(cover of The Last American #1 by and (c) Wagner, Grant and McMahon, scanned from my original issues, hence price sticker still doggedly stuck on there, won’t come off without damaging the book after all this time!)

But it did get me to thinking – the Com.x collected edition was years ago, since when, as far as I know, The Last American has remained out of print, which is such a shame that most readers today can’t get a hold of it. I managed to dig out my original issues of the comic from my four-colour stash and thought I’d post a few up here. The story centres on Captain Ulysses S Pilgrim (US Pilgrim, an apt name choice), the last man on Earth to be invested with the power and authority of the government and president of the United States of America.

(this sequence: Pilgrim’s robotic assistants prepare to awaken him from his atomic Rip Van Winkle slumber in The Last American, by and (c) Wagner, Grant and McMahon)

Except it doesn’t look like there is an America left. Pilgrim, a disgraced army officer (the reason for his disgrace is never made clear) is selected by the president for a special mission. There is war coming – nuclear war. Pilgrim will be subject to a new cryogenic process, frozen into hibernation for two decades, to be awoken on a mission to set out and re-establish civilisation, to assist survivors and a whole lot of other noble sounding reasons that rather pale in the face of nuclea armageddon because, frankly, they are all but pointless considering the level of destruction promised; it’s a plan born of desperation to do something, anything in the face of inevitable annihilation. Pilgrim, married with a young family, is reluctant – to be honest, if it comes down to it he’d rather die with his family than live as the last survivor of a destroyed land, but the choice isn’t his. Awoken, he sets out into a devastated landscape, his only companions three robots.

The story is very much of its time, one of the last of the Cold War era penned tales, perhaps just a post-apocalyptic slice of science fiction now to younger readers, but to those of us who grew up during the years when a strategy called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was considered sensible by those in power, it reminds us of a pre-Glasnost time when living with the knowledge that all life on Earth could be pretty much extinguished after a four minute warning siren was part of everyday life, insane as it sounds (although when the Berlin Wall came down it seemed like we had past that dangerous phase of human history and entered an unparalled new era of peace, little did we know the even more complicated War On Terror years were right around the corner, sigh…). And government planning to ‘protect and survive’ was a part and parcel of that because those in power can’t really accept a loss of their authority and all the institutions that go with it, so crazy plans for underground bunkers to sit out the worst of the blasts and radiation then emerge to rebuild were pretty common, so, cryonics and talking robots aside, Last American isn’t that far-fetched for that period.

Understandably Pilgrim soon begins to face pyschological problems. As he starts to explore the wrecked landscape, devoid of life save for a few ants, surveying the irradiated remains of all he once knew and loved, his mood darkens, his morale, never exactly high considering he was forced into this mission to start with, plummets. He has no wish to be the last American and soon Wagner, Grant and McMahon are grimly delighting in executing their own take on one of the great staples of science fiction – the last man in the world. It leads to scenes of Pilgrim trying to drown it out in drink, or, in one memorable scene, venting his fury and bitterness by yelling at God in the ruins of a church for not stopping it, for letting it happen (well before Ennis had Jesse Custer aiming to ask God why He let bad things happen), shooting at the remains of the cross:

“This is all your fault! That’s right! You coulda stopped it – why didn’t you, eh? You’re so all-damn powerful, why didn’t you do something? Have You seen what it’s like out there? Have you? Well, I’ll tell you, pal! If there is a God then you gotta be one twisted, evil son of a bitch!”

It isn’t all misery and gloom though, as you’d expect from this creative team there is a rich seam of gallows humour laced throughout. As his mindset continues to deteriorate Pilgrim begins to lose it, even the eternally optimistic, cheery Charlie (a robot driven a little eccentric through decades of watching junk TV while taking care of Pilgrim’s stasis booth) can’t keep him going and he begins to hallucinate. His main hallucination takes the form of Bert the turtle, a riff on the incredibly ridiculous (althoug meant seriously at the time) 50s ‘duck and cover’ public information movies that showed cheerful, blonde, all-American children ducking and covering the minute they saw the flash of any pesky atomic blast. Nuclear bomb? No problem, kids, dive down behind a wall, duck and cover, and you’re sorted! Yep, he’s crazy, but he’s got a good reason to be going insane, unlike the people who actually made the old duck and cover films and books to instruct civilians on how to survive an atomic exchange.

Or as he examines a pile of human skulls in the remains of what was once Poughkeepsie he finds a message left by a man who was forced into cannibalism to survive, but he ate only those already dead “I killed no-one, I am innocent, God forgive me…” Looking around the lunar landscape that was once a bustling town Pilgrim yells ‘fresh meat, come and get it’, happy to see any human face, even that of a cannibalistic survivor. No-one can be seen though, our cannibal is long gone as he yells to the ruins “Will the man who ate Poughkeepsie please stand up?”, one of those lines that’s stuck in my head over the years since I first read it (was it really 20 years ago? Really?)

In another darkly humorous sequence Pilgrim imagines that it was only he who was nuked; he dies but everyone else in the world lives as he finds himself ascending out of the grave right through the clouds to Heaven. Which turns out to be American! As he moves among the former great and good of American history he talks about great men, noble men – but in the end they were just men, perhaps they put too much trust, too much responsibility on them. It also allows for some more dark humour as Einstein and Fermi argue at the party over how nuclear knowledge has forever changed humanity. As Einstein complains bitterly that nuclear weapons have changed “everything except the way people think”, Fermi tells him to forget his liberal scruples. After all, he adds, dropping a mini A-bomb into a Martini cocktail glass, “after all, the thing’s superb physics.”

Yes, as I said, it is very much of its time now, but that’s not a bad thing – so is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and that didn’t stop that remarkable Cold War spy novel being reborn to contemporary audiences as a brilliant thriller, F Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen too are very much of their time and yet also deal with issues that remain pertinent to any human society in any era, in addition to their historical elements, which is why they continue to interest readers. That and Wagner, Grant and McMahon’s mixture of commenting on the billion-dollar, decades long insanity of nuclear confrontation, pitch-black humour and often jaundiced look at the darker side of human nature (although leavened by some humour and a little glimmer of possible hope), and Mick’s superb art, say to me that this should be back in print and available to readers again. Meantime I’ll leave you with the artwork Mick posted on his blog and is turning into a print (and Thought Bubble folks, do say hi to Mick!):

(the charming Martin from Skin, by and (c) Milligan, McCarthy and Swain)

In the last few years we’ve become quite used to comics creators using the medium to explore some very personal areas, including dealing with illness or disability. Its not new, of course; Al Davison created his remarkable Spiral Cage years ago. More recent years have seen comics creators tackle personal health subjects from Crohn’s Disease (Tom Humberstone‘s honest and moving 24 Hour Comic Day offering) to shopping and fashion loving girl Marisa Acocella Marchetto bringing a touch of Sex and the City to dealing with cancer (Cancer Vixen) and Darryl Cunningham’s incredibly moving Psychiatric Tales (book due early next year, see Darryl’s blog for previews). And much as I have deeply admired these creators and others for their honesty and work  I have to say Skin, despite not being directly autobiographical as most later works are, still stands out for me though, for a number of reasons.

It was one of the first graphic novels I read which took comics into that sort of territory, way back in the early 90s (when it finally got printed after being passed from pillar to post by publishers who looked at it and stepped back fearful of a backlash) and as such it left a deep impression on me that’s lasted nearly two decades now; I still find myself going back to re-read it from time to time. The normal standard in, say, a movie dealing with a young lad born with disabilities is usually one of uplifting morality as he struggles against adversity and raises himself up despite his handicaps. Noble suffering. Skin doesn’t do that. Quite deliberately, as the introduction states, they didn’t want some nice young middle class chap who struggle heroically, they wanted a working class kid who was bloody angry, whose parent were pretty much unable to cope with him, who just wanted to get drunk and feel up girls and hang out and belong with his mates in his skinhead gang. Martin can be a right little git, frankly. Yes, he is a victim, but he’s a victim where our natural sympathies are deflected by his often nasty character (again playing against the expected type of this kind of tale where our tear ducts are normally milked for effect by lazy storytellers), leaving the reader feeling conflicted and uncomfortable. The contrast between his anger and later violence works well when considered against the corporate violence inflicted on his and thousand of other children’s bodies before they were ever even born.

(cover to Skin by Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy and Carol Swain, published Tundra)

Milligan pulls no punches (he remains a writer I love to this day), McCarthy’s art is astonishing, from the brutal leer on Martin’s face in one scene to the psychedelic, drug-fuelled sex scene with the young skinhead and some hippies (aided in no small part by Carol Swain’s brilliant colouring) which is a great example of how bloody amazing McCarthy’s art often is. Both art and story combine perfectly to tell a powerful tale of a disturbing subject and do so while denying the reader the normal emotional crutch of having a loveable but put-down hero to root for; given the themes that’s highly appropriate. Its not a work to come away from feeling either uplifted by how someone overcame the dreadful hand fate dealt then, nor is it a work to come away from with a sense of noble tragedy. Its a work to come away from feeling bloody angry. It still makes me angry even thinking about it now and this morning’s news article on victims still dealing with the effects of the drug decades on is a reminder of why people should be angry.

Skin remains one of those comics which I not only hold up as a fine example of the power of the medium to tell important, adult tales (there are many other fine examples), it is one of the few where it actually makes me proud of the medium, that it could deliver such a story. As this mornings news article reminds us the awful problems caused by the drug haven’t gone away, the human cost is still there, besides which its a work that doesn’t just rail against that particular abuse but any and all corporate abuses and the personal disasters they can cause, making it still very relevant. And I still wonder why such an important and powerful work has been allowed to be left in out of print limbo for so long?