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