Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy: "Freakwave" Part 1

[jlroberson]

This is, I believe, the first published work in the US of either Peter Milligan or Brendan McCarthy, one of those teams that are made to work with one another. I believe this was also before Alan Moore was published here, so Milligan got there first, but for Pacific Comics(and later Eclipse). I'm assuming this later helped Brendan McCarthy get his work on the Road Warrior films. (and I know, it looks an awful lot like the later WATERWORLD. But it's far better) And it's never been reprinted, like much of McCarthy's non-DC work. From 1983, Vanguard Illustrated #1, the first section of "Freakwave."


















(c)1983 Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy.

Comments

[stig]

God, I hate first-person present narration.

[jlroberson]

But that's third-person. First-person present-tense is more like Frank Miller.

[stig]

Dammit, got mixed up. Thanks.

Still hate it, though. I want to read a comic, dammit, not an illustrated damn gamebook.

But it was only their first story!

[jlroberson]

Well, it was still pretty common back then, even--and in some ways especially--in the indies. For intance, the early issues of LOVE & ROCKETS--Jaime's stuff anyway--was swamped in it and really only became what we know once that went away.

It's interesting that since then Milligan's narration has become one of his defining points, having--since SHADE anyway--taken it in very odd and playful directions. I'm particularly thinking of FACE and THE EATERS, which narrate in the terms of the obsessions of the characters. In the former, everything is expressed in surgical metaphors. In the latter, culinary. At the time it felt like Milligan had fallen under the influence of Nabokov. There's also a version--it's hard to call an adaptation--that Milligan did for A1, with art by Brett Ewins, of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," where the narration gradually starts commenting on, and even lashing out at, the story.

You'll find it very interesting how this story ends. Not as you'd expect.