chapter seven

Previously in Last War in Albion: Morrison did the worst work of his career with the recklessly offensive and bullying Big Dave.

A nervous breakdown. There is no way forward. We must set the action in reverse. -Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Whatever its moral flaws, Big Dave, along with Maniac 5, were the two most popular strips of the Summer Offensive, and so like Maniac 5 it saw itself trotted out for return engagements. This began with the one-off “Young Dave,” a story of Big Dave’s childhood, which appeared in the 1994 annual, followed by two more four-part stories in 1994. These stories moved away from the sheer and over the top big concept premises of the original two strips, finding their humor instead in putting the title character in juxtaposition with iconic parts of British lad culture. The first, “Costa Del Chaos,” sees Big Dave holidaying in Tenerife, while the second, “Whole Lotta Balls,” sees him storming the World Cup to win it for England and defeat the Germans. Tonally both are similar festivals of cynical and calculated offense to the original, but there’s a creeping sense of desperation and trying too hard, as if Morrison and Millar were simply trying too hard for something that neither deserved it nor, truth be told, wanted it. Morrison validates this sense, admitting that  “Big Dave clearly had to die. Mark and I were goading each other on every day to break some new bad taste taboo, We both have pretty fucked-up notions about what’s funny and what isn’t. It got to the point where we wouldn’t be satisfied with a Big Dave pitch unless one of us was really badly shocked. We were barely aware that our audience didn’t necessarily want to go as far as we would have liked.”

Mercifully, 2000 A.D.’s editors eventually grew to blanche at their enfants terrible, and pulled the plug later that year. Morrison has suggested a variety of ideas that might have come out otherwise—“Planet of the Darkies,” which Morrison described as “Dave gets sick on a bad kebab and imagines returning from space to a world taken over by immigrants,” “Battleground Bulger,” which saw miniaturized Dave and Saddam Hussein fighting inside the body of a dead toddler, and a story for the 2000 AD Yearbook called “Cheryl-Anne’s Big Night Out,” which saw Big Dave trying to kill Salman Rushdie. This story, which apparently got as far as Steve Parkhouse drawing it, was the one that actually served as the breaking point, with Fleetway head Chris Powell rejecting the story, which largely coincided with both Morrison and Millar ceasing to work with the company, with Morrison going so far as to suggested that he was “blacklisted at 2000 A.D.”

And indeed, their future treatment at 2000 A.D. largely bears this out, at least in the short to medium term. Perhaps the most striking example comes with the strip Janus: Psi-Division, featuring the psychic judge they introduced in Inferno.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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?’…

Continue Reading