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For Flux, as promised:
Disrespecting Mark Millar’s Authority
“Two whores, a junkie, a couple of sissies, and a moron who can’t even tie his own shoelaces wants to tell the rest of the world how they should be living their lives? It’d be funny if it wasn’t so goddamned tragic.”
- The Commander, The Authority 14
Under the tenure of Warren Ellis, The Authority was described by Grant Morrison as taking the traditional superhero team "to the next level": it pioneered high-octane, so-called “widescreen” comics, crazed blockbuster action with all the restraints off and the volume turned up to 11. What Mark Millar has done in his subsequent run on the book, or so it has been claimed, is to take the superhero genre in a further new direction: one that explores the wider ramifications of a group of individuals with godlike powers who want to do the right thing. His Authority are not satisfied with merely preserving the status quo from world-threatening menaces: they want to change the world, and build a finer one in its place. And fortunately for fans of massive property damage and brutal ultraviolence, this is one superhero team who believe that end justifies just about any means.
Millar's limitations as a writer are sometimes painfully clear: a tendency to leave gaping plot holes, for example, or the fact that all his characters tend to speak in the same patented Mark Millar fashion (lots of adjectives, a blasé attitude towards incredible events and horrible violence, a sick sense of humour and often ill-fitting British slang). Yet in spite of this, he has made The Authority consistently the most entertaining comic in its class for the duration of his run to date. There’s no denying that the combination of sick humour, inventive concepts and action on a massive scale is satisfying on a purely visceral level. However, fans of the book frequently maintain that part of its appeal lies in the fact that the book has a strong political element. That it deals with real world issues, and explores the political ramifications of the existence of a group of individuals with godlike powers – and their own agenda.
But what is that agenda? What are the politics of The Authority the team and The Authority the comic book? One point of view is that The Authority are, essentially, the mythical "liberal elite" that the right-wing talk about and fear so much (in fact a team of Authority analogues who appeared in a recent Superman comic went by the name of 'The Elite'). They have left-wing, socially liberal ideals but they back them up with totalitarian force. They are, in other words, some people's idea of wish-fulfilment: what if there were super-people, and what if they agreed with us and put right all that we believe is wrong with the world? It's worth noting that this is how Superman started out: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shushter wanted a hero who would stand up to and overthrow the Nazis, and anyone else who oppressed the weak.
[GAP]
“Why do superheroes never go after the real bastards?” asks a rarely-used narrator in the first panel of Millar’s debut issue of The Authority, just before we see the team violently depose the regime and execute the government of a thinly-veiled Indonesia. Later on, we see them make the Russians pull out of Chechnya and the Chinese pull out of Tibet using threats and intimidation.
[this bit still in random thoughts format]
Is it really so radical to have the “real bastards” be the despotic leaders of third-world nations?
After all, the most notorious popular radical movement of our time sees its main enemy not as governments, but corporations. [/random thoughts]
In one of the series’ momentary pauses in between fights scenes and mass destruction, The Midnighter questions Jack Hawksmoor’s newly found and ostentatious wealth: “Kind of odd accoutrements for a self-proclaimed post-human revolutionary, don’t you think?” The leader of The Authority’s answer to this is that he’s made the corporations agree to reverse their policy of exploiting third-world workers in exchange for paying him to plug their brands. Which begs the question, why didn’t The Authority just point the Carrier’s guns at Nike and tell them where to stuff their sweatshops, ie use the same tactics we see them using to force the Russians out of Cheyna and the Chinese out of Tibet in the very same issue? Or do Western capitalist corporations warrant negotiation and compromise in a manner that the heads of nations who might still crop up as villains in a Hollywood movie do not? It would seem that in fact The Authority’s leader is just as willing to be bought by big business as the likes of George W. Bush or Tony Blair.
Even worse is Hawksmoor’s remark about not showing the riot cops who to hit by “dressing like a bum” or wearing “ethnic-style piercing[s]”: it’s facile, reactionary and above all disingenuous, because Jack Hawksmoor is the god of cities, and so will never have to worry about getting hit by a police baton in his life. Sat in his luxury home, ruling the world, the idea that his chosen attire of designer clothes is somehow more subversive than whatever the people on the barricades are wearing would be laughable if it wasn’t so offensive: indeed, by characterising those who hold progressive or libertarian views in this manner, Millar is falling back on the familiar and tired “smelly unwashed anarchist” stereotype so beloved of the Daily Mail.
[GAP]
"I think landing The Authority has let me rediscover my radicalism. I had a lovely time writing the mainstream superhero stuff after Swamp Thing, but my origins in comics are a little more dangerous. All my earliest work features babies being buggered, priests being burned, etc, etc, etc. It's tremendously liberating to work on a book where I can write superheroes for what are essentially Preacher fans."
- Mark Millar
It's a telling comment. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher has much to recommend it, but barely attempts anything resembling incisive political satire or constructive social commentary (despite what the more fervent Ennis acolytes may tell you).
[GAP]
In Millar's hands Apollo becomes something of a queen, with his long silver hair, pouting pretty boy ‘Richard Gere’ looks and light-hearted banter, whilst Midnighter is a leather-clad macho sadist with decidedly psycho-sexual overtones. They fit the archetypal butch and femme roles perfectly. Once these roles have been established, it’s more than a little worrying that bad things, up to and including sexual assault, keep happening to Apollo – he's in danger of being just another superhero’s girlfriend in need of being rescued, yet another feminine victim in a boy’s own world. Midnighter on the other hand is so full of testosterone it's a joke: "Just find me something I can hit!" He may sometimes find alternative solutions to just hitting things very hard, such as when he talks down Tank Man, but on one level he’s the least queer man on the planet: there’s no destabilised masculinity here, no questioning of gender roles. It’s telling that a number of fans have even chosen to see Midnighter and Apollo not as gay men per se, just two guys who happened to spend so long on the run and fighting for their lives with each other that one thing led to another. It would be nice to think that this was a particularly progressive mode of thought along the lines of Gore Vidal’s “there are no homosexuals, just homosexual acts” theory, but in reality it’s far more likely to be an example of the comic book reader’s capacity for denial: just like all the fanboys who refused to believe that Warren Ellis’ subtler Midnighter and Apollo were gay at all, even when he was dropping hints left, right and centre.
The book’s sexual politics become even more dubious when one considers how Millar writes the women in the team. Shen (aka Swift), Angie (aka The Engineer) and retroactively the team’s deceased leader, Jenny Sparks, are all given bisexual tendencies, as well as a tendency towards free and easy sexual relations (in what is by no means the first salacious and offensive association of the two attributes). So the Authority consists of two gay men in a tightly-knit, presumably monogamous and so conveniently non-threatening relationship, two straight men and two bisexual, available women. It sounds like a straight liberal man’s fantasy – which is, of course, exactly what it is. And that’s fine as far as it goes, since superhero comics have always been an exercise in wish-fulfilment and power fantasies and to an extent always will. But one has to ask: does the "finer world" The Authority are working towards consist of anything more than one long drug-fuelled orgy?
[GAP]
There is no moral consistency in Millar's Authority: it's never explained, for example, why Midnighter feels the need to kill the Beast-analogue in issue #16 after he's let Tank Man (who blew up a maternity ward full of bouncing babies, lest we forget) walk away in issue #14. It's important to remember the role of the artists in the comic's change in tone. Bryan Hitch, drawing heavily on the style of Alan Davis at least where faces and figures are concerned, renders The Authority with a certain nobility and classical grace. Frank Quitely's style, on the other hand, is almost grotesquely parodic. Under his pen, for example, Apollo isn't Hitch’s slender young god but a hulking, musclebound hunk. This is one of the reasons why it’s so tempting to read the Millar / Quitely take on Authority as a dark, blackly funny parody – and yet Millar himself has made it pretty clear on the Authority messageboards and elsewhere that this isn’t how he’s writing it at least primarily, that he’s firmly in the “go Authority!” camp.
But this is just symptomatic of a bigger, deeper problem: namely that however hard Millar ties to make it work, the superhero model he is using simply will not serve as a framework for a serious political message. It serves as a perfectly good framework for a lot of other messages: for example, what’s wrong with superhero comics today. It’s worth pointing out that as an allegory of the state of mainstream superhero comics, and a powerful, almost magical statement of intent, 'The Nativity' is a work of genius. In Kreigstein's battle with, and eventually recuperation by The Authority, we see Mark Millar laying out a new superhero paradigm – one which renders the old order obsolete, breaks all the genre's supposed rules, and yet still finds a way to incorporate the original ideas that made companies like Marvel great in the first place.
The only problem is that outside of the comics industry, all this means less than nothing. And that’s the problem: The Authority is only a strongly subversive, political comic relative to the accepted norm for superhero comics. A close reading of the politics of the Authority is impossible, because on closer inspection, the politics of both team and comic fall apart: like the comic colouring schemes of old, all we can see if we peer in closely is the gaps. In the final analysis, there is no coherent political ideology at the heart of the Authority, and the Authority has no politics to speak of. It’s just big dumb fun: albeit big dumb fun for people who smoke dope and might wear a Che Guevera t-shirt. In other words, outside the ultraconservative world of comics fandom, it’s as mainstream as they come. |
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