It has taken them a long time, but DC have finally, after a thirteen year gap, collected one of the most innovative stories they ever published. Skreemer was first published in six parts by DC in 1989, four years before they launched Vertigo, their ‘mature readers’ line. Skreemer is clearly a precursor of what they intended to do with Vertigo, and is still better than most of what was eventually published under that imprint.

Veto Skreemer, the main protagonist of the story, is a gang leader in a post-holocaust America. His two childhood friends, Dutch Amsterdam and Vicky Chandler, are gang leaders too. Their lives and fortunes are intertwined with one another, right until the end. The time of the gangs is on the way out, however, but Veto has a plan to stop it. On one level the story is about the struggle for supremacy between the gangs as their time is ending. However, we also have the Finnegans, a poor Irish family struggling to survive in a hostile environment, and trying to remain together as a family through some terrible adversity. Various members of the Finnegan family run fowl of the gangs in general, and Veto in particular. Actually, the entire of Skreemer is narrated by one of them, Peter Finnegan, who is not even born at the time of the events portrayed. His father worked for Veto, and his grandfather was forced to murder two children to save the lives of his own twins. This is not to say that anyone notices them, in much the same way that royalty don’t notice servants. They’re the underclass, invisible but observant, and far more durable in the end than the giants that rise up around the briefly, doomed to crash. This is what the story is about too, the durability and resilience of family.

Mostly, though, what Skreemer is about is free will, and how we get to choose what we want to be. It’s also about the opposite of that, which is predestination, and about how we sometimes doom ourselves to be what we don’t want to be. Every move that Veto Skreemer makes is known to him in advance, yet he also knows that all his plans are going to fail. And some of the reason that they’ll fail is because he makes them fail. And so on.

The storytelling in Skreemer is done through a series of flashbacks, involving both sets of characters, the Finnegans and the gang leaders. At about the same time as Skreemer was published, Dark Horse Comics published a three-issue comic called Exquisite Corpse, the three issues of which were unnumbered. The idea was that you could read them in any order, and that there would be a coherent storyline to be found. The same could have been said of Skreemer, to a certain extent. Flashbacks tell the various back stories in no seeming order, although they all get told in the end. This is largely due to the influence of a song and a book which share the same name; Finnegan’s Wake. The song is an old Irish drinking song, and is constantly being sung by one of the characters; and the book is by James Joyce. In both cases they start again at the end, with Joyce’s book ending "A way a lone a last a loved a long the", which runs around to "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay" at the beginning of the book. The song ends with Tim Finnegan reborn from the dead, after being accidentally 'baptised' in whiskey.

Over and over, the themes of life and birth, of death and rebirth permeate this book. What is perhaps most astonishing to me is how early on in his career Milligan managed to write what is still to me his best work. He managed to go over some very complex philosophical and theological ground in a story about a gang war, which is pretty good going. There are certainly a few points in the writing where it seems a bit creaky, but it’s still no disappointment to me after waiting years to read it again. Recommended without reservation.

Publisher: DC/Vertigo
Date: September 2002
Price: $19.95
Format: 176 pp TPb, Colour
ISBN: 1563899256
More Info: Amazon.com / Amazon.ca

Review originally on The Alien Online