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Pat Mills on Batman

19:28 / 05.06.03

So in Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, there's this bit written by Pat 'Black Metal in Human Form' Mills. Now Mills, as any fule kno, is the flawed genius responsible for both some of the best and some of the suckiest work in British Comics, including Slaine, Marshall Law, Accident Man, Third World War, Finn, Nemesis the Warlock, the ABC Warriors, and, on his strange, suckier side, Sex Warrior, and The Fear Teachers, to name but two (I've probably repressed the other shockingly bad stuff he did to fill pages back in the Toxic! days). But the author bio says he's probably best known in the US for his work on, among other things, Batman.

Batman? Someone let Pat 'I hate superheroes' Mills write Batman? Wtf?

So my question is - can someone tell me which Batman stories Mills wrote and, perhaps more importantly, whether they're Good Mills (Accident Man, Nemesis) or Bad Mills (Sex Warrior &c)? Not that it'll stop me tracking them down, but it'd be nice to know what to expect.

Anybody?

12:27 / 06.06.03

He's probably NOT best known in America for his Batman work, but I think he may have written a one off pretigue book called Book Of The Damned or some such nonsense. It was bad Mills, if it was him that wrote it. It was drawn by the guy who did a lot of The Accident Man stuff. He vowed never to work in comics again after that Batman book, that's how bad it was.

13:56 / 06.06.03

He's been doing french porno gdjankk forHeavy Metal for ages surely? he's also the dirty perve behind the all girl sexpunk group ROCKBITCH. he's also the third point in the trinity of unholy brilliant comic anarchist magicians. anyone know what progs of 2000ad the early series of Flesh ran in?

14:23 / 06.06.03

Yep, he did a Batman prestige book (Book of the Damned, or Dreams or something like that) with art by Duke Mighten. It wasn't up to much - no, I tell a lie : maybe it's because I read it at night before going to sleep, but I found it very hard to tell what was going on in about the last quarter of the book.

I seem to recall there were complaints from the creative team about interference of some sort - book being held back for ages then rushed-through or the like.

But velvetvandal's right, Pat can be great (and even if you don't like his stuff, I think one has to tip the hat and acknowledge just how important he is in terms of the development of comics in the UK), and some of his stuff looks very hmmm too. But he's been working steadily for... what, best part of thirty years ? That's pretty impressive in its own right, really.

11:42 / 07.06.03

I sometimes think Pat's work rate has been his undoing, really. It was definitely the problem with Toxic. When it started out it was the coolest comic in the world - almost all top quality Mills stuff, but with Alan Grant's Bogey Man thrown in as well, and as it went on and Pat had to churn out more and more stories for it the quality definitely went into a slump, with Mills essentially doing warmed-up retreads of his old ideas just to fill pages.

None of this, of course, detracts at all from the fact that he invented Slaine, Nemesis, Marshall Law et cetera, and did, as DBC points out, have an enormous influence on British comics of the classic 2000AD era.

And Duke Mighten! God, I'd forgotten he did the art on AM. What an excellent name, as well. Sounds like he leapt into reality straight out of one of those old Warhammer manuals. Mighten was responsible for one of the coolest visual jokes I've seen in a comic - it's at the end of the first Accident Man story, where AM is in a fight with an evil yakuza guy who has a sword, and finds a pair of sai daggers that just happen to have been stuck up on the wall for decoration. Mighten added a label underneath, which read 'Sai swords - that's handy!'

Flash forward several years, to when me and my mates are watching Matrix 2 in the cinema, and the scene in the Merovingian's chateau where Neo is being attacked by a bunch of guys with weapons, and jumps up the stairs, to find...a pair of sai daggers that just happen to be stuck to the wall...

So I said...

14:30 / 08.06.03

Kevin O'Neill drew MARSHAL LAW, right? Wasn't there some big hubub about his art on that book being deemed too offensive for the public or something like that?

I always found it interesting that Kevin O'Neill was first only known for MARSHAL LAW which rapidly disappeared, then skyrocketed to fame with LOEG.

Haus of Mystery

11:17 / 09.06.03

Mills is an erratic writer, and I've been through phases of hating his work, but basically the man's a fucking genius. If it wasn't for him there would have been no 2000ad and if there was no 2000ad I probably wouldn't be into comics. Re-read his early ABC Warriors or Nemesis stuff and it strikes how many ideas are being spat out, and just how anti-authoritarian it is. Humans are nearly always a bunch of fucks, and you end up rooting for their wholesale slaughter. And this was in the 70's when most British comics were called 'Alfie's Lucky Boots'. I think the man seriously needs his dues. Plus he's still a cantankerous old sod like all good geniuses.

11:26 / 09.06.03

If memory serves, there was the Comics Code ruling circa 1985 for Kev’s artwork on a Green Lantern story written by Alan Moore (possibly reprinted in that TPB that comes out this week?) where the CCA refused to pass the story. When the editors asked why, and whether it was anything specific in the story that made it un-CCA-able, they were told that it wasn’t so much the story or what was depicted but the STYLE of the artwork that made it unacceptable. I think that Kev was supposed to have been amused at this, and vaguely proud of the ruling.

yawn - thing's buddy

12:47 / 09.06.03

flesh book 1:

2000ad prog 1-about twenny summat

flesh book 2:

progs nummer 86-99 awesome stuff.

13:03 / 09.06.03

i think mills also wrote invasion 1990 (or whenever the future was back in 1976), with that lovely cockernee lorry driver getting one up on the dirty volg invaders of britain, even in the jingoistic nonesense mills had room for plenty of class war as the hero (wiv 'is shotgun) ouclassed the sandhurst posh boys every time

bad mills or good mills? i was 9 and it seemed great, like warlord comic but mentally more violent

a

19:24 / 09.06.03

The Alan Moore?Kev O'Neill story was censired mainly because it was very much along the LAst Temptation of Christ route, and featured some pretty distrurbing stuff, but notably "Qull of The Nine Inversions" a Satan figure who was originally depicted as being crucified, but who just ended up nailed to a board.
Didn't Pat Mills do the Bat Mite story?

yawn - thing's buddy

07:58 / 10.06.03

was invasion not Gerry Finlay Day?

08:52 / 10.06.03

all i can remember clearly is the hero (was he called bill savage?)saying to a volg he was putting a sausage under his hat as a favour and it in fact being a hand grenade. cue volgs head exploding.

it may not have been mills at all in retrospect and i threw my old progs away when i got into girls so have no way of checking.

A

11:54 / 10.06.03

Flesh stuff's all pretty early then. That'll be testing the local back-issue bins to their limit, but chiirs

12:52 / 10.06.03

I think long-time Bat-scribe Alan Grant wrote the Bat-Mite issue and Kevin O'Neill drew it. It's a fun issue - - lots of great little bits that Kevin squeezed into the backgrounds.

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

12:54 / 10.06.03

Wasn't a big chunk of 'Flesh' reprinted in one of the annuals?

Haus of Mystery

17:11 / 10.06.03

Let's not forget Mills (and John Wagner) did Action Comic, the proto-2000ad comic that got banned in the 70's. All those exploitation strips like Hookjaw and Spinball - I think there was a strip called Kids Rule OK that had a post apocalyptic world with kids fighting each other a la Mad Max, and a fascist group of cadets. oh yeah and all adults were dead. I only encountered an old copy when I was wee but it was ace. And a comic being banned after national press outrage - that's pretty good for the c.v.

finger n' thump

19:06 / 10.06.03

Flesh was in the megazine quite recently. the first book. I think.

SavageFistsOfFengshui

12:13 / 12.06.03

I’ve not read Pat Mills’s Batman, but Marshall Law: Kingdom of the Blind featured Private Eye, a millionaire who fought crime out of self-interest and because he enjoyed beating up poor people. I think he killed his boy wonder sidekicks so he could steal their organs to extend his life. Great stuff.

Flesh Book 1 was in 2000AD prog 1-19 but according to 2000AD online Mills only wrote the first episode and the last two. Pat Mills allegedly wrote the first Invasion strip before giving way to Gerry Finley-Day.

Another example of "good Mills" was Charley's War, which ran in Battle Picture Weekly and later in Eagle.
http://charleyswar.tripod.com/battle/id9.html

12:31 / 12.06.03

I always thought Gerry Finley Day was just a name like TB grover that mills, wagner and grant would share between them.

the black hole saga is probly my favourite mills. the violence really touched the sublime there.

SavageFistsOfFengshui

12:48 / 13.06.03

I think Finley-Day was a much worse writer than Mills, Wagner or Grant, although the latter two have been known to pass off inferior work under pen names.