Last War in Albion v4 Chapter 2: Morrison and Millar Omnibus

Morrison, for their part, spent considerably less time working for Image. Indeed, prior to doing the creator-owned Happy! with Image in 2012—by which point Image was a very different company—Morrison’s only Image work was a three issue run of Spawn beginning in December 1993. This came about largely by accident—Dez Skinn’s Comics International misreported that Morrison would be included in the initial wave of guest writers alongside Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and Miller. Bemused, Morrison got in touch with McFarlane and, as they tell it, “he liked the fact that I had the same surname as Jim Morrison and suggested I write three issues.” It’s a funny story, and surely one Morrison is telling in the same spirit as Alan Moore’s “SPORN!” anecdote, but it highlights a blunt reality of Morrison’s career at the end of 1993: they simply weren’t one of the top stars in the industry. 

This surely rankled. Morrison’s relationship to Moore’s work was one thing. That was a shadow they’d always been in, and while they plainly had feelings about that fact it was not news.But Gaiman was their peer, recruited at the same meetings they’d been. But it can’t have been a surprise either. Gaiman was riding the crest of Sandman and everything he touched was turning to gold. Morrison, meanwhile, had produced some critically beloved titles, but their only unequivocal hit was Arkham Asylum, and they knew full well those sales were because of the Tim Burton film and Dave McKean’s art, not because of anything they did.

Nothing about their eventual Spawn gig dispelled the notion that they were a “best of the rest” sort of writer—precisely good enough to be the one that missed out on the initial run of guest writers. Where Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and Miller’s issues were all drawn by McFarlane, Morrison’s first issue, Spawn #16, was notable for being the first issue of the title that McFarlane was uninvolved in, with art instead coming from Greg Capullo. And this was always the plan for Morrison’s run—initially they were supposed to fill in so that McFarlane could draw Moore’s Violator series, but ultimately they ended up providing cover for McFarlane to do Spawn/Batman with Frank Miller. This was one of two crossovers published with the characters, the other, titled Batman/Spawn, being put out by DC and featuring Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon, and Alan Grant all writing with Klaus Janson on art—a respectable creative team to be sure, but nothing compared to Miller/McFarlane, a disparity that says much about the clout and, more to the point, money that Image had in 1994.

And like Moore, Morrison needed the money. Arkham Asylum was by then several years in the rear view mirror, and their big paycheck had by then been frittered away “on champagne, drugs, and spur-of-the-moment expeditions around the world,” as they put it. With McFarlane paying as much per issue as Morrison had made off Arkham Asylum, a quick run of Spawn comics was an obvious choice. But where Moore and Gaiman had both approached the gig with an eye towards crafting quality stories within the Image aesthetic, Morrison was altogether more cynical about it. Asked in an interview if they were going to offer “a radical interpretation” of Spawn, Morrison scoffed, “You’ve got to be joking. I’ve written this for Spawn fans,” explaining that “I met a lot of the kids who read Spawn and basically they just want to see lots of fighting and bright lights and monsters and violence. That’s the kind of story I’ve written.”  Reflecting on it years later, they described it as “some of the easiest work I’ve ever done,” readily conceding that they just “found a tone that seemed faithful to McFarlane’s voice and followed it through to the end.”

And the lack of effort frankly shows in the comics, which are a faintly incoherent mess. The main plot is a charming bit of directness: the forces of Heaven create Anti-Spawn, a Crusader-themed rework of McFarlane’s design that used crucifixes instead of skulls. Spawn and Anti-Spawn brawl for two issues, with Anti-Spawn largely beating the stuffing out of Spawn for the first one and Spawn turning the tables with an assist from his homeless friends in the second. It’s big dumb fun of exactly the sort Morrison promised—Spawn ultimately finishes the fight by punching straight through Anti-Spawn’s head. 

But the issues have a subplot concerning a town called Simmonsville in the middle of the Nevada desert. In fact, it’s built on the spot where an underground nuclear test accidentally blew open a gateway to Hell. There the US military, using a supply of psychoplasm (the substance Hell is made of, which apparently “changes in response to mental states. Whatever you’re thinking of, whatever  you desire or fear, psychoplasm becomes that thing”), has constructed a town built entirely out of the fragmented memory of Spawn’s mortal life as Al Simmons. “Houses that he lived in, the schools he went to, playgrounds he played in, factories and churches and parks—all recreated here in the desert, above the doorway to hell,” as one of the military suits in charge of the project explains. It’s a neat idea, and Morrison spends the first third of their opening issue establishing it before having Spawn discover it at the start of the second issue (or, rather, he’s simply dumped there by a demon), only to have this plot abruptly interrupted by Anti-Spawn’s attack. After Anti-Spawn is defeated, Morrison devotes the final couple of pages to Spawn destroying Simmonsville. But at no point do these two strands of plot intersect in anything other than a wholly incidental way. It results in an arc that’s lacking in basic dramatic unity, giving the sense that it hasn’t been thought through. It doesn’t look easy—it looks lazy.

This is no great sin. It is, after all, just three fill-in issues of Spawn written purely for the money. And Grant Morrison on their worst day is still a vastly more nuanced and interesting writer than Todd McFarlane. But there’s a strange self-fulfilling petulance to it. Having failed to make the a-list roster of Spawn writers Morrison wrote a Spawn arc that largely confirmed that they didn’t belong there. Morrison spoke in interviews at the time about how they’re “always on the side of Satan, because he’s the one who introduced us to the concept of knowledge. When I was a kid I kind of figured out this whole thing where the serpent is the symbol of life and rebirth and DNA, so I decided since then that if I was on anyone’s side I’d be on Satan’s side,” explaining that they “see Satan and Christ as the same thing which is the creative principle and the principle towards evolution.” This is, obviously, cribbed straight from Blake, but it speaks to Morrison’s instinctive desire to be the petulant upstart. But on Spawn, Morrison demonstrates what Blake soon learned: anything—even rebellion—can be a prison if you stay inside it.

Morrison made noises about wanting to continue working with Image, talking about ideas for “a 12-issue super-hero story which will be released as three interlinking series—Pantheon, The High Five, and Mister Ink” that he wanted to publish there, but this series never materialized, and Morrison would do no further Image work. That is not to say, however, that they did no further disposable work for hire comics in the period. It’s just that, unlike Moore, these projects were mostly not about collecting massive paychecks. Instead they took a series of low-selling gigs on Marvel and DC books, all focused on one basic goal: helping Mark Millar establish his career.

This practice would take Morrison to relatively unlikely places, perhaps most notably the comparatively Brit-averse Marvel Comics, where he and Millar penned a five issue series called Skrull Kill Krew in 1995—the only work Morrison would do for the company in the 20th century. Indeed, Morrison adopted the interesting promotional strategy of leaning into this in interviews, noting that “it’s just so beyond the pale to work for Marvel we thought it was a really funny idea. Because you shouldn’t do it. I mean, they fucked over Jack Kirby and did all these terrible things to people, so we’re working for them now.” 

Marvel, however, was in deeply rough shape in 1995. Unsurprisingly for the company that the bulk of the Image crew had left, it did its own share of Image-esque dark and violent takes on characters: a crossover in which Thor goes mad and becomes a villain, another where the Avengers get involved in a cosmic genocide, and a series of Spider-Man stories featuring the villain Carnage, a character that took Venom, the character made so popular by Todd McFarlane, and offered a new “violent serial killer” version of him. But it was a different Spider-Man event that best captured the company’s problems. In August of 1994, Marvel began a story across all four Spider-Man books generally known as the Clone Saga. This story returned to a plot point from twenty years earlier in which Peter Parker was confronted with a clone of himself, who apparently died at the end of the story. This new arc revealed that he had not died and was instead living under the name ben Reilly, however, and brought him back to feud with Peter Parker, and then, in a dramatic escalation of stakes, revealed that in fact the character readers had been following since 1975 was the clone, and that Ben Reilly was the original. 

This would merely have been a foolish sort of storyline were it not for the fact that a few months into it Marvel announced a reorganization under the impressively stupid “Marvelution” banner in which editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco was removed and his position replaced with five separate editors-in-chief each overseeing a different group of books—the Spider-Man and X-Men offices, an office for licensed comics and the remnants of Epic Comics, a Marvel Heroes office for the Fantastic Four and Avengers, and finally Marvel Edge, home to “edgier” books like Ghost Rider and the Punisher, and where Morrison and Millar would briefly find their home. This splitting up of the company caused chaos across the board, but especially in the Spider-Man books, where DeFalco was also one of the writers, and found himself suddenly going from helping plan the arc and giving the final sign-off on plot points to working under the newly installed Spider-Man editor Bob Budiansky, who’d had nothing to do with the arc’s conception, and who was himself replaced a year later when the Marvelution was abandoned and Bob Harras was named editor-in-chief of the whole line. The result of this was that the story was unfolding with no real plan as to where it was going. With the standard operating procedure for the arc being that stories ran through multiple titles (so as to force people to buy all four Spider-Man books each month instead of just following a single one), this meant that every aspect of the story was subject to far too many cooks with far too little oversight. On top of which, Marvel’s increasingly vocal marketing department repeatedly pushed for storylines to be extended and additional miniseries crammed in. The result was a two year boondoggle of a high profile story that never had any coherence or direction, eventually becoming such a hot mess that Marvel published a comic called 101 Ways to End the Clone Saga parodying its own internal chaos.

As the level of corporate upheaval suggested, Marvel’s troubles extended well beyond the Spider-Man office. The 1994 implosion of comic shops inevitably hit the bottom line hard. The five editors-in-chief were all ordered to raise sales on their respective lines at the exact point where the number of shops that could make those sales was cut in half. The editors quickly realized that in a contracting market their primary competition was each other, leading to a year of cutthroat backbiting as editors attempted to poach talent from each other while siloing their popular characters—one staffer is quoted as saying that ‘it would have been easier to have Spider-Man team up with Superman than to have Spider-Man team up with the X-Men” Ironically the only one to succeed in the face of these astonishingly inhospitable conditions was Bob Budiansky, as the early days of the Clone Saga generated interest in the books before the wheels came off. And the timing of this industry-wide decline could scarcely have been worse. In 1991, Marvel Entertainment Group went public on the stock market, and used the money to enter a period of rapid expansion, buying up Malibu Comics, the trading card companies Fleer and Skybox, the Italian sticker company Panini, and a 46% share of ToyBiz. All of this was predicated on the idea that the massive sales of the early 90s were going to continue, and when they didn’t it quickly became a crisis for the company.

The most significant acquisition of the period, however, came in December 1994 when Marvel acquired Heroes World Distribution. Heroes World was one of several comics distributors operating in the direct market—companies who did the work of actually taking orders and shipping books to stores. At the time it was the third largest of them, behind Steve Geppi’s Diamond Comics and Wisconsin-based Capital City. Marvel’s plan was to make Heroes World their exclusive distributor—a move that sent shockwaves through the industry, as the direct market was based on volume discounts and retailers now had to split their orders between two distributors, getting lower discounts on each. Diamond responded by quickly locking up exclusive distribution deals with DC and Image, effectively killing Capital City, who they acquired in 1996. Marvel’s plan to use Heroes World, meanwhile, was an abject disaster—Heroes World was in no way prepared to handle the volume of orders involved, and delays and billing errors abounded. The endeavor collapsed in 1997, and Marvel slunk back to Diamond, who now had a monopoly on the direct market, which they’d maintain for the next quarter century. By this point things had gone badly enough for Marvel that they entered bankruptcy and a lengthy battle for control between corporate raider Carl Icahn and ToyBiz CEO Ike Perlmutter—a saga that stretched out into 1998. 

Within all this chaos, Marvel and Image saw their fates briefly and ignobly entwine again. One of the rotating door of Marvel executives during its drain-circling era was Jerry Calabrese, a marketing guy who didn’t even read comics. Calabrese’s straightforward assessment of the company’s dire straits was that they should probably go get some of the creators who had been working on their books the last time they were popular. And so Calabrese went to Image with an unexpected offer: would any of them like to come reboot some of Marvel’s characters? This proved divisive within Image—McFarlane was particularly appalled, asking “why do you want to work for your competitor?” as if he’d not done a Spawn/Batman crossover just two years prior. But Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee were interested, especially when the financial terms—a minimum $2 million payday for each of them in exchange for producing two twelve issue runs apiece—were offered.

In order to justify the reboot and redesign of the characters Marvel staged a big crossover in which its entire slate of characters banded together to fight Onslaught, a malevolent version of the X-Men’s Charles Xavier. The characters slated to be part of the Lee/Liefeld redesign—the Avengers and Fantastic Four—seemingly sacrificed their lives to defeat him, but were in fact pulled into a pocket universe where they could live out their rebooted lives with new issue 1s. 

As with much of the comics industry in this period, the wheels quickly started to come off after the initial big splash. Part of this was behind the scenes turmoil—Calabrese was forced out a month before the first Heroes Reborn issues actually shipped, and the next batch of executives did the usual thing of marginalizing their predecessors’ pet projects in favor of their own. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, there was considerably more chaos, especially from Liefeld’s camp, where things started awkwardly when writer Chuck Dixon acrimoniously departed the Captain America book. Reports differ on exactly what happened—Liefeld claims that he disliked Dixon’s approach, while Dixon claims that he quit after Liefeld departed from his plots. Given that the dispute centered on part on the fact that Dixon—who would eventually publish comics with a neonazi press—objected to Liefeld wanting to do a storyline about racism, this might be viewed as a blessing in disguise, but the disguise was still one of shambolic management. And this was hardly the only problem Liefeld’s books were having. His redesign of Captain America, which removed the A symbol from his mask, was widely panned, with one promotional image in particular being so Liefeldian in its anatomical proportions that it remained a meme decades later. Liefeld also annoyed Marvel with his practice of sending a courier with the disk containing the art files with instructions not to turn it over until he received Liefeld’s check—a story that makes Jim Valentino’s complaints of late payment from Liefeld something of an irony. 

But aside from the drama, the idea also just failed to pay off. Things started well, with the relaunched titles being the four biggest sellers in September of 1996, but the dropoff was sharp once people satisfied their initial curiosity. By the second issue they were all getting outsold by Spawn, validating McFarlane’s skepticism of the project. Even still, the books stayed relatively successful, in that they were top ten books, but by 1996 that meant selling a hundred thousand copies, which was nowhere near enough to justify the astronomical fees being paid. Liefeld’s two titles were seen as particularly disappointing, and he was removed from both books at the halfway point, with Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios taking over the whole experiment, which was abandoned after a year, with each title getting a 13th issue just to do the inevitable Image crossover before the characters were transported out of their pocket universe and into yet another new issue #1. These new new series quickly leveled out to only slightly lower sales than the Heroes Reborn fiasco.

Morrison and Millar arrived during the “Marvelution” stage of this collapse, where they were commissioned by Tom Brevoort, a then-neophyte editor, who was in fact making his first-ever commission of a new project. As he tells it, “a blind fax came across the transom from Mark Millar and Grant Morrison. It simply stated who they were, and that they were looking for opportunities at Marvel.” Brevoort, a fan of Morrison’s work, grabbed the fax and reached out. As Brevoort was a low-ranking editor he lacked the ability to offer them any of the major characters, Morrion and Millar were advised to come up with a new concept.

Their resultant book was initially called Skrull Kill Kult, a riff on industrial band My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, but Marvel rejected this on the specious grounds that it would read as an endorsement of murder cults, resulting in the new title. The Skrulls—a race of goblin-like shapeshifting aliens—were a longstanding menace within the Marvel Universe, and Morrison and Millar’s pitch reached back to their first appearance in Fantastic Four #2 back in 1961. That comic ended with the trio of Skrulls that had been impersonating the Fantastic Four being ordered to shapeshift into cows, at which point Mister Fantastic hypnotizes them to forget that they were Skrulls, allowing them to live out the rest of their lives as grazing cows. 

Morrison and Millar’s pitch was that these Skrull-cows had eventually ended up in a slaughterhouse, and that Skrull meat entered the American food supply, where it gave everyone who ate it a brain-eating virus that would kill them in two years, but would give them superpowers until then. This was a very “ripped from the headlines” sort of move, riffing on the myriad of news stories about mad cow disease. This was a lurid tabloid name for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disease typically affecting elderly populations, but that had started popping up in the UK among younger people and, tellingly, cattle farmers. The reason turned out to be interspecies transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a condition first identified in British cattle in 1989.

Mad cow disease was what’s known as a prion disease—an infection transmitted by a misfolded protein in the nervous system that begins replicating in the host. This class of disease is incurable and fatal—after an incubation period the malformed proteins simply take over, breaking down the correct protons and precipitating the breakdown of the nervous system. They are oddly terrifying for their rarity, a product not merely of their incurable fatality but of the horrifying rapid onset dementia that they cause and the often jarringly disturbing symptoms they produce—one prion disease is literally called “fatal insomnia,” and does what it says on the tin. But they form an oddly potent metaphor for the larger situation Morrison found themself in: a strangely misshapen, twisted version of a thing that, once taken in, insidiously eats away at the very foundations of one’s self.

Skrull Kill Krew, in any case, followed a group of infected humans who, in another victory for descriptive naming, hunt and kill Skrulls in retaliation. This was, to be sure, not a highly nuanced premise; as Morrison put it, “we just desperately wanted to do something that was just people running around shooting each other.” Brevoort took a somewhat more diplomatic read on it, describing it as “a very 2000 AD sort of idea: part parody, part over-the-top action/adventure comic.” And the 2000 AD roots were surely there, most obviously in the decision to mirror Zenith’s team of Steve Yeowell on art and Brendan McCarthy doing the underlying design work. But the more substantive comparison is to Morrison and Millar’s Summer Offensive project, and not only because Yeowell had worked on that as well, drawing Mark Millar’s similarly ultraviolent Maniac 5.

No, the real comparison is in many ways the most odious element of the Summer Offensive, Morrison and Millar’s edgelording Big Dave. Nothing in Skrull Kill Krew came anywhere close to that comic’s innumerable nadirs, and the comic certainly isn’t exclusively focused on being in as poor taste as possible, but it’s nevertheless clear throughout that Skrull Kill Krew is invested in a puerile rebelliousness. The first issue’s cover features a terrified Skrull being held down by a boot as a gun is pointed down at his head. The caption hypes “Buy this book… or we shoot this Skrull!,” with the “or” struck through and replaced with a spraypainted “AND.” The second, meanwhile, proclaims that it’s guest starring Captain America “whether he likes it or not,” while the fourth, in a parody of Fantastic Four’s traditional tagline as “the world’s greatest comic magazine,” proclaims itself “the world’s most hateful comic magazine.”

This tone is established immediately in the comic itself as well. The first scene opens with a high school history teacher lecturing about FDR’s policies around hydroelectric power before the door to her classroom is kicked in by a skinhead who proclaims that “life’s just too faggin’ short to waste your time reading about some bloke nobody’s ever heard of” before he and his Black dreadlocked companion gun the teacher down, revealing her to be a Skrull. 

Other characters are soon introduced, including the viewpoint character, Rob Fortune, who becomes Dice, a character whose superpowers are determined by a slot machine graphic on his forehead, along with the self-absorbed supermodel Catwalk and the angry punk Riot, who Morrison describes as “this spunky New York woman who wants to be a lesbian but doesn’t have the balls. She irritates everybody.” But these initial two characters prove an effective summary of the book’s aesthetic vision: Skrull Kill Krew is the sort of book that’s exceedingly pleased with its clever idea of pairing an imposing Black man with a racist skinhead. Morrison and Millar inevitably lean on this odd couple relationship with things like a scene where Moonstomp, convulsing because of the brain-eating virus, begins having patches of dark skin appear on his face. As Ryder explains it, “my white supremacist friend here has a virus which is feeding on the anger in his body and turning him into what he hates most. Namely negroes.” Ryder proceeds to taunt Moonstomp, who angrily tells him to “shag off, chocolate drop” and calls him a “big black poofter.” 

That all of this, along with the use of “faggin’” as a replacement swear word, was perfectly allowable by Marvel while a My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult reference was deemed scandalous says much about Marvel Comics in the mid-90s. But it says far more about Morrison and Millar, and the degree to which their aesthetic was simply one of mean-spirited witlessness for the sake of it. Skrull Kill Krew aims for offensiveness, but in practice only hits a cringeworthy immaturity—a book that seems to be actively trying to be bad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it folded after five issues. 

Morrison and Millar’s had marginally better luck at DC, where they got to ten issues for Aztek: The Ultimate Man. Unlike Skrull Kill Krew this was a relatively straightforward superhero book focused on establishing a new character. Morrison described it as coming because they and Millar wanted “to get ourselves back into the DC Universe. We wanted to do something and we wanted it to be fun too.” Although, of course, their notion of fun was what it was—in this case the notion that “we'd set up this guy who was the brightest, happiest, youngest guy and then just fuck him up.” And this is more or less where Aztek #1 begins, with the title character in his gleaming new armor jumping off a building just before he realizes that “I’d never tested the wing units in a built-up urban area.” (It’s fine, though.)

But—unusually for the debut issue of a new character’s series—Aztek #1 quickly proves as interested in introducing its setting as it is in its title character. Indeed, before the issue even introduces him there’s a three page scene focusing on the villains. This scene ends with someone being asked what he knows about Vanity. “Not much,” he answers. “It’s got a bad reputation. It’s not a nice place. That’s what I’ve heard.” His interlocutor chuckles. “‘Not a nice place.’ That’s quite right. Vanity is not a nice place. It’s not a nice place at all.” This final bit of menace is narrated over a couple panels zooming out at the city’s skyline—a strangely ominous thing, with oddly expressionist architecture and a sickly green light pouring from all the windows. Only after this bit of setting the scene does the comic offer the obligatory splash page of its hero and scene about flying, and even this keeps the focus heavily on the city, with the issue’s title being “A Town Called Vanity” and Aztek’s opening monologue quickly notes that “the city smells and feels like a patient dying on a sick bed.” 

The nature of Vanity’s malaise is one of many things that never get made clear before Aztek was cancelled. Aztek has been sent there because Vanity is the prohpecized location of the return of Tezcatlipoca. As Aztek was the chosen and trained champion of Quetzalcoatl. (Morrison notes that they were “reading a lot of stuff on Aztec and Mayan culture for The Invisibles. That bled over into the creation of the Aztek character”) But the dark nature of the city goes beyond that, seemingly into its very architecture, which is full of suggestively named buildings like Urthona Tower, and which a text piece in the third issue suggests was built by a deranged occultist. 

The notion of an urban bad seed also serves to offer some justification for Morrison and Millar’s edgelording antics, which are still on full display even in their nominally fun superhero book. The first issue sees a small-time supervillain, The Piper (introduced in a first page splash panel looking like a schlub as someone off-panel declares, “You look ridiculous, Piper”) blackmailed into committing a bank job. There he’s confronted by Bloodtype, Vanity’s existing superhero protector, who’s a Punisher pastiche (terrible catchphrase, “what’s your bloodtype?”, to be asked shortly before he shoots people). The Piper is beaten brutally and then gunned down, at which point Aztek confronts Bloodtype, subduing him just in time for him to be killed by a bomb. Meanwhile the second issue sees Piper’s daughter—who’d been kidnapped to ensure his compliance—turn out to be a villain in her own right aiming to be Vanity’s newest crime boss, only to be gunned down by her supervillain boyfriend Synth, whose powers and intelligence change daily, after he becomes an idiot at the stroke of midnight. 

The comic largely continues in this vein, along with the obligatory smattering of guest spots—Green Lantern in issue #2, a two-issue story in which the Joker attacks Vanity, complete with Batman team-up, and an arc in which Lex Luthor effectively buys out the Q-Society, the group of South American warrior monks who trained Aztek. Throughout the main tonal engine of the book is the contrast between Aztek, who, as Morrison suggested, is a square-jawed ultimate Boy Scout type who does things like spend thirty-six hours searching for an old lady’s lost pet lizard and the perverse horror of the setting whereby, when he gets the lizard home to her, she’s slit her wrists in the bathtub in despair. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book failed to do much business; the first issue debuted with slightly lower sakes than the twenty-fifth installment of Jeff Smith’s indie darling Bone, and fell quickly from there, slipping out of the top hundred for the month by its third issue; even the Batman guest spot in issue 7 couldn’t juice sales, getting outsold by a reprint of Sandman #7. DC pulled the plug not long after, leaving whatever plans Morrison and Millar had to further develop their “do horrible things to a good guy” idea abandoned. Morrison groused later that “we had this whole thing. It was going to be like a superhero version of The Prisoner. And then they cancelled it,” blaming the cancellation, rather improbably, on the idea that DC “didn’t want me on too many books” and not on the fact that the book was among DC’s worst sellers. Morrison was, in any case, peeved enough to have the series end on a cliffhanger of Aztek joining the JLA, which Morrison had just taken over writing, allowing them to eventually resolve the lingering plot threads. 

In terms of the War, however, there is one Morrison/Millar project that plainly stands above the rest in importance: their run on Swamp Thing. Morrison and Millar disagree on precisely how this came about. As Millar tells it, “Grant, very generously, just came on board for the first four issues to make sure that DC selected me above anyone else pitching for the gig.” Morrison, however, claims that “they asked me to write the book but I said ‘Let’s get Mark in, let’s give him a job.’” What’s agreed in both of these accounts is that Morrison’s role was transitional—they would co-write the first arc with Millar before Millar took over the book for what would turn out to be the final twenty-seven issues of its run. But even this point has a significant difference of opinion, with Morrison asserting that they “consulted with [Millar] on the stories” for his solo run. This is certainly at all plausible—the arc’s structure of having Swamp Thing become the elemental not only of the Green but of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire as well certainly feels like something a practiced magus would come up with. Equally, it’s not as though magic has a monopoly on the classical elements.

What is perhaps most interesting is the way in which that initial four issue arc pulls against itself. On a macro level, its broad aesthetic goal is consistent. As Morrison put it in an interview hyping the run, they and Millar sought to pen an arc that “strips all the baggage away and returns Swamp Thing to his origins as a monster,” arguing that “everything since Alan Moore’s run has been barnacles on his yacht, so we scraped off the barnacles and then torpedoed the boat.” And the arc certainly accomplishes that. But on an issue by issue level things are far more uncertain. Morrison has described their writing process with Millar as beginning with the two of them getting drunk, Then “we sit there and we work the thing out, do a thumbnail sketch for it. Then we figure out the basics of the dialogue; we work out the plot together; then one or the other of us takes it away and just sends it in.” Within this process it’s generally accepted that Morrison wrote the actual script for Swamp Thing #140 and #142, the first and third installments of the arc, while Millar took the second and fourth. And there are clear differences between the two.

Morison’s opener begins with Alec Holland waking up in Peru from a dream of being Swamp Thing, the implication being that the entire preceding run of 139 issues, stretching back to Marty Pasko’s Saga of the Swamp Thing run, along with the original 70s Wein/Wrightson series, has just been part of a lengthy fever dream. The comic spends most of its page count exploring this seeming status quo; only at the issue’s end does the action move to Louisiana, where Abby Holland is having disturbing visions and, in the final couple of pages, a couple stoners are brutally murdered when a monstrous and bug-infested Swamp Thing bursts out of their joint. It’s a horror book, yes—especially within those final pages. But it’s plainly more interested in bigger ideas. Holland has, apparently, been in Peru researching hallucinogens, and Morrison takes advantage of the topic to give him a lengthy monologue about the wonders of DMT, including Terence McKenna’s hypothesis that the human brain is, as Holland puts it, “waiting for the messages from these plants.”

When Millar takes the reins in Swamp Thing #141, however, there’s a subtle but marked change in tone. It is not that issue #140 is sunshine and roses—the murder of the two stoners is downright mean spirited in its violence and general nastiness. But that’s nothing compared to Millar’s eight page opening sequence, which revisits Gene LaBostrie, the Cajun fisherman served as a viewpoint character for the narration in Moore’s final issue on the title, “Return of the Good Gumbo.” Here, in an issue tellingly called “Bad Gumbo,” LaBostrie and his family are attacked by the bestial wamp Thing, with LaBostrie being violently pummeled to death in the scene’s conclusion. What is particularly striking about this is that when Steve Bissette designed LaBostrie back in 1987 he modeled the character overtly on the writer whose sentimental departure the character was marking, meaning that Millar’s first issue of Swamp Thing ends up devoting a third of its length to seeing Alan Moore violently murdered by Swamp Thing.

The pattern continues over the next two issues. Morrison returns for an issue of high concept horror with Alec Holland aboard the “Soul Train,” a nightmarish train full of tormented spirits conducted by a puppet-like machine of metal and rags. Eventually Odin shows up and helps him realize that he actually is Swamp Thing, only the Green has severed his human consciousness from his body, turning the latter into a monster. It’s an efficient piece of work that ends with a cliffhanger of a fleeing Abby being caught in the desert by Swamp Thing. Millar’s conclusion to the arc, meanwhile, is little more than an issue long fight scene that culminates in Abby rejecting the now reunited Alec/Swamp Thing because, as she puts it, “I don’t belong in a world of monsters, Alec”—a beat that is as unearned as it is just sort of unpleasant and mean-spirited. 

It is perhaps surprising, then, that Millar’s solo run on Swamp Thing is pretty good. Or perhaps not—for all Millar’s manifest problems, being a bad writer isn’t one of them. His run is uneven, to be sure—there’s a surfeit of mysterious super natural characters with a paucity of explanations, and more than one of the arcs are a bit lumpily plotted. But his (or Morrison’s) arc structure presented a number of challenges, and Millar largely rose to them. The rough concept is that Swamp Thing must confront the Parliament of Stones, the Parliament of Waves, the Parliament of Vapors, and the Parliament of Flames to gain their powers—a premise that could easily become repetitive. Instead, however, Millar manages to make each arc feel appreciably different from the others—no small task.

The first arc, unsurprisingly, is the most straightforwardly conventional one, as it has to do the bulk of the heavy lifting to set the larger concept up, and there’s an awful lot of moving parts. It’s the only one to work off of a premise whereby Swamp Thing has straightforward enemies to confront, first a big game hunter named Nelson Strong who’s been hired to take him down, then Sargon the Sorcerer. Both are DC deep cuts—Nelson Strong was a character in a short-lived Adventure Comics feature from the 70s, while Sargon was a golden age character who Alan Moore had killed off during the Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in of Swamp Thing. The climax, inevitably, sees the defeated Nelson Strong revived as a stone elemental who Swamp Thing has to deal with at the same time as Sargon. It’s a capable imitation of post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing, notable mostly for Millar’s fondness for massive gushes of blood and over the top violence like having Swamp Thing kill Nelson Strong by smashing him with a tram car. 

Things take a swerve, however, with the second arc, which sees Swamp Thing recruited by a young woman who’s, in her account, trapped in her own unfinished book of short stories. (She is, it turns out, actually a water elemental.) The arc sees him moving through six of the stories, each of which are effectively an Elseworlds-style alternate world: a pulp horror world where monsters are common, one where Abby is evil, and one where Swamp Thing’s origin story plays out in the real, mundane world. The arc’s unexpected highlight, however, is the second issue, which sees Swamp Thing visit a fascist earth ruled by Hitler. Millar’s cynical misanthropy is, for once, proves entirely suited to the task before him—he writes fascists as a bunch of pathetic grotesques. Yes, he writes everyone like that, but at least with fascists it makes a reasonable point. And his plot is solid: Hitler’s puppet President of the United States summons the golem after finding the knowledge of how in a book about Kabbalah in the forbidden library, but gets Swamp Thing instead. He asks Swamp Thing to destroy the world, which he views as just in the face of all the horror of a Nazi regime. Swamp Thing declines, and the President allows him to depart this world, but foolishly leaves things so that the actual golem can arise, all too happy to destroy the world. It’s clever, cathartic, and an almost frustrating reminder that Mark Millar can, in fact, deliver the goods.

Millar’s third arc, meanwhile, pivoted to a “swords and sorcery on the streets of Manhattan” setup, while his (and the title’s) conclusion was a big epic that brought back Abby, John Constantine, and the Floronic Man for a story about whether Swamp Thing would destroy the world once he gained the power of all four elements. The climax comes when Constantine and Abby decide at the last second to defect from the vast and complicated plan to prevent Swamp Thing’s apotheosis because, at the end of the day, they trust him, a decision that proves well-founded when the now cosmically aware Swamp Thing decides to spare the world on the grounds that “I cannot erase mankind from the face of the earth when even the worst among them has potential.”

It’s a sweet ending—considerably more of one than Millar’s reputation or, for that matter, past work would have expected. Swamp Thing looks at the worst of humanity—“their holocausts and rape camps, their starving millions and intrinsic cruelty to their fellow man”—all the stuff that you’d expect Millar to highlight. But then he is kind and benevolent. It’s genuinely surprising, given that the writer was still tossing buckets of blood around just an issue before. Perhaps Millar is not the spiteful cynic he can appear, but rather someone who’s torn between the bleakness of his traumatic upbringing and a sense of hope.

But perhaps he’s just hitting old familiar beats. Swamp Thing being tempted by divine power but choosing humanity has been a fundamental theme of the book since Moore revolutionized it. Millar’s resolution is just the ending of Moore’s “Greening of Gotham” arc with some bits of the Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in mashed in. And this is true of much of his arc. That swords and sorcery arc kicks off with a Conan the Barbarian clone from another dimension drawing his sword to try to fight an eighteen-wheeler and being killed instantly, which would feel considerably cleverer if it weren’t the most iconic moment of the first issue of A Game of You, complete with the Manhattan setting. Even the Parliament of Waves arc is just putting an Elseworlds spin on Moore’s old American Gothic arc, right down to the first issue being based around a fish monster. Most of Millar’s success comes from echoing the borrowed glories of what were, by the time of his run, already decade old comics. Where his own vision has been clear, it’s generally been the kind of vicious cynicism that’s been visible in his work since Maniac 5 and Big Dave.

And yet there is, unmistakably, a strand of mercy within this cynicism. One of the longest running subplots in Millar’s run concerns a priest, Father Kelly. His first solo issue opens with a scene in which the priest—described plainly as the cornerstone of his community—is tricked and kidnapped by a demonic magician and trapped in hell. The priest makes a variety of small appearances throughout the run—first he is temporarily allowed out of hell to help Swamp Thing (which, the demon makes clear later, was not an intercession from god as Father Kelly believes but a ploy on the part of hell to worsen his suffering), and then later a resurrected Anton Arcane explains that he’s a good guy now, having been ministered to by Father Kelly in hell. This turn proves a key beat in Swamp Thing’s decision not to destroy the world, which he specifically credits to the fact that even Arcane possesses hope. Father Kelly is an unmistakably Millar creation—a good man who exists only to have absolutely horrible things done to him for no reason. But there is a clear sense of grace to Father Kelly—an investment in the notion of human decency in extremis that cuts against the more uncharitable interpretations of Millar’s style.

But this is a fleeting grace note in Millar’s run. A more comprehensive sense of him is perhaps found in Swamp Thing #165, a standalone fill-in late in his run. He opens the issue with an essay addressing the reader. “I write sick stuff,” he says, quite accurately. “I am a sinner. I can’t help it. I just unzip my mind and it all comes pouring out onto the page. My stories are full of corrupt cops, perverted priests, and positive references to drugs.” This surprisingly cogent self-reflection is the setup to him explaining that he’s going to reform, citing the wonders of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America and promising an issue that’s “in tune with the ideals of the good men waiting to remove the arch-Communist, Bill Clinton, from the White House.” The issue revisits Chester Williams, the Bryan Talbot-modeled hippie from Moore’s run, in an ostentatious satire. It opens with a party at his house in which he turns on one of his guests for hitting on an eighteen year old, ultimately decking him and proclaiming that he’s going to call the cops on everyone at the party, citing “how many kids die every day injecting Marijuana.” Two pages later Chester’s undergone a career change and is now himself a cop, spending the rest of the issue spouting right-wing rhetoric, including arguing to Swamp Thing that “big business is the backbone of America. Remove it and everything falls apart,” and declaring things like that “many common prejudices are rooted in the inherited, genetic wisdom of our race.” 

It’s plainly satirical, what with the “injecting marijuana” joke and over the top declarations like that “Life is just a seventy-year opportunity to get rich. Money is more important than life ever was. Why do you think there’s tougher laws against bank robbery than murder?” There’s no serious way to read this as anything other than mockery of the political right. And it is, in fact, a riotous delight of an issue, made better by the absolutely gonzo decision to put Curt Swan on art. Swan’s clean and plainly old-fashioned style makes the book tangibly feel conservative, but without actually making any sacrifices to the storytelling since Swan is, in point of fact, still great even just a few months before his death. 

But it’s still an issue that’s trading entirely on shock instead of substance. Sure, Millar is ruthless in his skewering of conservative politics, but his critique is entirely negative—there’s no sense, whether within it or, frankly, elsewhere in his run on an eco-horror book, of Millar having actual affirmative beliefs. Even before one considers Millar’s right-wing turn in his later career, there’s something faintly off and uncomfortable about the issue. It’s hilarious, cheeky, and fun. But in the end, like most of Millar’s career, it gives the sense that his only actual commitment is wanting to mockingly laugh at people. 

And yet this was who Grant Morrison had tied themself to—someone who seemed exclusively to bring out their worst instincts. Morrison is predisposed towards rebellion, yes—a fact that does trap them in Moore’s shadow in key ways. But in Millar they had a creative partner and influence who seemed to pull them towards staying there—to being nothing more than a tittering bad boy. Sure, they had by this point proven themself. But they still weren’t doing the work.