For reasons that I’ve never really worked out, a lot of the best writers of American comics are British.  And the very best of them have surnames beginning with M.  Alan Moore’s the one the public are most likely to be aware of, thanks to his weirdbeard appearances on television in the eighties, when his Watchmen was redefining what could happen in the medium.  Grant Morrison is the next, and his takes on mainstream superheroes have often been breathtakingly audacious, while his creator owned work pushes the envelope in a way that few other writers can hold a candle to.  The third M is lesser known even to comics readers, and his name is Pete Milligan.

Like Moore and Morrison, Milligan’s early work included stories for 2000AD that were well above the baseline for the science fiction action yarns the comic trades in, adding fascinating concepts to the staple mix of aliens and punch-ups.  One benefit of writing for 2000AD is that writers get used to serving up their stories in dense chunks, a handful of pages at a time.  Take the discipline required to do that into the relative luxury of the 22 pages that American comics usually consist of, and you’ve got one reason for British writers standing out in the scene.  And with only the best Brit creators making it over to the States — artists as well as writers — it’s no surprise that some excellent work was done.

Milligan’s brilliance took a while to register with me, and there are times when he overloads his scripts with ideas at the expense of coherence.  Still, better a glut of concepts than the poverty of them normally found within the pages of a comic.  Shade the Changing Man was his longest running series, about an alien with the capacity to morph reality.  At least that’s what it seems to be.  As it went on, it became clear that Milligan’s bigger interest was with the relationship of his protagonist and his two female fellow travellers: Milligan writes women like someone who actually knows some in real life, and has interesting conversations with them.

There were a few mini series for DC imprint Vertigo too.  I recently picked up all eight issues of Minx for £5, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.  The world it depicts is fascinating, with a monkey astronaut returning to Earth and in psychic contact with a select group including the heroine.  Meanwhile, a twisted sadist is rearranging peoples’ bodies so that they’re no longer human.  Somehow the American president is involved in all this.  Sparky fun, and interesting to see art by Sean Phillips before he developed the signature style that you can see in his collaborations with Ed Brubaker.  The classic from this era is Enigma, available in collected form with moody art by Duncan Fegredo: it’s the title a lot of people rate as Milligan at his finest, but I never quite got what the hype was — one to read again, I suspect: Milligan’s subtleties definitely merit a second viewing.

More recently, Milligan did a wonderful run on X-Statix for Marvel, taking a tired bunch of mutants and turning the title into an incisive satire on media machinations.  It runs out of steam as it goes on, but there are some wonderfully dark and twisted moments along the way, and plenty of room for Milligan’s signature explorations of identity and sexuality.  Art by Mike Allred is spot-on, like some kind of psychedelic animated Saturday morning show that adults never got to see.

Human Target was a dubious tv series that had its origins in a seventies DC comic.  Milligan built on the basic concept of a man who impersonates others to produce some excellent thrillers about a protagonist who loses himself in the identities of those he doubles for.  There’s real intelligence at work in these stories, and different story arcs have different artists, most of them more than capable.

Milligan has just started work on Hellblazer, Vertigo’s flagship horror title, and I’m looking forward to see what he does with its protagonist John Constantine.  His moral ambiguity and bisexuality are perfect for Milligan to explore, and if his current writing continues the high standard set in Milligan’s recent Moon Knight annual for Marvel, where he was superbly accompanied by artist Laurence Campbell, I’ll be picking up his Hellblazer collections for sure.