Last War in Albion

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Midway through Peter Milligan’s run on Shade the Changing Man a number of British Invasion titles were rebranded under the new imprint Vertigo, which launched with some additional material harvested from Disney’s aborted Touchmark imprint including Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo’s Enigma.

“Pitiful. Cruel. Tyrant. Narcissist. No better than the man you possessed. I loved you and you killed me.” -Cecil Castellucci, Shade the Changing Woman

Milligan was helped here by Fegredo, who dialed back the McKean-esque excesses of Kid Eternity to a more straightforward line style, focusing on what Milligan’s script required, which was emotional and character-focused storytelling. Fegredo’s underlying aptitude at expressive weirdness, meanwhile, ensures that the grotesqueries of Enigma’s world hit with appropriate horror—the first issue, for instance, focuses on the Head, a serial killer with a lizard head who sucks people’s brains out through a metal straw, and Fegredo renders her as a horrifically demonic figure that forms a sharp rupture with the ordinary world. Aiding Fegredo in this is colorist Sherilyn van Valkenburgh, who, in contrast to Fegredo’s taste for bright and vivid colors in Kid Eternity, uses a muted palate of earth tones to ground and contrast Fegredo’s tendencies towards weirdness.

All of this adds up to a clear classic of the period. Nevertheless, it’s equally clear that it’s an underrated one. It got a trade paperback collection in 1995, but went in and out of print, eventually following Karen Berger from DC to Dark Horse when it got picked up by her Berger Books line, the second time an editor brought the project with them when the original line was shuttered. In spite of its obscurity, however, it is a clear case that Milligan, on his day, could produce a work that stood shoulder to shoulder with anyone of his generation.

As for Shade the Changing Man, it spent just over half of its run as a Vertigo book, continuing all the way into March of 1996. This latter half of the run, however, marks a constant battle of entropy—one that Milligan slowly but surely loses. If one is inclined towards a “jump the shark” model a clear inflection point exists past which the book consistently finds itself on the wrong side of the basic quality line, but the truer story is simply one of gradual deflation, the eternally present question of whether Milligan was a giant on the scale of Moore, Morrison, and Gaiman steadily resolving itself into a shrugged “guess not.” 

Things began well enough, as they do with this sort of narrative. Milligan’s first arc for Vertigo was a three-parter entitled “Birth Pains” in which Shade gains yet another body, this time a catatonic person in a mental institution, and quickly finds himself having to save Kathy from a serial killer who views torture as an artistic medium granting access to a mythic realm called the Garden of Pain. The use of Kathy as a generic peril monkey is a bit frustrating, but on the whole it’s an effective bit of horror in what could now be called the Vertigo style.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The early 1990s produced a deep body of cringeworthy trans writing. It’s fine, we’ll be back to comics within the first sentence.

“I didn’t want to find out that instead of getting my powers from a transcendent scientist-mentor, I was grown from the DNA of Aryan super-athletes and Hitler’s personal sex midgets! I didn’t even know Hitler had personal sex midgets!” -Warren Ellis, Planetary

All of which is to say that Milligan’s inadequate account of acquired womanhood, rooted in his perspective as a heterosexual cis male as it is, remains a real and in its own way valid element of early 90s trans culture, just as the differently bad treatments of trans identities in Sandman and Doom Patrol from around the same time were. Flawed and cissexist accounts of trans women were always a real part of developing trans identities, and it’s certain that among the tens of thousands of people who read the “Shade the Changing Woman” were some for whom it was a crucial step on the way to their own transitions. Like the Nifty Archive, the fact that it’s excruciatingly cringeworthy does not change the fact that nothing like its treatment of trans identities had existed in mainstream comics since the pre-Code era. Whatever else might be said of Shade the Changing Man, that’s a significant legacy.

The “Shade the Changing Woman” arc was followed by a short two-issue story in which Shade met James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway that culminated in Shade the Changing Man #32, in which Shade deliberately got himself killed so that he could investigate the madness from the other side. The reason for this was both straightforward and metatextual; that issue came out in December of 1992, and the next month was to be the launch of a new DC Comics imprint called Vertigo. 

The point of Vertigo, as explained by Karen Berger, its executive editor, in the promotional Vertigo Preview, was an act of self-definition. “Most of you already know,” she writes in the introduction, “that DC currently publishes six monthly titles that aren’t quite like any others in the industry: Sandman, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Shade the Changing Man. But, despite producing comics that are challenging, disturbing, and creatively singular, we’ve been an ill-defined lot. We’ve been called horror, mature, sophisticated, dark fantasy, cutting-edge and just plain weird. Tired of tired misnomers, and not even having a collective name, we decided to define ourselves.” The common elements in these six titles were clear enough. It was not quite the presence of Karen Berger, who had nothing to do with Doom Patrol and had by 1993 departed from Hellblazer, Animal Man, and Swamp Thing. But all six books had been defined by writers out of the British scene, although by this point Swamp Thing was in the hands of American horror writer Nancy A. Collins, and the transition to Vertigo coincided with Doom Patrol passing from Morrison to the American Rachel Pollack.…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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