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Authority Brave New World Part II: Worth the wait ?(spoilers)

Eloi Tsabaoth

07:32 / 05.12.01

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-SPOILERS
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Did anyone get this?
As for whether it was worth it, I would say yes and no. This is your standard ´shit on the heroes´issue, so that when they come back, it will be supposedly be more satisfying to see them triumph. Some nice stuff here though, like Art Adam´s beautiful artwork, and the sudden realisation that The Colonel is David Beckham...
Shame he didn´t kill any of them off, though...

[ 05-12-2001: Message edited by: Undergoing Virtual Therapy ]

sleazenation

12:56 / 05.12.01

i'm quite interested to see this book.

Matthew Fluxington

13:03 / 05.12.01

just finished it. it's wicked, wicked, wicked. depressing, but you know everything will turn out okay... Millar is the fucking king of reducing his heroes to nothing, isn't he?

It's always nice to see comics drawn by Art Adams, too... nice work from him, as per usual.

Matthew Fluxington

16:41 / 05.12.01

Hm. There is something that feels vaguely mysoginistic about the fates of Swift and the Engineer. The specifics of what happened to them, the fact that their particular tortures are more to do with their gender, and that rape is involved, and perhaps a bit harsher than what happened to Jack, The Doctor, or Apollo....

I don't want to spoil it just yet, cos it's clear not everyone has read it....I'm just curious if it struck anyone else that way.

edited to say: oh, just to be clear - the torturers are clearly being mysoginistic, I'm speculating on the reasons why Mark Millar chose to make the girl's fates more gender specific and crueller in relative terms.

[ 05-12-2001: Message edited by: FLUX = reborn ]

Captain Zoom

19:14 / 05.12.01

flux, I think that the guys punishments were gender-specific too, in that they've all been emasculated somehow. if you consider the people supposedly behind the authority's torture, they're all meant to be conservative capitalist bastards. it figures that their punishments would be of a more "tradiational" mindset. it also figures that the punishments for the men would have less do with sex. I couldn't see them setting Jack Hawksmoor up as someone's bitch in prison, as the whole concept of male homosexuality, regardless of whether it's through love or violence, is distasteful to a male conservative mindset. Whereas the degradation of these uppity women

who are taking power from where it should be is more like putting them back where they belong. Anyway, that's how I read it.

Zoom.

Captain Zoom

19:15 / 05.12.01

Oh, p.s.

Mmmmmmmm Art Adams.

This comic looked great and read really well.

Zoom.

Matthew Fluxington

19:34 / 05.12.01

I don't know...besides "daily beatings", nothing really is even happening to Jack and Apollo, The Doctor has just been made an inanimate object, which really isn't that big of a deal, he's not even being tortured. Shen, however is being raped and made a slave, and Angie has been infected with diseases, and is being sexually and physically abused.

I think the guys are really getting off easy, and the girls are being humbled in a far more hateful way...

oh, where is Deva when you need hir...

Tamayyurt

04:23 / 06.12.01

I agree with FLUX. The guys did get off easy. I mean beatings? They get that all the time! We don't know if the doctor is "alive" in his inanimate state...if he is the powerlessness he's feeling right now (trapped in your own body) is pretty horrible.

PS. Who's David Beckham?

sleazenation

07:04 / 06.12.01

David Beckham is the captain of the English national football team, is of almost legendary limit intelligence but high in Charisma (for mouth-breathing football fans) He's also married to also non-too-bright spice girl Victoria (posh- an epithet which has always amused me)

Sax

07:30 / 06.12.01

However, he is a fucking exemplary football player, which ,after all, is what he gets paid for.

sleazenation

17:07 / 06.12.01

Good to finally see this title, although the main thought with me as i was reading it was to wonder what Millar's unaltered script would have been like.

the Fool

19:24 / 06.12.01

Apollo was getting more than beatings. He was almost a 'prison bitch', especially the way Last Call told him to light his cigarette.

They also gave Jack brain damage. Which is pretty harsh.

sleazenation

19:44 / 06.12.01

i wouldn't want to be an atrocity surveyor, standing over mutilated corpses and destroyed lives saying oh you may think you've got it bad, but....

Hush

17:20 / 08.12.01

Jenny Quantum! I had forgotten about her, and I was so wrong.

Maybe I am just identifying with men in leather looking after children. But I loved this.

The wait was not only worth it, it was necessary to give the full value to this story.

Coitus Reasumptus.

The Damned Yankee

21:50 / 09.12.01

A brief statement regarding the last page of Authority #27:

Moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa!

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

08:51 / 11.12.01

Hmmm. I dunno.

It just seemed a bit obvious, and slightly absurd - why on Earth would any world government that read its comics books keep the authority alive? To punish them? That's mad scientist thinking.

Eloi Tsabaoth

08:51 / 11.12.01

I think it's obvious that despite what Millar might think, this comic bears as much resemblance to reality as your average issue of Superman. He's the Verhoeven of comics, chuckling at his own subtlety while layering on gratuitous T+A, gore and bad taste with a sprinkling of sledgehammer-blatant satire.
Still, keeps me entertained...

The Damned Yankee

14:10 / 11.12.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Pancakes:
Hmmm. I dunno.

It just seemed a bit obvious, and slightly absurd - why on Earth would any world government that read its comics books keep the authority alive? To punish them? That's mad scientist thinking.

Or conspiracy theory?

'Sides, I have it on good authority that Dubya's favorite book is Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar (no, I am not making this up). He's not up to comic books yet.

But hey, unbelieveable or not, it beats the hell out of the "they're all dead and the pro-corporate asshole Authority is here to stay" scenario, yes?

Tom Coates

14:10 / 11.12.01

I still maintain it's kind of shame they went back to super-hero stuff after Ellis - bad super-people just aren't that interesting to me...

sleazenation

14:31 / 11.12.01

in what way was ellis run 'not superheroes'?

The Knowledge +1

16:39 / 11.12.01

Captain Zoom

16:46 / 11.12.01

sleaze, ellis didn't have super-guys fighting super-guys in the traditional sense, as Miller has really. Granted it's been in a fairly original way, but boils down to the good guys versus the bad guys. Ellis at least dealt with superterrorist armies, transdimensional invasions and god. Miller so far has had gentically engineered super-types, and evil version of the Doctor, and the corporate authority.

I wonder what ennis' and azzarello's runs would have been like?

Zoom.

sleazenation

20:15 / 11.12.01

I thought ellis was just going for progressively bigger villains on his run - starting with very traditional evil supervillain in kaizen gomorrah (along with his villainous hench persons) next up an invading reality populated with an empire of supervillans and then on to god. from the start there was only a very limited amount of stories in ellis run and they included supervillains .

sleazenation

20:25 / 11.12.01

Apparently Azzerello's run would have focused on faith issues with some members of the authority questioning the morality of their actions...

Mr Tricks

22:12 / 11.12.01

ahhh...

Adam's art was a pleasure to see... The writting was enjoyable.

A bit of a surprise to see Swift in the media.

And yeah it seemed the women where worse off, felt like that was part of Millars plan as these villans would surly be sexist as well.

I loved the Homophobic/erotic satisfaction of Lastcall's treatment of Apollo... this of course was somewhat diminished by the almost forgetable fill--in run.

Hawksmoore as braindamaged homeless dude... nice irony. Of course the catch is that Jenny Quantum could potentally cure them all with a gu-gu-ga-ga... which also sort of hampers the drama. My hope is that it gats resolved in part #3 & leaves #4 to explore the ramafications & impact of this treatment on the charactors...

Oh and as for the Doctor... used to remove those stuborn stains... sounds hellish & easily perverse!!!!
And from France's leading thinker....YIKES!!!

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