.
Another brief series from Marvel's
Epic Comics line that I recently re-read, THE LAST AMERICAN, a 4-issue series from 1990-1991,
by writers Alan Grant and John Wagner, with art by Mick McMahon :
![[Linked Image from milehighcomics.com]](http://www.milehighcomics.com/istore/images/fullsize/49127482304.1.jpg)
It begins with an army Captain named Ulysses Pilgrim, who is awakened by service robots from cryogenic freezing, about 20 years after a nuclear war, and is apparently the only person in the U.S., or by all appearances the entire world, left alive after a nuclear war. And in flashbacks you see that he was specifically cryo-frozen to be awakened after 2 decades for the specific mission of looking for survivors, after the full effects of the nuclear war have played out (sifting through the ruins, the military giving him at the time he is selected, the job tile of "commander of the U.S. Deep Reserves") .
So Pilgrim travels across the terrain and rubble of the New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, and Virginia region looking for signs of life and survivors.
And meanwhile he is coping with the loss of his remembered wife and child, presumed to be dead.
And in his mind in flashbacks and music and TV clips, and the programmed human-like comments of the service robots around him, while searching the ruins he re-lives the past in his mind, convincing himself that culture still exists. Part of the robots' programmed orders, it is learned, is to keep him content, and from going over the mental brink and committing suicide.
And after watching the "Duck and Cover" 1950's public service film of how to protect yourself from a nuclear explosion, among Pilgrim's many delusional fantasies, he imagines having conversations with the animated turtle in that film, kind of like a devil/angel on his shoulder, along with imagined conversations with LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and other dead presidents, and nuclear scientists like Einstein, who were responsible for creating the nuclear deterrent, creating the patriotic cold-war rhetoric, and ultimately causing the war, that he now lives in the bombed-out remains of.
He goes back and forth between near-suicidal depression, and an optimistic hip-ho-away-we-go optimism that they're just about to find survivors and bring back the world to the way it was.
An interesting and darkly humorous study of the effects of nuclear war, and of the fake optimism of nuclear survivability in the cold war era, that such a war could be winnable, and through one character, an introspection of coming to grips with reality, of what aftermath of such a war would truly be like.
All 4 issues online at :
THE LAST AMERICANhttps://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Last-American/Issue-1?id=131434https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Last-American/Issue-2?id=131435https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Last-American/Issue-3?id=131436https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Last-American/Issue-4?id=131437
