chapter three

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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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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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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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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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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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s The New Adventures of Hitler made use of shock tactics, and like St. Swithin’s Day drew a predictable response.

AH: I wonder if I’ll be allowed to say that Hue and Cry are a crap band?
MORRISON: Possibly the worst in the history of humanity. – Interview with Grant Morrison

Indeed, The New Adventures of Hitler managed the impressive feat of being controversial before it had even launched. The June 1989 issue of Cut in which the first installment appeared also featured a column from Pat Kane, half of two-hit wonder pop group Hue and Cry, entitled “Disquiet on the Comics Front.” Kane had been serving as a columnist for Cut for some time at this point, but in “Disquiet on the Comics Front” he angrily resigns the position in protest of The New Adventures of Hitler. Kane begins with a potted history of British comics: Charley’s War, 2000 AD, the arrival of Alan Moore, and then into the modern renaissance, praising (ironically, as it would turn out) Crisis and mentioning Gaiman and McKean’s Signal to Noise, which was then serializing in The Face, a lengthy introduction to burnish his credentials as a fan of serious comics before swerving into his attack on Morrison.

Kane proceeds to construct an analogy out of punk rock’s use of shock, comparing the use of the safety pin and the swastika within punk. “The safety pin didn’t stand for anything in public before punk used it,” explains Kane, “or at least had a radically different meaning; a new symbol was created by punk’s inspired re-contextualizing. The swastika, as a symbol, already has a long and bloody meaning in the public realm; punks using it aesthetically couldn’t avoid being dragged into the world of contemporary racial politics.” Somewhat puzzlingly, Kane extends this metaphor to a comparison of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which he describes as the safety pin to The New Adventures of Hitler’s swastika, explaining that “Kiddy-cartoon characterisations of funny animals cannot be further away from the horrors of Nazi genocide; yet the use of the most light-hearted form to express the most profoundly disturbing of events in Maus reminds us of the incapacity of art to fully represent such pain and suffering, even as it must try to. A new symbol of the Holocaust is minted; one which remembers, but is conscious of its limitations.” In contrast, Kane suggests, The New Adventures of Hitler attempts to repurpose the symbol of Hitler himself. Crafting it into “an ‘empty sign’—but not so much to nihilistically proclaim the pointlessness of meaning (like punk), as to be re-filled with contemporary pop-cultural references,” arguing that the appearance of Morrissey existed to turn Hitler into a pop star, arguing that this is “an image of fascism which fascists, past and present, would quite like to be seen around: the Fuhrer’s early life portrayed like J. Alfred Prufrock’s, all bourgeois bumble and angst; references to hip pop music and comics culture; surely, then, not such a monstrous man, nor such monstrous times.”…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alongside their success in the US market, Morrison pursued more personal and idiosyncratic work in the UK market, including the Thatcher assassination fantasy St. Swithin’s Day. Thatcher, btw, was bad.

Damned to the “help yourself society”—where the strong help themselves to whatever they want and the weak are left to help themselves. – Jamie Delano, Hellblazer

Her premiership was marked by a similar severity to her political rise; her economic policy enthusiastically embraced the monetary politics that had enchanted her at university, slashing public spending alongside taxes and privatising large swaths of industry. She was a vehement opponent of unions, successfully breaking the back of the powerful National Union of Mineworkers over the course of the 1984-85 strike. In terms of foreign relations, she fought a war against Argentina for a couple old colonial possessions, was an adamant enabler of South Africa’s apartheid regime, and was a firm supporter of murderous Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. 

Finally, in 1990, after more than twelve years running the country, she fell. With approval ratings softened by simply fatigue and then bludgeoned by her proposal to replace a property tax with a poll tax to be levied equally on all citizens, effectively shifting a huge quantity of tax burden away from wealthy property owners and onto the poor while simultaneously discouraging them from voting (as voter rolls were used to determine who owed the tax), Thatcher was wounded going into 1990. In November, following the furious resignation of Geoffrey Howe, prompting Michael Heseltine to mount a leadership challenge. After a narrow win on the first ballot, Thatcher was advised by her cabinet to resign, and on November 28th she resigned, leaving Downing Street in tears. 

All of this adds up to a horrible legacy, to be sure, but it is not markedly worse than any of the other right-wing governments of the 1980s. It does not serve to explain the full psychic weight she pressed upon Britain in the 1980s. No shortage of more colorful accounts exist—Warren Ellis’s account of how “we would look out of the window every morning to make sure the bitch hadn’t put Daleks on the streets yet” and his account of 1980s Britain in Planetary where he described her as “genuinely mad” and noted the “feminists and women’s studies theorists who denied she was even really a woman anymore, she was so far out of her tree” are both minor classics of the genre, and the subgenre of pop songs fantasizing about Margaret Thatcher is a rich one. But again, these exist of any right-wing politician—Frank Miller’s depiction of Ronald Reagan in The Dark Knight Returns is no less vicious in its parodicism. The horror of Thatcher is not captured in angry parodies of her.

No, the awful heart of Thatcher is simpler than that. There were no shortage of conservative politicians of the 1980s, but there were few who were came to conservative politics out of as fundamentally ideological a commitment as her.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison found fame and fortune on the back of Arkham Asylum, becoming both rich and a major comics celebrity, though this would prove a poisoned chalice indeed.

The drums stalk up. It’s on me before I realize. -Kieron Gillen, Phonogram

Even as their wishes were being hideously granted in the American market, Grant Morrison kept one foot in the British market. On one level this was simply sound business; there was no reason to put all their eggs in the potentially volatile American market, where despite the massive success of Akrham Asylum they were essentially only working with one company (it would not be until late 1993 that Morrison published a comic with an American publisher other than DC, and they would not have an ongoing series outside of DC until the 21st century), meaning they were only ever one spectacular falling out from having to go looking for work; notably, the other major American comics company, Marvel, remained steadfastly indifferent to the British market. Remaining active in their home country was a sensible precaution. 

Their highest profile contribution to the UK market was, of course, Zenith, which saw Phases Two through Four of Zenith released during this period. But this was an oddity in multiple regards. For one thing, it was a project that had begun almost a year before their American debut. For another, it was a marquee project in the country’s biggest comics magazine. Most of Morrison’s UK work in this period, meanwhile, was altogether more idiosyncratic, personal, and lower-profile. This makes the era a relatively unusual one for Morrison, who, while undoubtedly having varying degrees of success across their career, was not often drawn towards the deliberately niche or artsy in the way that Alan Moore often was. 

This phase of Morrison’s career was aided by an unusual moment in the British comics industry itself. Long something of a backwater, the previous two decades had steadily grown it into a major scene in the global comics landscape. As with most of the late 1980s comics scene this was largely but not entirely Alan Moore’s doing. He had stood on the shoulders of giants, to be sure, but in the end he was the one who established the market for adult comics in the British industry, he was the one who had broken out in the American market and created a sudden demand for intelligent British writers, and he was the one who had put British comics on the global map. Now, in his wake, came a wave of ambitious comics magazines looking to trade on the demand for comics that combined a sense of intelligence and cool flooded onto the stands, more than a few of them featuring Grant Morrison.

In terms of Morrison’s work the most significant of these was Trident, a statement that could in no way be made about the magazine at large. Trident was the flagship project of Trident Comics, a Leicester-based outfit focusing on creator-owned black and white comics by up and coming creators.…

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