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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading