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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