Rites of Passage (Toxic! Magazine,1991)

All illustrations are © Kevin O'Neill & Pat Mills

Introduction

Between 28th March and 24th October 1991, Apocalypse Ltd had proposed a full color weekly magazine, Toxic!, with Pat Mills as editor, and Marshal Law as the leading story. The Hateful Dead story was indeed first published from #1 to #8.

During the weeks that followed the end The Hateful Dead pre-publication, many readers have wondered if ultimately Mills and O'Neill had not killed their character.

Doc Tox, who was in charge of the letter column never really contradicted them until the cancellation of the magazine with issue #31 (Apocalypse Limited went bankrupt).

Rites of Passage

To fill the magazine with marshal Law material before the next installment (that eventually never came as the magazine ceases to exist), the 8 page prologue first published in the Fear and Loathing paperback were reused in issue #14 and 15 of Toxic!.

Two unpublished pages were added to this prologue. The first new page published in Toxic! #14 is linked to the last panel of The Hateful Dead.

The last page of the prologue was originally designed to introduce the cover of the first issue of the original series.

The second new page published in Toxic! #15 provides a new sequence that turns back to the end of The Hateful Dead.

One could find these 2 new pages in the bonus section of the US Blood, Sweat, and Fears TPB published by Dark Horse in 1993 (note that the UK TPB of the same title, released by Titan Books in 2003, does not include these pages). The first of these two new pages (as well as a reprint of the cover of Toxic! #14) is also included in the bonus section of the UK TPB Fear Asylum (Titan Books, 2003).

The Hateful Dead (1991)

All illustrations are © Kevin O'Neill & Pat Mills

First edition

This 48 pages story was fully illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (pencils, inks and coloring), with lettering by Steve Potter. It is the first part (Rise of the Zombies) of a whole story that will concluded with Super Babylon. It was first pre-published in the fortnightly British magazine Toxic! (Apocalypse Ltd), through #1 to #8, between March 28 and May 16, 1991 (larger size magazine format with good quality paper).

This magazine was using the Marshal Law story as headliner for its launching. Indeed, the logo of the magazine appears in the story.

Marshal Law will make the cover for issue #1 and #5. For the first three issues, Kevin O'Neill was able to produce around 8 pages. From #4 to #8, this rate will fall between 4 and 6 pages, and then, apart two additional pages (see the Rites of Passage article) we will never see more new Marshal Law material in the magazine, that lasted 31 issues.

I have noticed in the first page of issue #6, an error with Black Scarab thought bubbles backgrounds that are red instead of yellow (see Toxic! #7). This was corrected for the release of the first paperback collected edition. Similarly, the Marshal Law logo used in each of the opening page in the magazine, has been further removed in the paperback.

Toxic! #6

corrected paperback edition

Below and left-hand side, Toxic! #2, right-hand side same panel in the paperback edition.

In 1991, Apocalypse Ltd, immediately released the paperback both in the UK and the USA, in comics format (softcover), with the Toxic! #5 cover (the cover for Toxic! #1 being used as back cover). It comes with a very good glossy paper and printing quality. It also features new illustrations for the second and third of cover.

Below second and third of cover for the collected edition.

back cover

It is worth pinpointing that the character design is evolving under the pen of Kevin O'Neill. He has became more and more elegant and stylized (we barely see the inverted cross on the mask of the hero during this adventure). Graphically, Kevin’s drawings look much closer to his more recent works (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I also think that the original subdivision in mini chapters makes this story one of the most intense and entertaining.

Plot

Toxic wastes resuscitate superheroes buried in the San Futuro’s cemetery, and turn them into Zombies. Marshal Law is mostly responsible for the death of these so called heroes; nevertheless, he is pretty keen to do the work twice. Problem is, his former girlfriend Lynn Evans has been revived too.

Themes

As the character is now published in UK by Apocalypse Ltd and serves as the lead strip for a new weekly magazine, Marshal  Law is put back at the heart of the story. The key elements of his background are recalled in the very first pages: San Futuro, the war of "the zone", the earthquake.

The main missing character of this narrative will be his alter ego, Joe Gilmore, who will only appear in the last 2 pages, literally cannibalized by his costume counterpart. One can even feel that his parents are more those of the Marshal than his. This slight dehumanization is reinforced at the beginning the character is introduced by the sole means of his police function (his routines, his schedules). It will be explain that the thin thread that connected him to his feelings of compassion were broken when Lynn Evans was killed (the Marshal is somewhat "dead within"). And it is only because she will be resuscitated that Joe Gilmore will eventually reappear.

The main character evolution is actually the main theme. In this story it is about personalities suffering from not going "with the flow" (Razorhead, Marshal Law). Because despite being a cape hunter, he is nothing but a super hero himself, not so much different from the others (which is suggested in page 20, when the Marshal uses the services of costumed prostitute).

Beyond the Marshal's hatred for his fellow super-heroes, the hatred that he feels for himself is being more and more tangible, and that will lead him to the fatal gesture depicted in the very last panel. At the end of the story and for the first time, he will even show mercy towards another super-hero.

What's better for a "linving-dead" hero than the Zombies genre. If the story is initially very close to the film The Return of the Living Dead by Dan O'Banon (1985), it is strongly leaning towards the metaphorical approach used in George Romero's quadrilogy (Night of The Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of The Dead and Land of the Dead). In the modern society, we are already walking living dead. Unlike the more recent Marvel Zombies which uses only the concept (and 17 years before that), the authors use the inherent ideas behind the concept to dig deeper in the psyche of their character. Furthermore, the Zombies depicted by Mills and O'Neill, even if they too share a certain taste for human flesh, have kept their critical mind!

Finally, the first part of the story, which explores some of San Futuro's mean-streets, can be paralleled with the movie Cruising by William Friedkin (1980). The Hateful Dead deals also with an infiltrated cop into a particular sociological group (S&M homosexual New York community for the film, costumed heroes prostituting their powers for sado-masochistic humiliations in the comics), in order to investigate a series of murders, and where the hero will have to question is own assimilation to this community ("Go with the flow" or not?).

References

References to comic characters

I am surely not exhaustive, but here are the references I have spotted (mostly DC characters):

• Green Arrow (see the picture above)
• Superman (opening page and page 46)
• A few Robin The Boy Wonder (page 11 and of course the Everest Character)
• Captain Marvel and Mr Freeze (page 2)
• Kitty Pride alias Shadowcat in an awkward position in page 6 

• As for the great villain of this adventure, Black Scarab, it is an obvious reference to the Blue Beetle, the Charlton's Golden Age hero (this reference will have much more importance in the conclusion of the story Super Babylon), character that will be later transferred to DC. That said, the authors gave him a pronounced Batman look in order to accentuate the Batman & Robin aspect of Black Scarab/Everest couple.

Other References

• The title itself, The Hateful Dead, is a nod to the Southern rock band "The Grateful Dead" (reversing the meaning of their name in the same time).
• From the dedicated wiki page: Colma is a small incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, near the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 1,792 at the 2010 census. The town was founded as a necropolis in 1924. With most of Colma's land dedicated to cemeteries, the population of the dead — about 1.5 million, as of 2006 — outnumbers that of the living by nearly a thousand to one.
• The links with Toxic! magazines are prevalent throughout the story: the magazine's logo is indeed made up of a barrel of toxic green fluorescent substance pouring on the title. It is the same barrels (affixed with the magazine title) and the same green fluorescent substance that are at the origin of the zombies plague in the comic. Similarly, the slogan used by the living dead "Go with the flow" will be used as one of the leitmotivs of the magazine.

• Some movie references are explained in the themes section, but it should be added that the yellow / fluo green color of the toxic liquid used to resuscitate the dead recalls strongly the color of the fluid used by Dr. Herbert West in Reanimator (Stuart Gordon, 1985, an adaption of H.P. Lovecraft).

• One of the corpse sculpture of Marshal Law's father's looks very much like the Guledig, seen in Pat Mills' Sláine.

Have you noticed?

Notwithstanding Kevin O'Neill's numerous juicy grafitti:

• page 4, Marshal Law boot mark on Captain "Shazam" Marvel's crotch
• page 8 a very useful fly-paper in Marshal Law's world

Some juicy quotes

• Page 9, regarding Everest's precognition powers: "They say he’s so far sighted, he wipes his ass before he craps".
• Page 12, some Marshal Law metaphysical insight: "I don’t like being a bastard…But they leave me no choice. That’s probably what god says".
• Page 30, about a super-hero that cannot stand odd numbers: "He cut off his thumbs and big toes because he hated odd numbers …(That, too). Naturally I shot him three times".
• And another delicious Marshal Law metaphysical insight (page 43): "And if this slime is right and there is no punishment in the hereafter …I’ll just have to give you your punishment now !"

• And I have kept my preferred quote for the end (page 45):

Reprints

In 1993, Dark Horse Comics published this story in the Blood, Sweat, and Fears collected edition. If the paper is of very good quality, the colors are slightly less vivid than in the original one shot. This reprint includes the cover, back cover, and third of cover of the original Apocalypse Ltd one-shot with additional red coloring.

Blood, Sweat, and Fears was then reissued in the UK by Titan Books in 2003, with the Super Babylon cover, and without the minor coloring problem. This reprint includes the previous Dark Horse cover, plus the cover, back cover, and second of cover of the original Apocalypse Ltd one-shot.

Ten years latter, DC Comics have reprinted this story in its Marshal Law Deluxe Edition (hardcover edition in April 2013, softcover edition in December 2014).

HC edition

HC back cover

SC TPB edition

These reprints lack the back cover and third of cover of the original one-shot. You can find the detailed content of these two books here.

International publications

Italian Edition

This story has been published in Italy in 2014 by RW edizioni, as part of the translation of the 2013 US DC Deluxe edition in three volumes (here in the second softcover volume). Therefore this reprint lacks the back cover and third of cover of the original one-shot..

The translation has been redone and is credited to Susanna Raule.

Spanish Edition

The US DC Deluxe edition has also been translated in Spanish by ECC ediciones in three volumes.  The Hateful Dead is included in the second volume, and just like the US edition this reprint lacks the back cover and third of cover of the original one-shot. The translation is credited to Albert Agut Iglesias.

Kevin O'Neill

Kevin O'Neill is currently involved in Alan Moore's Cinema Purgatorio anthology project, published Monthy by Avatar Press (details of this originally crowdfunding project can be found here).

In January 2017, he has published his first novel with co-writer Pat Mills, Read Em and Weep (vol 1, Serial Killer).

He has also begun to work on the final installment of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (vol 4: The Tempest). This work is sadly announced to be the last before his retirement from the comics industry (see here)

Kingdom of The Blind (1990)

All illustrations are © Kevin O'Neill & Pat Mills

First edition

This 46 pages story, drawn, inked and colored by Kevin O'Neill, was first published by Apocalypse Ltd in 1990. It has been issued in two formats: larger magazine size in UK as Toxic! Present #1 (printed on newspaper quality paper), and in comics format in the USA (printed on glossy paper with hard cardboard cover). In term of content, the differences between these two editions are minimal: no third of cover and back cover dedicated to Marshal Law for the UK edition, but two additional small thumbnails in the second of cover. In terms of printing quality, the UK edition is murkier that the US edition.

larger UK edition

Above, cover and back cover of the US edition. Below comparison between the second of cover of the UK edition (left hand side) and US edition (right hand side).

third of cover US edition

Plot

The third in chronological order of publication, this story was originally intended to follow immediately the original miniseries (indeed we witness the funeral of the Public Spirit). Our favorite psychotic policeman has to face Scott Brennan, aka the Private Eye, a wealthy media mogul. Just like the Batman, Scott Brennan is a self proclaimed vigilant, but with more radical methods. Marshal Law is torn between his duty as a policeman, and his admiration for the Private Eye. He decides to tolerate his deeds further, but it is a choice that will cost him dearly.

Themes

There is a central and recurring character in the work of Pat Mills, Torquemada the inquisitor. Various incarnations of this villain (being sometimes the main character) are used as an archetype in many of Mills series: Nemesis The Warlock, Sha, Requiem Vampire Knight, The Reedemer, to name a few. It allows him to denounce and mock the hypocrisy of religious authorities and their zealots.

Torquemada from Nemesis The Warlock series

There are a lot of aspects of Torquemada in the personality of the Private Eye: a fake mystical righteousness associated with an extremely rigid morality, a steadfast will to punish any sinner, and a tendency to play God. We can add to the mix the desire for immortality in order to complete his work of purification. For further details, Pat Mills talks about his inspiration for Torquemada in his blog here.

Another figure uses by Mills, is the scientist/doctor that uses uncompassionate blind science as an excuse to perpetrate tortures on their subjects (animals or humans). It is one of the seven tutelary figures hunted down by the A.B.C. Warriors in the Khronicles of Khaos saga. Obviously these "not so good" physicians have their own cast in hell in Requiem Vampire Knight too. Here that figure is evoked through Scott Brennan's parents, who experiment on animals, and even on their own child.

Scott Brennan also embodies the power of media, when they are used to influence the general public, and here also to justify against all odds (or simply true facts) the cruel acts and crimes of a vigilant.

As often in Mills works, these themes are addressed frontally in the story ("If you have something to say, just say it"), in this case through a recurring debate between Marshal Law and his deputy Killoton. And the authors spokesperson is not necessarily the one we could have expected.

References

References to comic characters

This story clearly referred to the Batman character (celebrating his Fiftieth anniversary at the time that story was written), mostly the post Frank Miller's bad-ass one. Like the Dark Knight, Scott Brennan is a man with a mission, that will use any means necessary to reach his goal, except killing. But here, the authors push this idea much further, with a Private Eye that uses extremely drastic methods, including the mutilation and torture of his foes. The name Private Eye refers of course to one of Batman surname, the Detective.

We also find some perverted hints to the classical Batman mythology. Like Bruce Wayne, Scott Brennan is a billionaire who after allegedly witnessed the murder of his parents (in fact he has murdered them himself) has been raised by the family butler, and now cruises the streets of San Futuro in his "Private Eye-mobile". And if you ever wonder why Batman's Robins are always young teenagers, Mills and O'Neill have the perfect response to that question.

Biblical, religious and mythological references

Private Eye's chest symbol is the all-seeing eye, whose omnipresent imagery in the comic referred to the all-seeing God consciousness that follows Cain. In the same spirit, this Eye that represents Scott Brennan's control over the media, derived from George Orwell's Big Brother (1984 is a literal reference in the comic). The title of the story is another perfect reference, here to Machiavelli: "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king".

Other References

The is also a strong association between the Private Eye and vampirism, referring as much to Dracula (Scott Brennan lives in a mausoleum and becomes the Private Eye by night, coming out of a coffin), or to the Countess Bathory (the desire for immortality fulfilled by baths in young boys' blood).

One can also find a small hint to The Pink Panther movie series (Blake Edwards), as Scott Brennan is cultivating the same relationship with his butler than Inspector Clouzot (Clouzot's butler Cato organizes surprise attacks every time Clouzot returns to his home).

Have you noticed?

Marshal Law, the Dark Knight triumphant?

Some juicy quotes

• From Marshal Law responding to Suicida's insults by quoting them: "Call me a fascist pig ... call me a leather-clap tinkerbelle ... call me a poseing ass-hole ... just don't call me a ... a... that word. Okay?" (that word being superhero).
• From the Private Eye urinating from the top of his mausoleum: "Yes, I've pissed on you all... And told you it is raining".
• From Alan Grant's introduction to the US TPB: "I'm truly shocked. I know Mills and O'Neill personally, and I always thought they were decent, God-fearing boys. This celebratory feast of depraved and disgusting ultra-violence shows just how wrong you can be. In a more enlighten society, what they've done to my own personal hero, The Batman, would be illegal!".
• An advert from Scott Brennan's yellow press newspaper:

Reprints

This story was reprinted in the USA by Dark Horse, in its Blood, Sweat, and Fears 1993 paperback, with a small, but hilarious introduction by Alan Grant (se above), and an exclusive montage cover.

Original cover (in its virgin form), as well as second, third and back cover of the original US edition are included (the latter printed with different coloring).

In 2003, Titan Books reissued the Dark Horse paperback on the UK market, with the same title but a different cover (although the Dark Horse cover is included inside the book), and different extra content. This time only the cover of the original US comics is included (again in its virgin form).

this TPB cover reused the cover for the Super Babylon comics

You can find the detailed content of these two books here.

Ten years latter, DC Comics have reprinted this story in its Marshal Law Deluxe Edition (hardcover edition in April 2013, softcover edition in December 2014).

HC edition

HC back cover

SC TPB edition

These reprints only lack the third of cover of Kingdom of The Blind, the original cover being reprinted in its virgin form, and the back cover reprinted with the different coloring of the Dark Horse TPB reprint. You can find the detailed content of these two books here.

International publications

Italian Edition

From October to December 1991, Italian publisher Granata Press has issued the story trough its magazine Nova Express (#6 and #7, perhaps the name of the magazine is a tribute to Watchmen). The larger size magazine is printed on good quality paper. Perhaps the colors are not as vivid as the original comic but its really not an issue. Oddly the story is published "by agreement with Zenda Edition", the french publisher, but Zenda never published any other material than Fear and Loathing. Thanks to Paolo Gugliuzza for pointing out to me the existence of this edition.

Nova Express #6

The translation is credited to Federico Zanettin. From the original comics, it lacks the back cover and third of cover.

issue #7

This story has been collected again in 2014 by RW edizioni, as part of the translation of the 2013 US DC Deluxe edition in three volumes (here in the second softcover volume). Therefore this reprint only lack the third of cover of Kingdom of The Blind, the original cover being reprinted in its virgin form, and the back cover reprinted with the different coloring of the Dark Horse TPB reprint.

The translation has been redone and is credited to Susanna Raule.

Spanish Edition

The US DC Deluxe edition has also been translated in Spanish by ECC ediciones in three volumes.  Kingdom of The Blind is included in the second volume, and just like the US edition this reprint only lack the third of cover of Kingdom of The Blind, the original cover being reprinted in its virgin form, and the back cover reprinted with the different coloring of the Dark Horse TPB reprint. The translation is credited to Albert Agut Iglesias.