30 days of comics I love # 7: The food was all ate and the fire went out.

The Last American #4

By Wagner, Grant and McMahon

Even though the creators of The Last American series - published by Epic Comics in the dark days of the early 90s - are most associated with the world of Judge Dredd, the post-Apocalyptic landscape of this comic bears little resemblance to the Cursed Earth that surrounds Mega-City One.

There are no mutant hordes roaming the wasteland on jazzed-up motorcycles, no clones of dinosaurs attacking small villages of normal folk, and no blatant metaphors for the dangers of mass capitalism running riot in Vegas.

Instead, Ulysses S Pilgrim, the final American of the title, is the only human left in a world that has been completely wiped out. There is no post-apocalyptic pulling together of civilization, just endless death and a world choking on ashes.

There has been a trend towards seeing the end of the world as one big violent party, where all inhibitions have been vaporized in the nuclear fire. Instead, Mike McMahon's usual gorgeous art gives us a never-ending wasteland of nothing, where nobody can be alpha anymore, because there is nobody else to rail against. The horror of nuclear war is that it blasts away the old world, but doesn't replace it with a blank slate, it just replaces it with the cold silence of nothing. 

At the end of this short series, there is still a sliver of hope that there might be other people out there, despite any real evidence that anybody else is actually left. Even Pilgrim gives up the search, the last person to try and find America, and the last to realize there is nothing left to find.

All that is left for Pilgrim is hallucinations of mass musical numbers, and souless robots to keep him company, there at the last gleaming of the twilight, before the lights go out for good.