere fraction of the whole, apparent only due to chance events: the scouring of a glacier, the cleaving of a river valley, the picking of a particular story from the slush pile. These fleeting circumstances determine how the underlying tectonics of history and ideology are transmuted into surface terrain and material culture, defining the very world itself. 
This is not the beginning so much as the first visible stone. Still, there is a level of arbitrariness to it. Both Morrison and Moore had previous publications that were not paid jobs. Either could go first. However, starting with Morrison has two advantages. First, it is something Morrison is passionate about. In his extended commentary on Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s “Alan Moore and Superfolks Part 3: The Strange Case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore,” Grant Morrison insists, “In October 1978, Alan Moore had sold one illustration – a drawing of Elvis Costello to NME – and had not yet achieved any recognition in the comics business. In 1979, he was doing unpaid humour cartoons for the underground paper The Back Street Bugle. I didn’t read his name in a byline until 1982, by which time I’d been a professional writer for almost five years. Using the miracle of computer technology, you can verify any of these dates right now, if you choose to.” This all being true, it would be unduly partisan to start the story anywhere else.
Second, however, any alternate ordering would remove Grant Morrison from the story for too long. While Morrison is correct to note that his first professional comic sale predated Moore’s, the truth is that Morrison’s early comics work consists of four short stories in an Edinburgh-based anthology that only lasted five issues before folding, a four year run of a newspaper strip in local Scottish papers, and five issues in DC Thomson’s Starblazer. Other than that, Morrison has no professional comics credits prior to 1985, and it’s not until 1986 that he began producing comics work at anything resembling a high volume, by which time Moore was writing Watchmen.
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This is Not a Dream (The Last War in Albion: Introduction)

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“This is not a dream.” – Alan Moore, “Shadowplay,” in Brought to Light, 1988.

Figure 1: The Great Bearded Wizard of Northampton

The Last War in Albion is a history of British comics. More specifically, it is a history of the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, a war that is on the one hand entirely of its own invention and on the other a war fought in the realm of the fictional, rendering its actual existence almost but not entirely irrelevant. The war in question is not the scant material residue of their verbal feud in various interviews over the years. This exists and will be picked over, but it is not the meat of the discussion.

Rather it is a more fundamental issue: how is it that two comics writers of nearly the same generation, with such a clear overlap in interests, who grew up a mere three-hundred-and-forty miles apart – no greater than the distance from New York to DC – a mere seven years in age difference (no larger than the age difference between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) are not friends and have not a hint of warmth in their relationship? This is almost as improbable as Morrissey and Robert Smith hating each other’s guts.
And yet it is the case. Underneath this fact is a story: one of how the British comics industry unexpectedly produced a small generation of some of the most important writers of the 1980s and 90s, and in turn had a huge cultural legacy in both the US and UK. So much so that the number three grossing movie of all time, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is massively and documentably indebted to what was, prior to the arrival of people like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and a constellation of significant (and at times better) but less influential writers, the minor backwater of the lowest order of the British comics industry.
Figure 2: The Thrice-Named Warrior Monk of Glasgow

Within that story there are two figures that appear almost identical to an even casual observer. One, Alan Moore, is a heavily bearded self-proclaimed magician who made his name with DC Comics in 1984 writing Swamp Thing, an envrionmental-themed superhero-horror comic. The other, Grant Morrison, is a bald self-proclaimed magician who made his name with DC Comics in 1988 writing Animal Man, an environmental-themed superhero-horror comic. These two men are not friends. There are sensible reasons for this. Despite their intense similarities, there are fundamental aesthetic differences between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore that place them at diametric opposites of a host of issues with profound social, political, historical, and magical implications. 

This latter adjective is worth remarking upon, as it is central to their differences. Both men believe in a system by which the manipulation of symbols creates material change in the real world. Both explicitly use their creative work in multiple media as an attempt to cause such change. Their comics are magic spells hurled into the culture wars, trying in their own way to reshape reality.
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