I worked at an independent movie theatre the summer after my high school graduation. People didn’t exactly line up around the block for The Winslow Boy and its ilk, so I had a lot of free time. Once the half-dozen middlebrows had taken their seats and the lights went down, I snuck into the lobby to read issues of SHADE: THE CHANGING MAN. “This Peter Milligan,” I thought to myself, “is a damn genius.” Today, when asked about my influences during interviews for AIR and CAIRO, Milligan is usually one of the first words out of my mouth. If I’m feeling ballsy, I tell people SHADE is the best comic series ever written. Yes, there are single issues of SANDMAN that brook no comparison, but taken as a whole, SHADE is the masterpiece. This pronouncement is usually followed by an incredulous pause. But by God, when I’m on the other side of the mic, I’ll say what I want.

When talk turned to Milligan on my forum here at SA, I had an idea. Instead of posing redundant philosophical questions (Who is this guy, anyway? And what was up with XStatix?), why not find the man and ask him? What is working at Vertigo good for if not harassing one’s idols? It worked; Peter graciously agreed to an interview. What follows are some of the questions raised in my forum, and a few of my own.

G. Willow Wilson: For those of your fans who only follow comics, what have you been up to since the last time you wrote one?

Peter Milligan: I feel as though I’ve been writing quite a lot of comics lately.  As well as Hell Blazer and other things there is a new series I have created for Vertigo called GREEK STREET that I am very excited about. This is an edgy, violent, very sexy re-imagining of some of the classic tales of ancient Greek drama seen through the prism of a tough modern-day London.

Outside of comics I have been working on a number of projects. As usual, most of these don’t make it to fruition, and I tend not to like to talk about things until they do.  Though last year I did create and write a short animation series for the BBC called META4ORCE.  This was nominated for a children’s BAFTA.

GWW: While there can be long gaps between your work in comics, what is it about comics that keeps bringing you back?

PM: I like the knock-about, day-to-day nature of the thing. The phone calls with editors I enjoy working with.  The emails, the j-pegs, the mysterious fed-ex packages. All that quotidian stuff that makes you feel connected to the outside world.  And comics can give you a certain creative freedom, a way of getting some pretty bizarre or personal thoughts across that might otherwise stay homeless. And it can happen relatively quickly.

GWW: This is from an internet commentator who actually calls himself ‘TheChangingMan’: What is your take on Rimbaud Syndrome–that feeling that all the deeply personal and artistically ground-breaking work one ever creates is a by-product of youth, and that once it is used up there’s no going back?

PM: I certainly think that this is a common feeling.   And I think that a lot of our present culture is built around that notion. I myself remember being miserable at 19, being aware that Rimbaud pretty much chucked the whole thing in around that age.  In truth I think that youth produces a certain kind of take on life, a certain fire that you probably never quite regain, but as the first flush of youth passes experience brings other qualities (though not necessarily).  This is of course a gross generalization. Sometimes that youthful fire doesn’t produce anything deeply personal or anything groundbreaking – it just burns down a lot of houses and is incredibly conservative, desperate to be part of the herd. As the Germans say: Jugend Hat Keine Tugend. Youth has no virtue. Which is probably a bit harsh, but that’s the Germans for you.

GWW: Your comics deal in metanarrative quite frequently. I guess that could be said of most comics, but you do it in a particularly literary and self-conscious way–in Shade, in Human Target, in XStatix. What appeals to you about this kind of postmodern storytelling?

PM: I suppose it widens the landscape. It increases the way in which to can make a story effective. And – without getting too Brechtian – it seems to me that a degree of ironic self-awareness, of self-referentiality is an accurate way of expressing how our world operates.

GWW: Another internet commentator wants to know: if you were paid to write a comic about anything at all–without regard to how it would sell or how your readers would react–what would you write about?

PM: Well, quite often I have written a comic about what I’ve wanted to write about, regardless of how it would sell.   At the moment I am interested in working on a story about Epilepsy. There are a few elements not in place yet but it is a hard sell, even to myself.

GWW: A lot of people on my forum wanted juicy gossip about your Xstatix run. Can you supply us with juicy gossip? Was there head-butting with the Marvel editorial staff?

PM: Apart from Axel Alonso’s predilection for split-crotch panties, I’m not sure I have anything for you.  There was never what you might call head-butting with the editors, but I was disappointed with the people higher in the food chain when the uproar about the Princess Diana story broke, and we had to fuck around with it. I thought, you Americans had a revolution so you didn’t have to worry about what our insane and largely inbred bunch of Royals thought. And here you are genuflecting like crazy because they and some of their subjects are pissed off  about a comic book.

GWW: What character or storyline that you’ve worked on would you most like to return to?

PM: I think there is something in THE EXTREMIST that I’d like to explore further. The way this suit could spread its poison around anyone whose life it touched . And the new post-AIDS realities and how that would affect the secret clubs in which The Extremist operates. There’s something very urgent and modern there.

GWW: You were part of a rockstar era at Vertigo–the heyday of the British invasion, which gave us luminaries like Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman. Were you (are you) conscious of your rockstar status? Was it (is it) at all weird?

PM: You were aware of it sometimes.  Offered sex and drugs and other more dubious pleasures.  A certain kind of person might let that turn their head.

GWW: Do you have hair? There’s a theory that you have to be either bald or named Brian–preferably both bald and named Brian–to make it in comics these days.

PM: I have hair. And I am not a Brian. Clearly I am an evolutionary blind alley.

GWW: Finally, I know a lot of your fans–myself among them–would like to see more of you beyond the pages of your books. What could we say to get you on to the internet and into a forum or a blog of some kind?

PM: Please?