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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