Peter Milligan's Hellblazer: Scab

Before spotting the new trade at the bookstore where I'm employed, I had never read a single Hellblazer story. I still don't even really know what John Constantine's deal is, aside from the fact that he's this sorta hard-boiled Londoner with an early-aughties bro-chic hairdo and some sort of connection to the supernatural. All the same, the three-issue title story bops nicely along and it turns out that it's useful to look at it through the lens of the Milligan theory Brandon expounded in the context of the writer's recent run on Batman Confidential, if only to see how "Scab" succeeds, while "The Bat and the Beast" occasionally misses the mark.

Insofar as "Scab" is about something, it is the apparent collapse of capitalism brought about by the implosion of the financial markets of the last 18 months. But Milligan doesn't approach the topic in any of the obvious ways and instead looks back to the origins of the atmosphere of financial prodigality in the mid-nineties and the implications it had for Britain's working classes and especially leftist politics. So think unions and old, Marx-y Labour versus Tony Blair, spiraling housing costs and prodigious credit. But while Milligan clearly tends toward the lefty side of things, the narrative is generally served by the circumstances, rather than the other way round, and thus never feels tendentious.

Milligan's tale of a supernaturally malignant scab begins with a scab of another sort, to wit, "Red" Mal Brady, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist dockers' union negotiator who betrays his proletarian brothers for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver. This betrayal, which resulted in the dissolution of the union and signaled the end of old Labour, was caused not by Red Mal's greed, but rather by a spell cast upon him by a younger, more corrupt John Constantine. The problem is, as our stories continually remind us, our pasts are wont to come back to haunt us, generally in the form of unresolved guilt. Milligan simply personifies this guilt by turning it into the catalyst for the festering skin lesions that attack Mal, Constantine and his doctor/girlfriend Phoebe.

If the preceding doesn't really strike you as particularly dynamic, that's because it isn't. The story works more for the sort of playfulness of Milligan's approach than as a result of its plot or any of the 'larger' questions it grapples with. For example, when a bit of Constantine's scab self animates and attaches itself to Phoebe's coat, eventually finding its way into her ear, it manages to latch onto some lingering guilt over the fetus she aborted a decade earlier. Thus, when Phoebe is jolted awake, she finds an anthropomorphized scab-mass calling her 'mum' and asking for chocky biscuits. But rather than ruminate on the morbidity of these circumstances, Milligan has Constantine take the little guilt-beast back to his apartment and attempts to reason with it.


The exchange that plays out between the two is brilliantly glib, and emblematic of Milligan's ability to have fun with such nominally serious issues. When Constantine tries to convince the scab-fetus that it's nothing but a "bunch of agitated scabs," the thing replies that it may not be normal, but that it is still a person . . . "with rights." That last bit, tossed on almost as an afterthought, pokes ruthless fun at the Rawls-ian Theory of Justice sort of thinking that underlies so many social movements, no matter how absurd or counter-productive.

There are other moments like this--Phoebe's medically jocular approach to the beasts in her closet, Constantine's flashbacks to his extraordinarily abusive treatment of his uncle, or the look of particularly vicious schadenfreude he wears as he accepts the job of conjuring up Red Mal's betrayal--in what is ultimately an extremely well executed three-issue mini-series. "Scab" works where "The Bat and the Beast" doesn't because of the lightness with which it wears its topicality and the relative concision of its narrative. I wouldn't say that the book has turned me into a Hellblazer reader, per se, but it does confirm for me Milligan's continued reign as the king of smart-dumb comics.

Peter Milligan's "The Bat and the Beast"

Peter Milligan occupies a really strange place in smart-dumb comics: Neither as out-there crazy as say, Grant Morrison or as mannered, intellectual (and boring) as Alan Moore. Milligan's strange position leads to comics that are rarely terrible and sometimes great (Submariner: The Depths being a recent example) but rarely totally work--they're always held back slightly by their over-arching conceit and formalism. Milligan's work is nearly always about something.

Not that all good comics aren't "about something", but that reading Milligan's work is more an adventure in how his plot/thesis will play-out, what scenarios and examples he'll develop to prove his point, than a kind of rolling, slowly working-itself-out, temporal sequence of events. The big, heavy ideas land with a thud by at least the end of issue one, and they get really fucking nuts and awesome, but what's being said, though leaning toward the empathetic and ambiguous, ain't all that surprising.

In Milligan's story arc, "The Bat and the Beast", currently running in Batman Confidential, the "about" is post-Cold War Russia, the ugliness and corruption that's spawned from the U.S.S.R dissolving. How this manifests itself though, is through the story of a Russian, bear-mutant--an updated, less retarded version of The KGBeast--and his connections to a Russian Mafia head who wants to hold Gotham for ransom by threatening to nuke the shit out of Batman's city. Maybe the best part of the comic so far is when Batman wonders to Gordon whether saving Gotham from an attack really matters because some other city will suffer Gotham’s near-fate. This concern sends Batman to Moscow.

The plot is Milligan in a nutshell: A quiet interaction with real history and comics history, some hint of political and social commentary, and a super-simple comic book story.

So yeah, let’s talk about the stuff floating in the background of this “Villain threatens to blow something up if he’s not paid a lot of money”. Namely, it’s but one more piece of pop-art that dares to make the point that maybe America isn’t the be-all and end-all of the world. Batman’s running around Gothan and eventually, Moscow trying to get info on “the Tsar” (the Mafia head and a simple but clever conflation of legal and illegal politricks) and quickly realizes he’s maybe out of his depth.

“Part Two” begins with Batman asking a thug about the Tsar and rather than answer, the thug puts a gun under his chin and pulls the trigger. And “Part Two” ends with a fight scene between Batman and the Bear. The most notable line of dialogue is the the Bear asking, “Why have you come here to hurt us?”—pretty much the question any and all governments, armies, and citizens asked when confronted with America’s funny form of diplomacy and prevention. Wisely though, there remains a distinction between the Bear and the heartless crime syndicate that raised him or carts him around—or something, it isn’t totally clear—and so, we’re working in a series of greys and not just…now here’s a comic deconstructing heroes and sympathizing/complicating the roles of “villains”.

This is an engaging comic and it’s smarter than most of the stuff coming out and it’s one of the few arcs in Confidential that feels on-par with the series’ obvious predecessor, Legends of the Dark Knight, particularly the slightly off-kilter art via Andy Clarke’s stringy illustrations—imagine Frank Quitely’s work, only every third page isn’t awful, but that’s all it is? You decide whether that’s “enough” or not.

Milligan & Fegredo's Enigma

"I’ve always regarded Peter as the best writer, in the grown-up, literary sense, to have graced the comic book business (as an adult exploration of the superhero concept, I believe his Enigma book is far superior to Watchmen in every significant way)."

-Grant Morrison

One of the more delightful meta-comics strands is Grant Morrison and Alan Moore's subtle and not-so-subtle critiques lobbed at one another. Be it through you'd-have-to-be-a-fan-of-both-to-catch-it references in one another's comics to harsh but even-handed quotes like the one above, the two are having some fun and taking this comics stuff kinda seriously. It's also fun because it just makes sense that these two wouldn't really see eye-to-eye and it's great that they recognize that on a like ideological or maybe even moral level.

This debate becomes more fascinating when you throw-in Peter Milligan's work, especially on his superhero deconstruction Enigma because although it's been praised by Morrison (see above and the Introduction for the trade), the series has about as much in common with Morrison's work as Moore's. The difference then, is that Enigma just does what Watchmen does way better. Milligan, as Morrison says, writes comics "in the grown-up, literary sense" better than anybody. This is key to approaching Enigma in the context of Watchmen because although it's a much better and more thought-provoking, it isn't any less formal and capital-M mature than Moore's mega-classic. Like all really good stuff, the difference is in the details.

The most notable aspect of Enigma is that, although it's an incredibly harsh, anti-Romantic sense of comics and superheroes, it never seems enamored with itself for being a harsh, anti-Romantic comic book. The same can't be said for Moore, who even today, seems to think that before Watchmen, no one had taken a sort of skewed, critical take on superheroes. Besides the simple fact that Watchmen isn't even the "first" of the big two, super-well-known comic deconstructions--starting 8 months after Miller's Dark Knight--there's an entire history of deconstructions that did it without yelling-out "Look! I'm attacking superheroes!"...stuff as mainstream as Iron Man--the entire premise, a play on superhero egomania and hidden vulnerability---to something like Spain Rodriguez's Trashman to the old Adam West Batman show.

Milligan wisely leaves comic-book comics behind from the start, less trying to parody or flip expectations than forget about them altogether. So, while the conceit of Enigma has to do with Super-Heroes, it's about heroes on the comic-book page and how the simple existence on the pages fucks around with the hopes and ideals and wish-fulfillment junk inside of our minds. Not Moore's high-falutin' what if... but a practical, humane application of one form of goofball un-reality media to our real-world.

But what it says about how these on-paper heroes we obsess over as children and teens is just as cynical. The basic set-up is Michael Smith, a guy with a life as ho-hum as his name, is suddenly confronted with the characters from some kinda crappy underground comics super-hero parody in "real-life" and it leads him to all kinds of questions about his life, sexuality, identity, and blah blah blah. It's really hard to describe without overloading you with spoliers--which nearly every write-up on the comic does--so I'm trying my best to be interesting and vague enough here...

Anyways, the point is, it's making some kinda obvious and even obnoxious points, about how being a boy reading comics about buff dudes in tights might be latently homosexual and about transferring our dreams onto fictionalized people that can't dream (so our dreams are safe), but Milligan does it with the right amount of confidence with his premise and comfort in absurdity. And there are two additional pieces of the Enigma puzzle that move it out of the "smart guy mocks comic in a comic book" sub-sub genre and into the category of masterpiece. The appearance of the creator of Smith's childhood favorite--a actual curveball in a sub-sub genre known for "curveballs"--and a game-changing "trick ending" switch-up that I'll only mention and leave it at that.

So, back to this whole creator-as-character thing. Milligan found a way to balance Moore's meta-comic philosophizing with Morrison's border-line obnoxious putting-himself-in-the-comic trickery, by incorporating a creator character that's not a stand-in for the creator himself and isn't an above-it-all satirical figure either. Although there's pathos and emotion in Watchmen, the all-too knowing politics of the endeavor, coupled with the overt satire of good ol' American comics, puts Moore and readers sort of above that which it's critiquing. Moore doesn't have a character to reflect him or the readers because the whole point of the comic is a kind of distanced condescension about media, politics, and the world at-large. This is of course, why it's so popular amongst intellectuals that don't normally read comic books. It's "smart" on that obnoxious Berkeley level.

Part of Enigma's thesis is indeed, the way that these small, frivolous pieces of media can have profound effects--often negative--on the reader. We see this play-out in excruciating detail as Smith moves away from his girlfriend and one-fuck-a-week routine towards a life of adventure and risk and eventually, a total revaluation of his sexual identity and beliefs. Titus Bird, the creator of The Enigma, Smith's favorite comic book as a child, which later comes to life and claims actual victims, is presented as an old and bitter homosexual who mainly created the comic as a lark, fitting into the goofy, quasi-philosophy of 60s underground comix and the counter-culture overall. That Moore himself is something of a product of that counter-culture might be another essay altogether, but Milligan does a clever comment on the responsibility of the creator and the need for integrity in one's creation, by taking the result of phoned-in, cash-in work to it's horrifying, illogical extreme. What if even your hack-iest, more played-out, cash-in work had real-world effects? That's a scarier, more precarious point than Moore's knee-jerk, angry 60s politics slapped onto 80s comics darkness.

And I haven't even gotten a chance to talk about Duncan Fegredo's art, which is as ugly and fucked-up as Milligan's story, eschewing the obnoxious formalism and pseudo-cinematics of Gibbons and Moore, for a fever-dream of lines, porous panels, and overall unease, that makes Enigma even harder to digest, as it should be.

Sub-Mariner: The Depths #3

In my American Lit. class the professor assigned a paper in which we are to discuss Henry James's The Turn of The Screw in terms of its status as a ghost story. As those who've read the story know, the whole conceit of the book is that the governess who narrates the tale is the only one to witness the specters. This fact coupled with a handful of other subtle inconsistencies give the story an ambiguity of purpose that critics are still debating 150 years after its publication. Upon reading the third issue of Peter Milligan and Esad Ribic's superb Sub-Mariner series, I concluded that my professor could just as easily assigned the class to discuss The Depths in similar terms, with nearly as fruitful results.

The third issue is unquestionably the best (thus far) in what is shaping up to be one of the most literarily, artistically and philosophically sophisticated comics in recent memory. The book's strength is in its ambiguity and its ambiguity stems from the varied possible explanations--each with its particular strengths, none wholly satisfying--for the mysterious events experienced by the crew. As Nelson discovers Stein's absence in the book's opening pages, only to find that he has ventured out on his own in one of the craft's mini-submersibles, he, as well as the reader, can reasonably attribute Stein's delirium and lack of judgment to the peculiar physical demands of deep sea travel.

The same could more or less be said for Stein's deepening paranoia, but this is where things begin to get a little shaky. As Stein inches continually closer to madness, he clings ever more fiercely to his militant empiricism. The problem of course is that conviction that is as unyielding as Stein's generally signals some sort of underlying insecurity. Nelson recognizes this when he asks, "What kind of man looks for something he know ain't there?"


What's interesting about this first part of the comic is that the narrative focus seems to point toward Stein himself as the source of the bizarre happenings on the craft. This is variously evidenced by the paranoid entries in his journal, the physical manifestations of the stresses of deep sea travel and the deeply rooted insecurity evidenced by his social, cultural and racial elitism and his almost lunatic affirmations of his faith in reason alone, culminating in a bizarre diatribe in which he insists to a photograph that it is nothing but "a product of light and chemicals."


The genesis of the art and narrative in the book's final pages is truly masterful. Whatever was left of the cohesion of the Plato's crew is completely shattered as they board the inexplicably silent Mariana Trench Station and discover the corpses first of McKeogh and subsequently of the rest of the station personnel. As one sailor harps continually on the subject of the station's blue movies, the normally self-controlled Nelson lunges at his throat and has to be pulled away by the other members of the crew. Stein is forced to assert his control as the situation totters toward anarchy, but he fails to realize that his edict forbidding the mere mention of Namor serves only to confirm the crew's conviction that he is responsible for the carnage.


The scenes of discovery are brilliantly rendered--the strange, almost mutilated aspects of the bodies and bizarre blood spatters only deepen the mystery. Ribic subtly alters his use of color and shadow in these pages, magnifying the book's dream-like atmosphere. The comic's closing sequence, in which Stein watches the film discovered in the camera lying next to McKeogh's body, is perhaps the high-water mark of the series to date. The scratches running along the film element and the strange attitude of bemused levity of the speaker give the scene a realistically affecting quality. The odd and really satisfying thing about this peculiar sort of The Blair Witch Project parody is that by contextualizing it with the overarching narrative of the comic it ends up being far scarier than the original.


As Sammy mentioned in his weekly haul post, the debate surrounding The Depths is as to whether or not Namor really exists and is responsible for these strange underwater events. While this question certainly forms the crux of the tale being told, the fact that the answer is more or less irrelevant is testament to the skill of the telling.

Sub-Mariner: The Depths #2

There is an awful lot going on in the second issue of this new Sub-Mariner series. The book is growing into one that takes its narrative about a sea quest and the power of myths and those who make it their business to debunk them and projects it into a legitimate examination of belief and fear and the effects they have on the mind.

The story creates a very clear dichotomy between the deep men on the one side, who have a very real fear of the sea in general and Namor in particular, and the rational Dr. Stein, who insists that Atlantis and Namor are myths--products of the psychological disturbances associated with deep sea travel. The irony in this case is that Stein's belief has more naked religiosity to it than that of the crew. One gets the sense that it doesn't really matter to them whether Namor exists or not, it is simply that they have learned a healthy respect (and fear) for the sea.

It is interesting to note that at least at this point in the narrative, the question of whether Namor actually exists or not doesn't really make a difference. As he spends more and more time in the deep ocean, Stein's grip on his sanity becomes ever more tenuous and the tension amongst the vessel's passengers reaches a near breaking point. We are given suggestions of Namor's existence, but when Stein finally breaks down and "sees" Namor, he doesn't actually see Namor at all, but rather some generic creature from the deep obviously cobbled together in his mind from various horror stories. The bottom line is that crew of the Plato is falling apart and whether it is Namor or "Namor" that is causing it matters not at all, the effect it the same.

Both Milligan and Ribic must be credited for maintaining an extraordinary level of tension throughout the book. Suspense is maintained simply by means of the subtle, obscured suggestions of Namor's presence, despite the fact that very little happens in terms of action. Ribic in particular has done an excellent job of documenting the physical manifestation of Stein's steady decline from the cocksure skeptic brimming with rude health of the first issue, to the wide-eyed, sallow skinned neurotic we are left with here.

The issue opens with an epigraph ("A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned.") from J. M. Synge about the dangers of approaching the sea fearlessly. Perhaps just as telling in terms of where this series might be going is the portion of the quote left out: "But we do be afraid of the sea and we only do be drownded now and again."

Sub-Mariner: The Depths #1

So I recognize that I am about a week behind the eight-ball in getting a review of this comic up, but the premiere issue of the new Sub-Mariner mini-series by Peter Milligan and Esad Ribic is so great, so precisely everything that I look for in a superhero comic that I simply could not let the opportunity pass.   The particular success of the issue stems in no small part from the creators' ability to employ techniques--Alex Ross-esque painted photo-realistic art, multiple narrative types, overt and subtextual literary references--so often associated (at least in my mind) with comics that are heavy-handed, overblown or even downright abstruse, to make a comic that is most emphatically not any of these things.

'The Depths chronicles the stories of Marlowe and Dr. Stein, both adventurers in a classical mode, but representing opposing temperaments.  After a failed undersea mission to locate Atlantis in 1939 resulted in the deaths of his entire crew, including his wife, Marlowe returns for a second attempt in the submarine Plato. Following the transmission of a message in which he claims to have found Atlantis ("I think I see it . . . it . . . it's BEAUTIFUL"), Marlowe disappears.  Skeptical of the veracity of his discovery and suspicious of his political sensibilities, the government hires Dr. Stein, self-proclaimed rationalist empiricist, to follow Marlowe's course in order to determine if he has indeed located Atlantis and, if possible, to bring him back.

The doubling of the characters of Marlowe and Dr. Stein establishes the comic's debt to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except in this case the story is sort of reversed, with Marlowe (what at first appears to be a misspelling of the name of Conrad's protagonist in fact suggests a further link to Chandler's detective) apparently "going native," leaving the uber-Apollonian and boorish Dr. Stein to rescue Marlowe from himself.  Saddling a comic with all of this literary baggage clearly runs the risk of bogging it down, but The Depths wears its erudition lightly.  The narrative is pulled along surely and economically and Esad Ribic's subdued palette and, dare I say, soft-focus give the book a sort of timeless, storybook quality which meshes well with its mythological foundation.