The Last American #4 - Epic Comics

THE LAST AMERICAN No. 4, March 1991

Featuring a pulse-pounding firefight against an underground bunker riddled with automatic defences and a genuinely disconcerting exploration of a secret experimental test centre for autistic pregnant women, Alan Grant’s fascinating script for Issue Four of “The Last American” must surely have instantly captivated his readers just as soon as this twenty-eight page periodical begins. For whilst the Scottish writer’s plot does contain the odd sedentary moment as a thoroughly demoralised Ulysses S. Pilgrim’s ponders “the whole damn schmoozle” of life, death and the universe, the vast majority of this book focuses upon the solitary soldier’s faint hope that Melinda, or rather test subject Alpha Delta 99/017, might somehow have survived her horrific ordeal beneath the planet’s surface and still be alive scraping out an existence in the post-apocalyptic world.

Indeed, even when it becomes clear that the young mother’s child has finally succumbed to the girl’s claustrophobic confinement, along with many of the grisly establishment’s other unwitting inhabitants, this publication’s enthralling penmanship still provides the vaguest of hopes that the wonderfully innocent parent might have managed to claw her way through a “natural break in the sandstone, carved by the same water that kept Melinda and her friends alive just that little longer”, and resultantly found herself safe in the expansive Luray Caves.

Similarly as successful as the desperate need this comic generates to discover just what occurred to the bunker's occupants, is Grant’s all-pervading atmosphere that at any moment Pilgrim might be lethally set upon by a horde of cannibal scientists. Alpha Delta 99/017’s diary entries make it crystal clear just how desperate the centre’s administrators quickly became to find food, and resultantly the threat of some half-starved hairy fiend leaping out at the US Army Captain and his robotic guardians with their insatiable fangs palpably lurks inside every one of the derelict installation’s ominously shadowy corridors.

Artist Michael McMahon also deserves a major congratulatory slap on the back for his fantastic pacing of this concluding storyline. Whether it be Ulysses suddenly finding himself surrounded by a hail of bullets from the complex’s faulty computer-controlled weapon system, or later desperately searching for Melinda’s next clue as to where she fled to with her dwindling friends, the former “Judge Dredd” penciler’s panels are absolutely packed with dynamic action and an urgency to discover what happened next…

Writers: Alan Grant & John Wagner, Artist: Michael McMahon, and Letterer: Phil Felix