Last War in Albion

November 14, 2022

Nobody Cares About Anything Anymore (Book Three, Part 55: Big Dave)

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A still from South Park featuring the show's typical homophobic humor

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having failed to jump immediately to the US market on the back of his early Trident and Crisis work, Mark Millar found himself writing Sonic the Hedgehog comics.

You just like offending people, don’t you? Nobody cares about anything anymore. – Grant Morrison, Multiversity: The Just

Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog work consisted of eleven self-contained stories across eleven issues, mostly in 1993 but with one in 1994 and two—presumably inventory pieces—in 1996. None are extraordinary, and if they did not bear Millar’s name they would seem wholly unremarkable. They are not cynical and nihilistic in the way that Millar’s work for older readers is. And yet looking at them in the context of his career, some of Millar’s trademark obsessions do begin to emerge. Most obviously, Millar leans hard into the idea of Sonic as an egotistical jerk—admittedly a savvy move that acknowledges part of the character’s core marketing appeal. But there are subtler issues too—a running theme of sidekicks and secondary characters who are defined in part by their inadequacy compared to the hero, especially in his first strip, which features Tails, Sonic’s sidekick from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, captured by Doctor Robotnik and turned into an evil cyborg brimming with vocal resentment. This would be a trope Millar would return to, and one it’s hard not to read in light of his own status as a sidekick within the War. Also obviously notable is the comedy “A Day in the Life of Doctor Robotnik,” a strip whose ending, which reveals Robotnik as a fan of romance comics, is difficult not to read in light of Millar’s broader fondness for homophobic jokes.

Something closer to an unfiltered version of Millar appeared in his other strip for Sonic the Comic, Streets of Rage. Based in a beat ‘em up style game in which vigilante ex cops try to rid a decaying American city of crime, the strip was by some margin the most adult strip in the comic. The nature of its setting, with its failed institutions that can only be saved by vigilante violence, lent itself to Millar’s cynicism, but also showcased the kind of innately conservative aesthetics that would come to dominate Millar’s work. The comic was also simply a venue for an only mildly toned down version of the nastiness that pervaded Millar’s other work, however. His first arc culminated in the villain being dumped alive into a vat of molten steel, a barely sanitized version of the resolution of Purgatory, while his second features a scene in which a character researches on a computer while narrating about how “There’s always one jerk in every class who’s into computers. One specky wimp with rich parents who drive him to school. I should know—I’ve got one pinned under my skate shoe right now,” a bit of bullying nastiness that evokes Insiders. In both cases the work is tamer and less confrontationally offensive than Millar’s other work, but the underlying attitudes are viscerally clear.…

October 17, 2022

Living Under a Bridge and Doing Drugs (Book Three, Part 54: Mark Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog)

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The box art to the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, featuring Sonic looking cool af

Previously in Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison met a bad influence.

It’s clearly an entirely legitimate product from Sega, and in a Modern-Warfare-2 piece of relevancy, the eponymous spiked-creature is now homeless, living under a bridge and doing drugs. – Kieron Gillen, Rock Paper Shotgun

On the one hand there’s nothing wrong with this. Moore deftly wielded provocation plenty of times in his rise, and Morrison’s enfant terrible persona was a well-crafted and effective attempt to do the same. What’s notable is not the extremity of what Morrison said, but simply the degree to which Millar brought this side of Morrison out, eliciting jokes about how “ I really would like to expire in some dramatic motoring accident. There’s nothing like travelling at high speed without a seatbelt and no thrill like the possibility of hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour. Anyway, what I’d like is to be cremated and leave instructions for my ashes to be thrown in the face of some perfectly innocent passerby. Someone I never knew or had any remote connection with. It would be such a lovely gesture” and anecdotes about how “my classmates and I were responsible for the nervous breakdowns of two teachers. One of them, a kindly and inoffensive old gentleman was subjected to a campaign of sustained psychological torture that would have brought Patrick McGoohan to his knees in no time. After a spell in psychiatric care, this dear old character bravely returned to teaching and lasted only a few months before being driven completely round the bend.. He lives quite near me actually and I often see him wandering about with a walking stick and an air of tragic bewilderment. You shouldn’t laugh really but sometimes it’s impossible not to.” This was a version of Morrison who was more instinctively disposed to stylized meanness and transgressive jokes. They were perfectly capable of this on their own, it’s true, and there’s no shortage of examples of them indulging in it, but the fact remained: when Millar was in the picture, Morrison could inevitably be found playing the most cartoonish version of their public persona.

Of course, this was very much the sort of thing Millar did. He was, after all, the writer of Insiders and Purgatory, for whom a nihilistic transgressiveness seemed the only aesthetic goal of any interest. In a comics scene increasingly defined by performative edginess, he offered the purest expression of it. And Morrison was open about this being the appeal, noting that “We both have a very ghoulish sense of humor.” This is clear in all of the joint interviews they did in the period, which positively brim with casual homophobia and puerile attempts to shock and offend. A 1992 interview saw Morrison complaining about how “We’re both sick of the way 2000 AD is full of poofs these days. Judge Dredd’s turned into a poof and so has everyone else. All the stories are about Buddhists, Feminism and Ecology – it’s a real drag” while Millar railed about how “I’m sick of listening to them bleating on about how bloody great they are.…

August 22, 2022

A Good Year For Bastards (Book Three, Part 53: Morrison and Millar’s Judge Dredd, Maniac 5)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s Judge Dredd story Inferno was set up by a Mark Millar story called Purgatory.

It’s going to be a good year for bastards, Spider. And their running mates. – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Tellingly, it opens with a light rip-off of Rorschach’s jail cell murder in Watchmen #8, with guards coming up on a dead guard who’s been pulled through the bars of a cell and murdered, which serves as the introduction to Grice. Going on, the comic continues in a vein that gives a clear sense of Millar’s takeaways from Watchmen. We see a man being held down to a surgical table as his nose is burnt off without anesthesia, a vegetarian being brutally force fed his (still alive) pet rat, and people being agonizingly burnt alive. In the instances where the violence can’t quite live up to this standard—a simple panel of a man raking spiked knuckles across another man’s back—the dialogue serves to juice it up with lines lie “Feel thet, boy? Feel yore skin peelin’ back? Tearin’ inta l’il strips o’ confetti?” It is a comic of unrelenting, ugly cynicism—the same thing Millar had already done with The Insiders only blown up to the parodic extremes of the Judge Dredd universe. And this was clearly the pleasure Millar wanted out of it, describing it enthusiastically as “hard as nails.” This was of a type with what Morrison was doing, yes, but it was not the same thing.

Nevertheless, the pair were close enough to work together, and indeed went on to do two more Judge Dredd stories. One, Book of the Dead, ran a few weeks after the end of the Summer Offensive, and slotted into the traditional Judge Dredd format of having Dredd go and do a tour of duty in another Mega-City, which is to say in an over the top parody of another country. But where Millar’s predecessor had done a “Judge Dredd in Ireland” story that stuck to territory he knew, Morrison and Millar did an Egypt-themed one, which is to say a straight up Mummy riff. This carried all the casual imperialism one would expect from this premise, with Egypt treated as a place of brutality and superstition (although not so brutal that the Egyptian judge sent to Mega-City One can’t be shown up as an arrogant fraud who gets himself beaten within an inch of his life on his first night on patrol), but by and large its worse sin is simply a sort of bland tedium—a sense of unreality that this is really the product of two of the most successful comics writers of the late 20th/early 21st century.

This sense only deepens in Crusade, the pair’s third Judge Dredd story, which sees Dredd sent to retrieve a crashed space pod containing an astronaut who was lost in space before being recovered and claiming to have met God. Published in 1995, a year after Millar left Dredd and was replaced by a returning John Wagner, the story puts Dredd opposite Judges from every other nation on Earth, all of whom also want the pod.…

August 5, 2022

I Knew I Would Be Judged (Book Three, Part 52, Inferno)

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Hey all. Just wanted to remind you all that the entire remainder of Last War in Albion Volume 3 is available for Patrons. And last night came the first part of Volume 4, a whole volume on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, a fact I’m definitely not mentioning because some highly visible piece of Sandman media launches today.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis handed off the reins on Judge Dredd to Mark Millar shortly before Millar began the Summer Offensive.

I knew they’d learn my secrets. The way they find out everything—I knew I would be judged—but not like this! Not like tonight! – Garth Ennis, Helter Skelter

The Summer Offensive was an eight issue run of 2000 A.D. in July and August of 1993 in which the magazine was effectively turned over to Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, who between then wrote four of the five strips for those eight weeks, with the fifth being by John Smith. For Morrison, this in practice marked a farewell to their run in the British market and a capstone to the phase of their career that included things like St. Swithin’s Day and Dare. Save for “zzzzenith.com” and a single issue Janus: Psi Division strip, both in 2000 A.D., the Offensive would mark the last time Morrison was the sole credited writer on something for the UK market. More to the point, the Summer Offensive fit into the aesthetic tradition of the UK comics renaissance that was in 1993, down to its dying embers, with its name making clear that it was wholly committed to an aesthetic of shock and taboo breaking.

Being 2000 A.D., one of the five strips was Judge Dredd, which Grant Morrison took on as one of their two solo strips for the run, penning a twelve issue epic called Inferno (which ran for four weeks past the end of the Offensive). This is, on the surface, an enticing combination—one of Britain’s greatest comics writers on the country’s greatest comics property. But Dredd has proven an idiosyncratic challenge for plenty of good writers, as Garth Ennis can attest. Morrison’s approach to the challenge was, in some ways, surprising. Their reputation, after all, was built on their visionary reinventions of American properties like Animal Man and The Doom Patrol—radical reworkings that in many ways went further than even Alan Moore’s trademark reworkings of characters. Now, after more than 850 installments between 2000 A.D. and the Judge Dredd Megazine, Dredd was surely ripe for such a reinvention.

Instead, however, Morrison took the strip in an aggressively lowbrow direction. As they put it, “Dredd’s just a big bastard with a gun, never anything else. There’s nothing under the mask. So I thought long and hard and then just wrote him as a one dimensional bastard with a gun.” This is not to sy that Morrison did not attempt to leave their mark on the character, taking time to damn Ennis’s run with faint praise (“I did make a definite decision not to do a kind of quirky ‘isn’t life strange in Mega-City One?’…

July 11, 2022

Gandalf’s Crap Understudy (Book Three, Part 51: Ennis’s Judge Dredd)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Judge Dredd in the late 80s and early 90s did an extensive arc concerning Mega-City One contemplating the restoration of Democratic rights. Late in that arc came another 2000 AD featured called The Dead Man, revealed in a late twist to be a secret Judge Dredd story, featuring the eponymous Judge walking the Cursed Earth aroudn Mega-City One.

“I notice bein’ Gandalf’s crap understudy doesnae stop you bein’ a condescending prick ’n’ all.” – Simon Spurrier, John Constantine: Hellblazer

At this point the main strip began depicting the backstory of how Dredd came to be a badly burnt body out in the Cursed Earth. This began with “A Letter to Judge Dredd,” a thematic sequel to “Letter From a Democrat” written in the form of a missive from a young boy questioning the efficacy of the Judge system. The boy dies horribly at the end of the strip just before his letter is delivered to Dredd, and this confluence prompts Dredd’s resignation. In an attempt to hide this fact a clone of Judge Dredd is given his badge and put on the streets in his place, which precipitated another epic, the twenty-six part Necropolis, which featured the return of the Brian Bolland co-created Judge Death. The story culminated, of course, with Dredd returning and saving the day, but still resulted in a massive death toll in Mega-City One as Judge Death and his Dark Judges spent months ruling the city. In the fallout of this, Dredd, his faith in the Judge system restored, concludes that the only way to reestablish order is to allow a referendum on the judge system and the restoration of democracy, setting up the culmination of the years-long arc.

This took place in a pair of short arcs towards the end of 1991, beginning in issue #750. The first of these, “The Devil You Know,” was penned by John Wagner and took place on the eve of the referendum, with Dredd arguing passionately against the restoration of Democracy (“When some creep’s holding a knife to your throat, who do you want to see riding up… me—or your elected representative?”) as the ordinary citizens struggle to even understand how to vote in the first place. The plot concerns a conspiracy by a group of judges to assassinate Dredd and prevent the referendum, which they (along with the rest of the city) are convinced will spell the end of the judge system.

The second arc, meanwhile, depicted the referendum itself. Called “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” it was unexpectedly written not by Wagner, who had written virtually the entirety of the Democracy arc, but rather by the incoming regular writer of the Judge Dredd feature in 2000 AD, Garth Ennis. As Ennis explains the handoff, “at that point John had enough American commitments and was writing the lion’s share of the Megazine. He had enough outside commitments that handling the Dredd strip in 2000 was too much work.” And so the opportunity passed to Ennis, who was of the up and comers the one with the deepest affection for Dredd, and, with his clear love of transgressive and boyish humor, one of the two most obvious fits for the property.…

June 27, 2022

The Whole Damned Brazen Con Of It (Book Three, Part 50: Judge Dredd)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis was a writer who could pen incredibly moving and succinct portraits of human emotion, and who could just as easily pen the most self-indulgent edgelording crap imaginable.

“The trick was that none of his spells, none of the words, meant much at all. What did mean something was the presentation. Putting on a face. The whole damned brazen con of it.” – Pete Milligan, Hellblazer

Nor does his career divide neatly into some narrative of the talented early years vs the self-indulgent later years—at almost all stages he finds himself producing both types of comics at the same time.

Like most writers from the British scene who were breaking out in the US, Ennis continued doing work in the UK scene until he’d fully established himself. In the face of the market collapse that happened in the early 90s, however, this meant that his UK work was essentially focused entirely on one publication: 2000 AD. But just as Ennis had ridden his breakout work in Crisis straight to a top job in the proto-Vertigo scene, Ennis was not left to toil on Future Shocks, and instead slotted in as the regular writer of the title’s marquee feature Judge Dredd, at first with a series of fill-ins starting with Prog 711 in December of 1990, three months before his first Hellblazer issue and eventually becoming the regular writer from late 1991 through the summer of 1993, just over a year before he wrapped on Hellblazer.

Remarkably, this makes him the first significant participant in the War to take on what is arguably the most iconic British comics character ever created. Moore had an early Judge Dredd script rejected, and Milligan had written a story featuring spinoff character Judge Anderson back in 1987, but for the most part Dredd was a character who existed in parallel with the early years of the War. He had been around since 1977, debuting in the second issue of 2000 AD, but always having been imagined as a key feature of the magazine. The concept had several origins. On one hand, Pat Mills had been considering a horror strip named after the British reggae artist Judge Dread, but ultimately discarded the idea. Separately, he had approached writer John Wagner, with whom he’d helped create Battle Picture Weekly, to do a strip in the vein of his earlier One-Eyed Jack, a Dirty Harry knockoff for IPC’s by then defunct Valiant. Wagner took the title from the abandoned horror strip, changing the spelling on the suggestion of Kelvin Gosnell, and developed the familiar lawman of Mega-City One. On art duties were Carlos Ezquerra, who modeled Dredd on David Carradine’s character in the trash-cult classic Death Race 2000, and whose decision to move the setting into the far future was crucial in the development of Mega-City One.

In the course of this process Wagner dropped out of the project, and Mills cycled unsatisfyingly through a number of freelancers, resulting in the delay of the strip past the first issue.…

June 20, 2022

Eyes Full of History (Book Three, Part 49: Hemingway, Ennis’s Returns to Hellblazer)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Ennis’s Hellblazer concluded as it began: Constantine cornered, desperate, and tricking the Devil himself.

“Here, I’m John Constantine and loving it, bastard terrifying with my eyes full of history and my head full of secret things, here in one of London’s collapsed veins, feeding off it.” – Warren Ellis, Hellblazer

Astra, it turns out, is actually a disguised Ellie. The raid at the beginning of the arc that killed Header was to steal some old pages, which turn out to have contained the lore that Ellie/Astra revealed to the First of the Fallen at the beginning of the outset, prompting him to murder the other two demons to whom Constantine sold his soul and begin his final attack on him. All of this was part of Constantine’s plan, set up to allow Ellie to fashion a weapon that would kill the First of the Fallen and to get into position to do so. And so Constantine tricks the Devil, turns his own scheme back on him, and kills him, a final triumphant escalation of the basic pleasure he’d been offering since his second issue.

This was the heart of what Ennis offered on Hellblazer. And it emphatically served as the definitive take on the character. This was no mean feat given that Constantine was created by Moore, had been written by both Morrison and Gaiman, and had already had an iconic run at the start of his ongoing series. He was not a character who seemed in dire need of a reinvention, nor one who even straightforwardly appeared to have room for one. And yet going forward it was Ennis’s Hellblazer that would be the template. Any other writer working on Constantine would now be reacting to Ennis, whether to follow his lead or rebel against it. This was simply how the character worked now.

Implicit within that was a larger vision. It has already been discussed how Moore and Morrison found their success by bringing techniques from more literary fiction to the genres associated with pulp fiction. Crucial to this, though by no means the whole of the story, were the techniques that arose out of modernist writing. Ennis’s approach squares the circle to an extent, adopting both a pulp tradition and a modernist technique that were largely neglected by Moore and Morrison. But unusually, in this case the pulp and modernist traditions were never entirely separate in the first place, and their fusion, and the innovation came purely in the form of fully porting this process over to the medium of comics.

At the center of this is Ernest Hemingway. Unequivocally one of the primary figures of literary modernism, Hemingway, like Ennis, sat at a strange aesthetic remove from his contemporaries. Where writers like T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and James Joyce became famous for starkly difficult and complex prose, Hemingway’s prose had the by now familiar halmarks of terse directness. The beginning of his novel A Farewell to Arms is apropos: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.…

June 13, 2022

Trenchcoat and Cigarette and Arrogance (Book Three, Part 48: Late Ennis Hellblazer)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis’s take on John Constantine drew heavily on the noir genre for influences, and largely fit into the structures suggested by Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

“I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness.” – Garth Ennis, Hellblazer

Ennis’s approach, it’s clear, is much closer to the one Chandler lays out than is convenient for Ellis’s point, even as his eventual conclusion that Constantine is the enemy of abusive authority in the general case clearly works.

Central to this is the unspoken ethical foundation of Chandler’s manifesto and the fundamental difference between detective fiction and what Ennis is doing in Hellblazer. At the heart of Chandler’s notion of realistic detective fiction is, ultimately, the perspective and worldview of the police. This is in some ways natural; murder is the domain of the police, just as war is the domain of soldiers. One cannot tell a realistic story about something without relying on the worldview of the people who deal with it. But a consequence of this is a worldview that is shaped by the police and their worldview, with all the innate conservatism implicit in that.

The occult, however, is not the domain of any real-world job, and so Ennis was left with considerably more freedom in how to tell his story. But Ennis’s clear focus on making sure the magical solutions within his stories made sense and were adequately set up is a clear embrace of Chandler’s ethics of realism, and a clear rejection of the sort of thing Chandler criticized British mysteries for,. On a larger scale, meanwhile, Ennis put much effort into grounding Constantine in his own experience of the real world. As he explained, Constantine “was a bloke who lived in contemporary London and did contemporary London things.” And with this wide mandate to shape his hero and his moral worldview, Ennis substituted the realism of cops with the realism of a man who grew up in Thatcher’s Britain amidst the Troubles, who drank a lot with his mates. And so his Constantine took the basic framework of the noir protagonist and shaped it into something more anarchic and engaged. This was a savvy understanding of Constantine—an unearthing of threads that were implicit in the character since his creation that wove them into a form that was well-suited to the landscape of the early 1990s.

Constantine’s post-breakup collapse marked the beginning of Ennis’s endgame, although he had more than a year left to run on the title. First came a phase featuring an unshaven, drunk, and homeless Constantine. This only featured three actual issues—a two-parter that resolved the lingering King of the Vampires plot from Hellblazer #50 and a one-shot in which Constantine is spooked by the ghost of a crashed World War II pilot that inspires him to get back to his life. This marked the first instance of Ennis directly engaging with the war comics that he grew up reading, But this issue, with its mawkish and Churchill-quoting title “Finest Hour” and its moral lesson about how the dead pilot “never gave up” and “clawed and fought to the last drop of blood for life” that leads Constantine to decide he owes it to him to try to live, is far from the best instance of it, landing closer to the jingoistic pap published in Commando and War Picture Library than to the stuff like Charley’s War that Ennis was clearly trying to approach.…

June 6, 2022

Enigmatic (Book Three, Part 47: Fear and Loathing, The Simple Art of Murder)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis was eventually joined on Hellblazer by Steve Dillon, whose simple expressiveness was a perfect fit for Ennis’s style, and who would go on to be the most significant collaborator of Ennis’s career.

“Yeah, well, that’s me, ennit? Enigmatic.” – Grant Morrison, Hellblazer

This arc wrapped in November of 1992, and with the arrival of Vertigo on the horizon Ennis wisely decided to do a pair of one-offs. The first of these saw him return to Constantine’s family with a story about his niece Gemma unwisely deciding to begin playing with the occult. This mostly served as a small showcase for Kit, who gets a four page scene in which she tries to talk Gemma out of continuing with the occult, noting her firm rule that Constantine keep his occult life away from hers, pointing out how “he’s been all over the world, he’s seen incredible stuff, he’s had the time of his life, and he’s cause a terrible, terrible lot of pain while he’s been at it,” and finally suggesting that the next time someone messes with Gemma she should just “chin the wee bitch,” It’s a succinct demonstration of the character, perfectly capturing why she’s an interesting counterpart to Constantine.

For his first Vertigo issue, meanwhile, Ennis penned a comedy issue about John Constantine’s surprise fortieth birthday party, thrown for him by the Lord of the Dance with a cross-section of Constantine’s supporting cast attending. This allows Ennis a change of gears, demonstrating the basic fact that he can do comedy. And indeed, the issue is tremendously funny, taking advantage of the oddity of the transition to use the permissiveness of Vertigo, which would soon become a siloed entity, to comment on the DC Universe it was in the midst of parting from. And so Ennis pulls gags like having the Phantom Stranger visit Constantine while he’s outside taking a piss, causing Constantine to surprisedly turn and pee on the Stranger’s shoes. “I had hoped we could ignore the cold facade that our kind deems so necessary, if only at this time of celebration. But I see there will be no hands clasped against the dark this night. I see I must remain a stranger,” he intones with sublime pretension before vanishing into the night. The issue is a charming bit of irreverence, if a stange sales pitch for Ennis’s run. Nevertheless, it worked; as Ennis describes it, the Vertigo launch meant that “The sales tripled… Just for one issue because there was a massive publicity push, which died away instantly the next issue, but it did us a lot of good. Even when the sales died down again they were still not quite double what they had been, so that was pretty good. A bigger audience got into Vertigo, and into that kind of comic.”

The first proper arc to take advantage of the book’s newfound readership was Fear and Loathing, which saw Ennis return to one of Jamie Delano’s best tricks, albeit with his own distinct spin on it.…

May 9, 2022

The Blue Sparks Smell of Ozone (Book Three, Part 46: Charley’s War, Steve Dillon)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Ennis wrote a blistering satire of the Royal Family featuring Prince Charles being possessed by Jack the Ripper.

“There was a smell of magic somewhere, like the blue sparks smell of ozone at a funfair.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman

The climactic realization—that the guy who asked for Constantine’s help had in fact summoned the demon into Prince Charles—is framed in blunt and power-mad terms. “I wanted to restore the monarchy of this country to its rightful power. I wanted a king who would have the iron will to rule absolutely. And believe me, he was willing. He would be backed by the military and advised by me. There would be no parliament. No opposition. Nor radicals. No liberals. No thinkers. No immigrants. There would simply be the rulers and the ruled.” When Constantine raises the obvious objection to putting Jack the Ripper on the throne as absolute monarch, namely that “the bastard eats people, you headcase,” the reply is blunt and incisive: “What has our royal family ever done except feed on the blood of the people?” It’s brilliantly incendiary stuff, aggressive and angry and to the point—the political fury of the Delano era crystalized into brutal and clarifying effectiveness.

Perhaps the most crucial thing to understand about Ennis is the way in which he both clearly fits into the larger British Invasion scene and feels fundamentally different from all of his peers. Were one to create an aesthetic geneology the bulk of the British Invasion scene would branch off from Alan Moore. Some of these branches imitated and built on Moore—most obviously Neil Gaiman, of the early crowd—while others like Morrison and Milligan had more complex and contested relationships. Nevertheless, all of them arrived in the US market ready-made to be compared to Moore. Ennis did not. Instead, Ennis was a parallel branch from the generation before Moore, branching off from a common influence in a direction as distinct from Moore as Gaiman and Morrison were from each other. This common parent was Pat Mills, and nowhere is that influence clearer than in Royal Blood.

Mills has come up several times already. This is inevitable—he was, after all, the star of the British comics scene prior to the great Moore-led explosion. And he was a star with a long-lived career, producing major works in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. These later works such as Marshal Law and World War III, written after Moore had revolutionized the industry, revealed a writer wholly capable of thriving in the auteur-driven world of post-Moore comics. His best attributes in that period were a sense of utterly uncompromising political ferocity—a willingness to just go for it that led to comics with a sense of purity of vision entirely unmatched by his peers. But the bulk of his career had existed in a world where British comics were aggressively low-rent and grubby things.

Even in this period, however, Mills stood out. He was at the forefront of three separate magazines that could fairly be described as transforming the landscape of British comics, beginning with Battle Picture Weekly in 1975 and continuing with Action and 2000 AD, where he co-created the flagship Judge Dredd.…

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