Posted in: Comics, Dark Horse Comics, NYCC | Tagged: Comics, dark horse, NYCC, peter milligan

Peter Milligan to Announce New Dark Horse Comic at New York Comic Con

Published Tue, 24 Sep 2019 13:30:36 -0500

Dark Horse Comics has issued press attending New York Comic Con with an opportunity amongst many others, to interview Peter Milligan regarding a project with the publisher. They just aren't saying what the project is, as they are yet to announce it. Which they'll have to do for New York Comic Con or before.

Milligan, started his comic career with Sounds music paper's comic strip The Electric Hoax, with Brendan McCarthy, later moving to write short stories for 2000 AD in the early 1980s. By 1986, Milligan had his first ongoing strip in 2000AD, sci-fi war comic, Bad Company, with artists Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. Milligan, Ewins and Brendan McCarthy had been working on the anthology Strange Days for American publisher Eclipse Comics. Strange Days featured three strips, Paradax, Freakwave, and Johnny Nemo. Johnny Nemo and Paradax span off their own series, from Vortex Comics.

In 1989 Milligan created Hewligan's Haircut for 2000AD with Jamie Hewlett and had his first work published by DC Comics. Skreemer was a six issue mini series drawn by Brett Ewins, wrote Skin drawn by Brendan McCarthy that was refused publication in the intended anthology series Crisis, eventually published as a graphic novel by Tundra Press to little controversy. years later Dark Horse would collect Milligan an McCarthy's work in a Best Of collection.

The 1990s saw Milligan revamp Steve Ditko's character Shade, the Changing Man for DC Comics, later becoming part of the Vertigo imprint and ran for 70 issues. Milligan became the regular writer of Batman in Detective Comics and co-created of Azrael, for Knightfall.

Milligan and Duncan Fegredo created Enigma for Disney Comics' planned Touchmark imprint, later picked up by Vertigo, and featured the first openly gay superhero characters starring in mainstream published comics.

Milligan and Mike Deodato launched the Elektra series for Marvel Comics in November 1996, as well as shorter works, one-offs like Face and The Eaters, or miniseries like Egypt and Tank Girl The Odyssey with Hewlett providing art, and the Human Target mini-series.

In 2001, Marvel Comics' new editor-in-chief Joe Quesada began revamping the X-Men family of titles. Milligan and artist Mike Allred took over X-Force with issue No. 116 and immediately replaced the book's Rob Liefeld-styled team with a more satirical one: the Orphan, the Anarchist, U-Go Girl, Phat, Vivisector, Venus Dee Milo, Dead Girl and Doop. X-Force was cancelled with issue No. 129 and replaced by a new title, X-Statix, with Milligan and Allred continuing as the creative force. Milligan proposed a character based on a resurrected Princess Diana. News spread to the British tabloids The Sun and the Daily Mail, which strongly objected and managed to get Elton John to complain to Marvel Studios bosses. Eventually the character was altered, as were the references to the British Royal Family.

Milligan's film work includes the screenplay for Pilgrim (also known as Inferno), starring Ray Liotta. He scripted the 2002 adaptation of the Melvin Burgess novel An Angel for May.

He wrote issues #166–187 of X-Men, teamed with artist Salvador Larroca, in 2005. Milligan returned to The Human Target with the graphic novel Final Cut, followed by all 21 issues of the subsequent series for Vertigo. Milligan was involved in 2007's Batman crossover, The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul, by writing the lead-in Batman Annual No. 26, as well as the parts of the storyline in the Robin monthly title.

In late 2008, Milligan was named writer for the long-running Vertigo series Hellblazer, which he wrote to its conclusion. Following DC's 2011 relaunch, Milligan became the writer of Red Lanterns, an ongoing series which debuted in September 2011. He wrote Justice League Dark, a spin-off of the Justice League franchise, starring John Constantine and Shade, the Changing Man then moved to Stormwatch.

He wrote Shadowman and Punk Mambo for Valiant, Terminal Hero for Dynamite, The Names and New Romancer for DC and 5 Ronin for Marvel

X-Statix returned for a one-shot earlier this year, promising a new X-Cellents spinoff series for 2020. If so it will now be accompanied by a new Dark Horse project…