4 out of 5

Recently, Brendan McCarthy put out a wackadoo 2000 ADish trippy book through IDW that made me question if all of the weirdness during the Milligan / McCarthy years actually stemmed from the latter, as Milligan-without-McCarthy – though frequently capable of doing a swish with genius – would dip into melodrama, bereft of the simply insanity that made books like Paradax and Strange Days a unique kind of fun.  Rereading Rogan Gosh, the line becomes more apparent – McCarthy’s artwork highlights the weirdness, and definitely lends itself to a certain loosey-gooseyness of the pen, but the wandering tiptop dreamlike narratives that came from those stories WAS Milligan, and Rogan Gosh almost gets to his most delightful form as a writer, stepping back and forth between puns, and drama, and goofy, and powerfully blunt honesty within panels, from page to page.

Rogan Gosh, taking a narrative cue from its name (I suppose) is a mishmash of ingredients, several intermingling “flavors” that create, somehow, one cohesive storyline, though its not truly a distinct beginning, middle or end.  On a top level for Milligan, this would seem to be a vehicle for exploring his own emotional connectedness with the world, always viewing things through the slight disconnected eye of the observant writer, as, on the many levels of the book, Rudyard Kipling takes a spirit trip to work through some buried guilt, or hero Rogan Gosh battles his way through history to conquer an ancient evil hidden in his life, or Dean gets whisked away to dreamland while eating Rogan Gosh at Star of the East restaurant, musing over whether he dumped Mazzy or she dumped him, or the teen who sits at home, upset about recent ex Mary Jane, thinking hefty thoughts in his last moments post a suicide attempt… The transitions, thanks to the freedom of McCarthy’s style and the surreal bent of the book in general, don’t have to be smooth, and liberate Pete to use pages of text here, or slightly orderless paneling there, to just get thoughts across on the page.

And though the final panels are the purest Milligan, the man unafraid to let things end in chaos, moments before he plays with a happy ending.  He does this in a few of his books and it softens what could otherwise be a devastating affect overall, purposefully undercutting his own attempts by either layering on extra melodrama (pushing himself toward honesty, which he seems to do via the suicidal teen’s storyline here and there) or just sorta shrugging and stamping “happy ending” on to something as if the simplicity of it is some type of ironic commentary.  His ‘Girl’ short story for Vertigo used this version perfectly, because it punctuated the whole tale, but sometimes – here – it just comes across as impatience with seeing something through to a different conclusion.

If you can deal with the formlessness of it all but don’t need the zip-bang-pow splash page of a Morrison weirdo-epic, Milligan could be a writer for you, and Rogan Gosh could be your book.