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Last War in Albion

Your Sister’s Tights (Book Three, Part 31: Trans Erotica of the Early 1990s)

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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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A Literal Death Trap (Book Three, Part 30: Milligan’s Batman, The Road, Shade the Changing Woman

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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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The Hidden Casket of Immortality (Book Three, Part 29: American Scream, Batman

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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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Company Involvement (Book Three, Part 28: JFK, Milligan’s Animal Man)

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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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Anything Nasty About The Sicilians (Book Three, Part 27: Skreemer, Shade the Changing Man)

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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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Husks (Book Three, Part 26: Insiders, Skin)

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If you enjoy Last War in Albion, you might also enjoy my new comic series Britain a Prophecy, which is so overtly in the same tradition of 80s/90s British comics that I even called the first arc The Last War in Albion. The first issue is available on a free/pay what you want basis.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis exemplified a tension within the British comics scene of the period, oscillating between strong political investments and vapid edgelording. The latter aesthetic, however, was exemplified by Mark Millar.

The qlippoths are generally understood as hells, although the word means husks or shells. It’s what remains once the sacred energy in things has departed. The sacred energy is meaning. When the meaning of a thing moves on, that thing becomes a husk. -Alan Moore, Promethea

Millar made his Fleetway debut late in the run of Crisis and Revolver. His first such effort, a one-off called “Her Parents” in Crisis #31, is a curious thing; the story of a boy enduring the attentions of his date’s parents while waiting for her to finish getting ready. It is essentially a comedy about how desperately unpleasant the parents are—bellicose, bigoted, and obsessed with football. The story does not really have a plot—it simply ends when his date finally comes down with no real reveal or resolution, as though the sole point had been to tarry in the unpleasant space of the parents’ living room for the sake of being there. Another strip, in the Revolver Horror Special, takes a similar general approach, following a sexist asshole named Brian who’s obviously obsessed with his mother before an ending reveal that his mother is an emaciated figure handcuffed to the bed so that he never has to leave her. This at least has something resembling a plot—there’s a reveal at the end that pays off and shades what came before instead of just “the person he was waiting for comes downstairs.” But the overall point is still simply to depict the unpleasantness, not to mock it or satirize it as Garth Ennis does, but simply because misogyny and homophobia are viewed as worth spending time with. 

The picture becomes clearer when you look at Millar’s longer works of the period. His professional debut was a series called Saviour that managed six issues at Trident before the company went bankrupt, the first drawn by Daniel Vallely, the rest by Nigel Kitching. It is undoubtedly an ambitious comic, weaving a vast mythology about a superhero named Saviour (modeled after television presenter Jonathan Ross, an early example of Millar’s ruthless savviness in attention-getting decisions) who presents himself as a messiah figure but is in actuality the antichrist. But there is also the same fascination with ugliness—a plotline about a young girl being sexually abused that spends all of its time on her terror and confusion, or a sequence that revels in Desmond Tutu being shot in the head. His other Trident series, Shadowmen, which saw two of a planned six issues published before the company went under, has a similar focus on gruesome violence, the bulk of it against women, lingering over things like an extended sequence of state violence being enacted against two women as an intimidation campaign, ending in one of their murder or a scene in which a female police officer is mind controlled into shooting first her fellow officers then herself by a man who keeps calling her “honey” while forcing her to do it.…

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For Sweet Fuck All (Book Three, Part 25: Troubled Souls)

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CW: NSFW imagery.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The late 80s/early 90s anthology Crisis was a politically engaged book for mature audiences that saw early work from a number of prominent figures, among them Garth Ennis.

If I’m a cynic, is being a believer really all that much better? Is never giving in, never compromising, is that really so great? When so many parts of your country have been turned into hell? When three thousand people have died for sweet fuck all? – Garth Ennis, The Punisher

Hailing as he does from Northern Ireland, Garth Ennis is not technically a British comics writer. Nevertheless he is a major figure in the nexus of writers that formed within the blast radius of the War—a secondary figure on the same order as Gaiman or Millar. Ennis entered comics as a young hotshot; he had just turned nineteen when he landed Troubled Souls in Crisis, his first professional work. Nevertheless, he immediately joined the upper echelons of the scene, charming Moore on the train ride to Angoulême a few weeks after is birthday in 1989 and commencing what would be a lifelong friendship. (Ennis recalls Moore advising him early on to “own what you create. Don’t let them do to you what they did to our generation,” which is probably more hindsight than Moore would have treated his career just two years after Watchmen, but comports with Moore’s own memory of “ giving him dire warnings about what he should expect in the comics industry.” Moore, in any case, provided a blurb for the trade paperback of Ennis’s second Crisis story, True Faith, describing it as “a fresh and original work, the power and charm of which last long after one closes its pages.”) Troubled Souls goes a long way towards explaining this meteoric ascent; it is, quite simply, a spectacular work. In one sense it is, like Sticky Fingers, a slice of life comic. But a slice of life comic is typically defined by its normality, while Troubled Souls was nothing of the sort. It was, instead, a comic about life during the Irish Troubles.

In one sense the Troubles can only be understood in a larger historical context. This begins roughly in the 12th century when the Normans conducted their first invasion of Ireland on the nominal pretext of assisting the deposed King of Leinster Diarmid mac Murchadha, but more generally because Ireland was a big island full of resources right near Britain and conquering things like that is what 12th century Normans did. This commenced a period of several centuries in which English influence in Ireland largely waxed and waned over the next few centuries until 1542 when the Irish Parliament acceded to the English demand to become the Kingdom of Ireland, with the British monarch on the throne, a request made both out of concern over the growing rebelliousness of the Irish and the need to consolidate newly Protestant English control over Ireland separately from the Catholic Church’s authority.…

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An Unusually Determined Suicide (Book Three, Part 24: Bible John, Third World War)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison penned a final work in the British market during this boom, a piece called Bible John in a magazine called Crisis.

The complex phenomenon we project. That alone is real. The actual killer’s gone, unglimpsed, might as well have not been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Marie Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don’t we leave it there? -Alan Moore, From Hell

The eponymous Bible John was a serial killer who operated in Glasgow in the late 1960s. His pattern was to pick up young women at the Barrowland Ballroom—all three victims were menstruating at the time of their deaths—beat them, and strangle them to death with their own tights. In the wake of the third killing the victim’s sister, who had shared a cab with both her and the killer, recounted him giving his name as “John” and quoting Bible verses on the drive, hence the nickname. A massive investigation followed, including the first time in Scotland that media published a composite portrait, but the murders remained unsolved. 

Morrison’s comic is as its subtitle describes it—a meditation and history of the killings in which Morrison conducts their own investigation as a narrative over their former Fauves bandmate Daniel Vallely’s expressionist best Bill Sienkiewicz/Dave McKean imitation. This narration is intense and psychogeographic in its approach. “The murder sites can still be visited,” one early section begins. “They include not only the geographical locations but also the graveyard acres of newsprint, of drawings, of photographs. Family snapshots with the grain enlarged. Black and white pointilist portraits, arranged in rows. Let’s go down there. Looking for clues. This is dead ground where even the air seems stunned into amnesiac silence. Lanes diminish into forced perspectives.” 

It is impossible to read this and not to think of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, which examined the Jack the Ripper murders from a similarly informed perspective, and which had begun publication in 1988, rendering it a surefire influence on Bible John. Indeed, Morrison discussed the comic in a Drivel column in November of 1990, noting its “unacknowledged debt to the subtext and subject matter of Iain Sinclair” while calling it “as fine a piece of narrative construction as one is likely to see in a comic book” in the course of a larger (and tremendously insightful) argument that obsessions with plagiarism are “based on the bourgeois concept of art as a commodity which is the sole privilege of an educated cultural elite.” Though of course given Drivel’s performative excesses it’s worth nothing that this argument came four months after their snark about Moore and Superfolks and four months before the beginning of Bible John, which contains no acknowledgment of the debt its own “wander around murder sites and report on their psychic energy” approach owes to Sinclair. 

Ultimately, however, this is an easy comparison to overstate. From Hell was in many ways a successor to Watchmen, using a tight nine-panel grid and no narration or caption boxes until the ending chapters (published years after Bible John), depicting the Ripper murders directly instead of talking about them from a historical vantage point.…

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Breeding, Darling (Book Three, Part 23: Drivel, Steed and Mrs. Peel)

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CW: Sexually explicit imagery

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The comics/pop culture magazine Deadline proved one of the most successful publications of the early 90s British comics renaissance on the back of the massively popular Tank Girl.

“What makes you such a bitch, Emma?”
“Breeding, darling. Top class breeding.” -Grant Morrison, New X-Men

Initially the character took off in the British queer scene—Tank Girl made a number of appearances in anti-Clause 28 protests. Deadline editor Dave Elliott successfully got the magazine US distribution under Dark Horse, who launched it in 1991, just in time to catch on with the emerging riot grrrl scene, where it took off, making Tank Girl into a latter day feminist punk icon. One of its fans was the stepdaughter of director Rachel Talalay, who gave her stepmother a copy of the comics. Talalay pursued the film rights, which publisher Tom Astor was actively shopping, and in 1995 a movie came out starring Lori Petty and Malcolm McDowell. The movie was a flop but a cult classic with an enduring legacy, not least that several of the Spice Girls met in line for the auditions to play the lead character. 

Another significant publication in terms of sitting in the comics/pop culture intersection was Speakeasy, a fanzine that gradually drifted upwards into being a professional publication before it went under in May of 1991. Its last eighteen months, however, featured a monthly one-page column from Grant Morrison called Drivel. As described by Morrison, Drivel was “a monthly, scurrilous, humour, gossip, and opinion column” that they wrote in the voice of “an exaggerated caricature partly inspired by the Morrissey interviews I enjoyed reading. The whole point of the column – which was one of the magazine’s most popular features, incidentally – was to take the piss out of the comics scene at the time.” It’s not entirely clear what Morrissey interviews Morrison is talking about and whether they included his interview two years prior to Morrison’s first Drivel column in which he proclaimed that “Reggae, for example, is to me the most racist music in the entire world” and alleged a black conspiracy to keep the Smiths out of the charts, but the point is clear enough: Morrison was engaging in an exaggeratedly catty and inflammatory performance. 

In practice this meant talking shit about other people in the industry—in their first column, for instance, they tartly bashed Howard Chaykin for his claim that “just because he wrote about and drew deviant sexual acts, it didn’t mean that he actually indulged in them. (Deviant? Forgive me if I snore more loudly than usual.)” Later on they take aim at Gary Groth for his Eros line, describing “the entire tawdry exercise” as “a cheap and none-too-cheerful money-grubbing scheme, which is rendered, doubly, triply, and even quadruply odious by the fact that it’s been initiated by one of the most self-righteous, holier-than-thou editorial voices in comics.” Their most infamous moment, however, came in a column in which they first launched their previously discussed suggestion that Moore substantially ripped off Robert Mayer’s Superfolks in various works.…

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A World That Was Once Rama (Book Three, Part 22: Gaiman’s Business Sense, Rogan Gosh, Tank Girl)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The short-lived Fleetway magazine Revolver saw one of Neil Gaiman’s few publications with the company, which he generally eschewed due to the feeling that it was a poor investment for his career.

Has time worn so thin? Have men grown so small? Are all the Seven Cities sleeping? Does only one beloved thing remain in the wreckage of a world that once was Rama? -Grant Morrison, Vimanarama

This was, in its own way, on display with his story for the Revolver Horror Special, “Feeders and Eaters.” The story itself is a minor work—a nine pager that wraps the disquieting central image of someone being slowly cannibalized while still living into a basic frame story, told moodily by Gaiman’s Miracleman collaborator Mark Buckingham. But the version in the Revolver Horror Special is one of three separate versions of the story that Gaiman has written and sold in his career. Six years later Gaiman revisited the idea for Ellen Datlow’s anthology Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, this time calling it “Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture)” and reconstructing it as “an outline for a pornographic horror film I’d never make.” Much of the plot is different this time, although the focus on sex as consumption remains, as does an image of someone exposing their hand to reveal that “her fingers look like ribs, or chicken wings, well-chewed and rescued from a garbage can—dry bones with scraps of flesh and cartilage.” In 2002 he revisited the story again, this time for Stephen Jones’s anthology Keep Out the Night. This version was a direct adaptation of the comic, although it recycled language from “Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture)” in its description of a hand where “most of the flesh had been picked from the bones, chewed like chicken wings, leaving only dried morsels of meat, scraps and crumbs, and little else.” Across the three versions the story saw print in ten separate anthologies, including two Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror collection and two of Gaiman’s own short story anthologies, as well as getting a television adaptation as part of Sky Arts’ Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories anthology, an impressive spread of moneymaking opportunities that decisively fulfilled Gaiman’s stated goal of not writing one-offs. 

The other major strip in Revolver, at least in terms of the War, was Rogan Gosh, an effort by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy, who had previously created Paradax, one of the primary inspirations on Morrison’s creation of Zenith. Milligan was another of the War’s minor combatants—he got his start in 1978 in Sounds running the strip The Electric Hoax along with McCarthy (It was their slot on the comics page that Moore took over in March 1979 for Roscoe Moscow) before settling into a career writing for 2000 AD with a series of Future Shocks followed by the original strip Bad Company) alongside his independent work in Strange Days.  McCarthy, meanwhile, wielded a gonzo and often psychedelic style, and Rogan Gosh saw the pair leaning fully into this tendency with a psychedelic vision quest that jumped freely throughout multiple timelines.…

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