Milligan Mania

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that Peter Milligan is one of my favourite writers. I remember discovering his work when I was a teenager in books like Extremist and Shade the Changing Man, though I don’t think I appreciated it much at the time. There was neat stuff going on, but I didn’t quite have the resources to understand it.

After a few years away from comics – generally the time I went to university and discovered girls – I came back to the book I never thought I’d see: X-Force, drawn by Mike Allred and written by that Milligan guy. After that, with a few more years of experience and intellectual growth under my hat, I made a point of tracking down more of Milligan’s work, and found my initial impressions were correct: There is a lot of neat stuff going on in his books. And all you need to appreciate it is a bit of patience, an appreciation of the bizarre, and a sense of humour.

Peter Milligan will always be linked to Grant Morrison, viewed by many as Morrison’s less flashy, less successful contemporary. Both were veterans of 2000AD. Both were imported by DC and became founding fathers of Vertigo. Both were hired to revitalize Marvel’s mutant books in the post-bankruptcy era. Both wrote weird, hallucinogenic, possibly nonsensical books. Morrison wrote an introduction for Milligan’s Enigma, Milligan wrote an introduction for Morrison’s Invisibles.

The big difference, obviously, is that while Morrison is a star, Milligan is more of a cult figure, loved by many of those who know him but ignored by many others. The main reason for that, most likely, is that Milligan isn’t much of a superhero writer. While Morrison can switch gears and crank out big-screen action in JLA or All-Star Superman, Milligan has always been a bit too odd for most superhero books.

X-Force/X-Statix is his only real successful venture into that area; his subsequent run on X-Men received mixed critical reviews and indifferent sales. (Pairing him with Salvador Larocca, a fairly conventional artist, probably didn’t help.)

Milligan can be both more absurd and more subtle than Morrison. For pure Total Weirdness Value, Milligan can stand toe-to-toe with Morrison, as evidenced in his run on Animal Man or the utterly insane Rogan Gosh, not to mention the bulk of Shade, the story of a man from the Madness Dimension. Though for all the insanity he can throw into a story, he gives the characters at the centre a very human grounding; Shade worked because of the characters surrounded by the insanity, and X-Force, amid all the satire and absurdity, was ultimately a love story.

Then there are the stories that are relatively grounded in reality: Skreemer reads more like a Garth Ennis story than something Morrison would write. Human Target was a surprisingly mainstream (for comics, anyway) series that wouldn’t require too many tweaks to become a network TV show.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to describe exactly what a Peter Milligan comic is like. It’s probably (at least) a little bit weird. Maybe it has some political themes? It might take itself seriously, or it might be winking at the audience for the entire time. The lines between satire and drama are probably dotted at best. But beneath it all, there’s probably a human element that keeps things together. It’ll probably take more than one read to really process everything.

For the next little while, I’m going to take a look at some of Milligan’s works. The greatest hits, such as they are, and the oddities many people aren’t as familiar with. Maybe even some of the stuff that didn’t really work. Ladies and gentlemen, loyal viewing audience and random by standers, I give you… Milligan Mania.

(Yeah, I came up with that title a while ago.)

The Story So Far:

• Bad Company
• Shade, the Changing Man
• Infinity, Inc.