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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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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