Just as the Cold War was finally ending, here come Alan Grant, John Wagner and Mike McMahon to remind us how very different, very bad it could’ve ended.
Twenty years after the nuclear war ended, Ulysses S. Pilgrim is awoken from cryogenic suspension to find out what’s left of America. It will take him four issues to discover that he is indeed The Last American. You might think you’re in for a fun post-apocalyptic romp, but every time the story seems to veer that way it sucker punches you to drill home the message that nuclear war is no fun.
Nuclear annihilation was a very popular theme running through eighties pop culture, as fitting for the decade that was arguable the most dangerous of the entire Cold War. Forget the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, we came much closer to the brink in 1983, multiple times.
And while in America you could still sort of pretend that the worst that could happened would be a couple of hundred million deaths and the survivors having to fight off mutants and bandit gangs, over here in Europe we full well knew that it would be the end of everything. If you’d survive the initial exchange, you’d die of radiation poisoning soon after; if not that, than through illness or starvation. It’s that nihilism, that certainty that The Last American captures so well.
Which is no surprise considering Grant, Wagner and McMahon were all British and should’ve been fully aware of what a nuclear war would mean to the UK. As a series, it really is relentlessly grim, with little even of the black humour Wagner and Grant put in their Judge Dredd stories e.g. McMahon’s art is gorgeous as usual, but it’s still oppressive for all its beauty.
Originally the series was supposed to come out in the mid-eighties, but McMahon fell ill and only recovered in 1990. Somewhat serendipitously it means it was a fitting coda for the end of the Cold War.
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