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.

Sometimes you luck out when you see a cool looking cover in a bargin bin and end up buying a Jim Aparo drawn issue of Charlton’s The Phantom.

This is actually some of Aparo’s earliest work, from just before he became a mainstay at DC Comics. He had actually attempted to join EC Comics in the fifties, but had been rejected and did advertising work until Dick Giordano brought him to Charlton. When Giardano moved on to DC, so did Aparo.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Aparo’s art: I disliked much of his work in the eighties and nineties on Batman and the Outsiders and the core Batman titles. Yet his earlier work on Brave and the Bold and especially Aquaman I love, possibly because I read much of it in black and white Dutch reprints. Certainly the colouring in the deluxe Outsiders series did his art no good. Or maybe it was the improved paper quality that ill suited his artstyle. His art here is gorgeous though, with no qualifications. I like his Phantom, a bit beefier than I’m used to.

Not that I’ve read many Phantom stories. As you might know, The Phantom started out as a Lee Falk created adventure newspaper strip, about “the Ghost Who Walks”, a vigilante in a fictional African country who has been keeping the peace for centuries, withthe mantle of the Phantom being handed over from father to son for generations. He got a few serials back in the days, the inevitable radio show, a nineties blockbuster movie when Batman was the rage and Hollywood though any old pulp hero would be as big. As well as a lot of comics adaptations over the years. For some reason The Phantom was incredibly popular in Sweden and they did their own version there. Here in the Netherlands he never quite made it. There have been a few reprints of American comics over the years but that was it.

Over the years bought some of those when I found them secondhand, mainly because he was another superhero than for any intrisic interest in the Phantom as a series. The notion of a great white protector of an African country is rather old fashioned and somewhat orientalist after all. On the other hand, the idea of an unbroken lineage of superheroes 21 or 22 generations long is great. Just the setting is a bit sus…

An amnesiac is washed on shore near a small village, where a kindly doctor nurses him back to health. After he recovers he discovers he’s the target in a massive complot and may be involved in the murder of the US president. His name? Not Jason Bourne.

I’m not saying that Jaan van Hamme and William Vance looked a bit too closely at Robert ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980) for their adventure spy thriller series XIII (1984) but it wouldn’t be the first comic inspired by a popular novel or movie, eh? It’s practically a tradition to take something popular and create your own twist on it and van Hamme and Vance certainly did. Over the course of twenty albums they set up and then unravelled the mystery of XIII’s true identity, his role in the murder of the president, the conspiracy behind this murder and once that was all resolved, dove into the older history of him and his family.

Hugely popular in Europe, the series survived the departure of its writer, van Hamme, who felt he had done everything he wanted with it and its artist, Vance, forced to retire from it due to medical problems. It spawned not only a spinoff series, but also a computer game and a French television adaptation. For me, it was one of the few European comics I kept reading when I was obsessed with superheroes for a couple of years.

Both van Hamme and Vance were well established when they started XIII. The first had already had been succesfull with the fantasy viking series Thorgal, drawn by Polish cartoonist Grzegorsz Rosinski and had also written the critically acclaimed Histoire sans héros (Adventure without Heroes), drawn by Dany, as well as more mainstream fare like the short lived Arlequin, also with Dany, which was the first series I read of him.

William Vance had broken through as the artist on the Bob Morane series of sci-fi thrillers as wellas Bruno Brazil, a more harder edged crime and spy thriller series which ran in Tintin. His passion however lay more with historical series. Westerns like Ringo, medieval series like Ramiro and Roderic but especially Age of Sail series like Howard Flynn and Bruce J. Hawker, his pet project. Sort of ironic then that his most well known series is a hard boiled modern thriller. But honestly, while he’s never a bad artist, his work on XIII is a cut above most of his older work.