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Underground > Comic Books >

AUTHORITY no More...

  
  

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Mr Tricks
22:28 / 17.05.02
Well, so the last issue wasn't Art Adams... this other guy did pretty well...

Yet, I can bairly remember what happened... sort of let down I suppose... Oh well.
 
 
Tamayyurt
23:48 / 17.05.02
What a lame ending so such an awesome comic. It's a shame.
 
 
sleazenation
09:15 / 18.05.02
but remember kids - superheroes all talk different and walk different now, (ie they all act like lame authority rip-offs) so it doesn't matter that the Authority more with a wimper than a bang and glossed over much of the ethics and inteventionism that was supposed to make it such a different comic... uh right kids? right?
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
09:38 / 18.05.02
So, for those of us that haven't weasted money buying it, what happened in the last couple of issues.
 
 
troy
17:36 / 18.05.02
Um, I thoroughly enjoyed the final issue of Authority and wasn't let down in the least. I liked Seth's powers (larynx-freezing vision, indeed). I liked Seth's fate. I liked how the team forced us regular folks to save ourselves. And I liked the marriage ('bout damn time).

Apparently, I'm in the minority, though. Ah well, I'm used to that.

"Welcome to the oval office, President Gore."
 
 
sleazenation
17:47 / 18.05.02
for the curious and cash strapped:

Thanks to apollo killing the machine last issue the remaining team members are free of their memory blocks and immediately slough of every trace of the degredations meted out to them on behalf of the G8 nations and recombine. Meanwhile Jenny Quantum appears to have grown a few years and aquired the power of speech. The Authority then refuse to save Humanity from the problems of the bleed, so humanity saves itself- Off panel. There is just time after that for the authority to dump the safely generic president in Iraq before Miller pats himself on the back for the way many superhero comic creators are now producing immitations of his tales of violence and glossed over politics.
 
 
Tom Coates
19:42 / 18.05.02
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the recent issues of the Authority have maintained its tradition of being unlike any other super-hero comic book ever made in several key ways. And then I'm going to further stick my neck out and declare the recent storylines possibly the least intelligent type of epic bollocks I've seen in my life.

He's learnt a couple of key lessons, which is that Saturday serial escapes from previously awful situations can still work in comic books, and in fact they work wonderfully well because you can then ludicrously up the 'horror and degradation' level each issue to play totally on the wish-fulfillment aspects, alienated teenager aspects and frustrated sexual appetites of teen entertainment. It's all rape fantasies, 'thrilling to depictions of absolute control' and 'if I had super-powers I'd whup their asses and they'd all fucking listen to me' wank.

I'll accept that stuff when the scripting is intelligent, because it's a pretty potent concoction of heady base desires to go fucking around in. But when the scripting is unintelligent it's not only unedifying, it's insulting.
 
 
troy
21:43 / 18.05.02
And I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the scripting in the final issue *was* intelligent. I'll stick my neck out even farther and point out that I found Ellis' Authority dull as dishwater (I liked some of his Stormwatch stuff, though); for me, Millar's Authority issues were the only ones that did anything for me to begin with.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
22:13 / 18.05.02
I've been biting my tongue about the final issue of Authority all week - I HATED it in the worst way. I'm going to agree with Tom and Sleaze, the issue was one enormous cop-out followed by Millar patting himself and Ellis on the back for "changing superheroes forever". It was repulsive, poorly written, and most especially anti-climactic. I hope that they don't bring back The Authority for future series, I think its out of touch now, and I just get the impression that whatever would happen next would follow in the footsteps of the selfcongratulatory rhetoric of the final pages of this issue.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
13:00 / 19.05.02
And I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the scripting in the final issue *was* intelligent.

You're at liberty to say that. You're mad, but there we go. It was so imbecilic as to be fascinating. It was also, in my opinion, one of the worst-structured pieces of writing I have ever seen. There were about eight issues squashed into one; all resolution and no climax. Maybe Millar was labouring under a space constraint, but there was so much going on there we needed more of to have any faith in it.

The characters reached new lows of idiotic behaviour and obvious solutions. Way back when, when Jenny Sparks ordered the Doctor to cut the Blue blood out of Sliding Albion, that was intersting - here was a hero group comitting something between ethnic cleansing and Humanitarian Intervention. When Swift co-opted Dr. Krigstein into the Authority so that he wouldn't keep popping up as some kind of ludicrous Arch-Nemsis, that was new. But this? The 'Steppenwolf' solution from Alan Moore's 'Miracleman'? A Deux Ex Machina revival of the Authority? So bored now. Seth was a potential goldmine of cool endings. He was even a potentially fascinating character. Instead we get an off-switch (read 'big red button marked "do not push"') and the Midnighter being caught off guard...oh, please... Is this the same Midnighter who, we have repeatedly been told, can process millions of strategies in his head, plan a battle before it happens? Or some other Midnighter who just looks really similar? And I'm supposed to believe he never considered the possibility that Seth was going to show up? Like Hell. So now in this episode we have Midnighter in peril...

Rant finished...for now...
 
 
Ganesh
13:53 / 19.05.02
I found the Apollo & Midnighter 'wedding' both ludicrous and patronising in the extreme - dovetailing immaculately with the nauseatingly self-congratulatory 'pat on the back' tone of the issue generally ("Look! Gay superheroes getting married! How revolutionary am I?") White leather? Puh-lease...
 
 
Jack Fear
15:52 / 19.05.02
Thought that was kind of cute, meself--Midnighter in white, Apollo in black--the union of opposites, indeed. And that would make Midnighter the "bride," wouldn't it... and I'd always had him pegged for a top...

But yeah, pretty goddam awful overall. I detest Millar's prose: too self-consciously "naughty," too larded with useless modifiers, nothing that anybody would ever say out loud ever. Apparently he never learned that brevity is the soul of wit.

And Millar never met a promising set-up that he couldn't piss away.

And Christ, not another brilliant supervillainous cabal that lays out its plans such that they all hinge on a single factor (in this case, the pseudo-Engineer).

And Christ, not another off-panel deus ex machina.

And Christ, Gary Erskine's art... Oh, my. oh my, my, my. Where to begin? Let's begin with the top panel of the last page, shall we? The overhead shot? Where the dancers seem to be leaning about thirty degrees to starboard, if the vanishing point implied by the lines on the floor is any indication, and the bench intersects with the wall in a distinctly non-Euclidean way, while the Doctor apparently hovers above it (he can't possibly be sitting on it): and two tiers below that, we've got a close-up of Jack Hawksmoor that's positively cubist in its insistence for showing up two planes, in utter disregard for the way faces actually hang in three-dimensional space. And so on throughout.

And Jenny Quantum, born in Singapore, has somehow become entirely Caucasian over the last four issues...

The franchise has been driven intothe ground: in the ground let it stay. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
 
 
Ganesh
15:58 / 19.05.02
The fact that one of the pair has to be 'bride' (in a dunderheaded "it's-not-the-one-you-expected-that's-how-subversive-I-am" kind of way) is, to me, indicative of Millar's whole take on the matter. He's so busy congratulating himself on having gay superheroes at all that he's relatively unbothered about actually making them believable...
 
 
Jack Fear
20:35 / 19.05.02
Sorry, 'nesh--you're meant to imagine sarcasm parsers around that entire paragraph. Ah, the inadequacies of written communication...
 
 
sleazenation
21:58 / 19.05.02
Actually in the last issue of Ellis run it certainly appears that Jenny sparks was to be reborn in london - a detail entirely ignored by miller in favour of sinagapore... but having said that, why couldn't jenny quantum have been born to caucasian parents in singapore?
 
 
the Fool
22:12 / 19.05.02
I have to agree with the general consensus here. I was really disappointed with this issue.

It was like Ren and Stimpy after John K left. Just hollow shadows and bad taste jokes.

And what happened to Art Adams? I can't help but feel this wasn't the 'real' final issue of Authority, just a stand in. The real final issue was either never made or got locked in some basement draw in the corporate offices of Time/Warner/DC. Corporations defeating the Authority from the real world. Bastards!
 
 
sleazenation
22:22 / 19.05.02
No I think this really was the last issue - Art Adams apparently had to pull out cos all the time that redrawing huge chunks of each issue was taking.
 
 
the Fool
22:49 / 19.05.02
So, is that it? No more Authority? Wasn't Garth Ennis going to do something?
 
 
sleazenation
23:22 / 19.05.02
Garth ennis is doing something, but that's in august and is a special/oneshot kind of deal. no continuing series on the horizon - but what i meant was that that was the rel last issue of millers run.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
23:35 / 19.05.02
Yeah, Garth Ennis is doing an Authority thing, but it's pretty minor, and it's pretty much just necrophilia at this point...
 
 
Mystery Gypt
00:46 / 20.05.02
the recent issues of the Authority have maintained its tradition of being unlike any other super-hero comic book ever made in several key ways.

can somebody or somebodies -- either here or in a new thread -- explain to me how it was unlike any other superhero book? i only just recently read ellis' run and the first few after that, as well as the preceding stormwatch comics; though i thought they were big and fun and well written and all that, i just don't see how this is anything radical or different. i'm not trying to start and argument, i just genuinely don't get it -- it's guys in lycra facing impossible challenges. where's the "unlike any other?" feel free to talk to me like i'm retarded, i just really want to understand for once and for all -- not why it's GOOD, but why it's NEW.
 
 
the Fool
01:00 / 20.05.02
I agree with you. It was just good solid superhero action fun to me. Fun being the operative word. I think MM likes to think that because he made the authority a bit more 'over the top' that was somehow revolutionary.
 
 
sleazenation
08:11 / 20.05.02
The arguement that I heard for the Authority goes something like this - The Authority is NOT new - Political interventionist superheroes have been done beforeby people like alan moore in miracle man, and miracleman managed to remake the world in his image in a way that the Authority refused to do. Over the top violence has been done in comics such as scott McCloud's "Destroy" - the pair have been combined in stuff such as Rob Liefelds Youngblood... No, the Authority isn't new, but has been influential - carbon copy heroes are a dime a dozen now- - a thinly veiled authority knock-off was defeated by superman in his own title. ultraviolence with plenty of swearing and internal organs is now the order of the day.

Of course, just because something is much immitated, doesn't mean it was much cop in the first place... (Ali G anyone?)
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
10:26 / 20.05.02
The reason Jenny Quantum can't be born to Caucasian parents in Singapore is that she wasn't, when we saw her in that first Quitely drawn storyline she definitely wasn't Caucasian then.

In other news, All the Rage has apparently said that a number of people, including Morrison, have been approached to write Authority stuff, just so long as Midnighter and Apollo don't do ANY poofy stuff at all. Whether the powers that be would be happy if that bird girl and the Engineer out of nowhere developed an interest in one another has not been reported.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
10:37 / 20.05.02
The premise of Authority was new to me - that a supergroup would accept the posssible responsibility implied by their powers, and would not back off making decisions overtly for the whole world. Miracleman's world was rather different - the superheros on that world could be counted on one hand (possibly two) and it was a straight case of Miracleman and co asserting their power. The result was a disturbing fascist utopia, or maybe a deiocracy - if there is such a word.

The Authority's intention was to make a better world, but along rather more human lines. Miracleman was more like Doc Manhattan. He saw tiny specs of people with strangely small desires. Jenny Sparks cared about everyone, and it pissed her off that so many people got a bad deal.

I think it's not that it's completely new, but that it's unusual, and then a little smarter than the others, and it takes place in a working continuum rather than a new one.

But it's all over now...and has been for a while.
 
 
The Natural Way
11:08 / 20.05.02
Much rather read the Avengers anyway.....
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
12:03 / 20.05.02
Whether the powers that be would be happy if that bird girl and the Engineer out of nowhere developed an interest in one another has not been reported.

It wouldn't be out of nowhere - Millar, in his quest to be "subversive" has made references to both of those characters being bisexual.
 
 
Ganesh
12:05 / 20.05.02
So they'd presumably be happy to let men join them in their hot girl-on-girl sex-play? Kewl.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
12:45 / 20.05.02
Eeeee. I seem to recall that Jenny slept with one or both of them in the rather ghastly 'secret origins of the Authority' run that Millar wrote. That would be the same sequence where Jack Hawksmoor wore Tokyo and Jenny hung out with Adolf.

Eeeee.
 
 
Ganesh
13:01 / 20.05.02
Are we having subversive fun yet?
 
 
Jack Fear
13:05 / 20.05.02
This Just In: Warren Ellis his Bad Self weighs in on the demise of THE AUTHORITY (from Ellis' mailing list, reproduced more-or-less in its entirety and without permission and just let the fucker try doing anything about it).

Addressing first the aesthetic dimension:

... I was a great fan of Mark Millar's take on the book. Hell, I ought to have been -- I got him the job. I also had a word with them on Frank Quitely's behalf. But now the current iteration is pretty much gone. ...

It's generally assumed that executive editorial pressures from New York put the book in its box. And while I'm not about to defend interference in the work, I have a feeling that it all stems from a single decision on the parts of a few writers.

THE AUTHORITY is not about Apollo and The Midnighter being gay.

I was deliberately sketchy about the lives of all the characters. Much of their internal lives were inference. The book was no more about them being gay than it was about any of the others being hetero.

Mark inverted that, being smart. But this directly led to them being identified by everyone else in the book as, and attacks on them being based on, only being gay. That's all they were. Another AUTHORITY special featured pretty much the only dialogue aimed at them being focused on their homosexuality. All that seemed to matter about them was that they were poofs.

I don't doubt the "empowering" nature of gay heroes delivering beatings upon gaybashers. Gaybashing has not gone away and it, and the people who do it -- and I've met people who openly admit to hunting gay people in the streets -- make my flesh crawl.

But when you make them *only* gay...

I can't condone cutting images of gay men in love. Cutting those elements from a portrayal of a strong and committed gay relationship is more disgusting still.

But if an environment is created where those characters are only about experience of and reaction to threat based on their sexuality, and most usually about homosexual rape and more general homosexual assault, then trouble is being invited, and you'd better be damn sure you have the ammunition to fight it off.

And on the editorial front:

Unwarranted and persistent editorial interference breaks a covenant. As a writer, you've been hired to do a job because you can be trusted to do it. When that trust is removed, you walk. You don't finish out a stated but uncontracted working period. You walk. Otherwise, you're in the system, institutionalised, and you will be viewed with contempt, stated or otherwise. Or, to quote an Olde English epigram; "If you keep on being their c**t, they'll keep on fucking you."

Removing the illusion of complexity about the book was a valid creative decision. I don't personally agree with it, but he created great comics nonetheless.

Staying put while things were being taken out of his hands was a bad decision.

This is Jack talking again:

So essentially, Ellis blames Millar, and not Wildstorm, for the artistic decline of the book: Wildstorm wanted to neuter the book, sure--but it was Millar's decision to allow it.

He could have walked away, at any time, with clean hands and a clean conscience (the implied and self-serving example, of course, is Ellis' own departure from HELLBLAZER--leaving the book rather than allowing editorial interference).

Instead Millar chose to make the changes that Wildstorm requested, every single one, and to piss and moan about it afterwards (and he IS pissing and moaning--his invective against Wildstorm started making the rounds of the comics-related boards last weekend).

And this is the man who has the balls to preach to us about "changing the way things are done"...
 
 
sleazenation
15:48 / 20.05.02
This isn't a problem unique to the comic world - Hitchcock orginally intended Carey Grant's character to be guilty of attempting to murder his wife in "Suspicion" but was forced to back down by the studios.

But leaving aside the issues of ethical decisions for the creators (ie whether to honor a contract/ comitment to a title you feel is being editorially compromised) I wonder what would the fans prefer?

Choice 1. An unfinished (and possibly unfinishable) story that is as close to the creators vision as possible under the best of circumstances.

Choice 2. A finished, but thoroughly unsatisfying story that compromises the story.
 
 
the Fool
22:25 / 20.05.02
Choice 1. An unfinished (and possibly unfinishable) story that is as close to the creators vision as possible under the best of circumstances.

Choice 2. A finished, but thoroughly unsatisfying story that compromises the story.

Its not much of a choice really. Either way you feel ripped off.
 
 
the Fool
00:45 / 21.05.02
MM has his say...

from X-Fan

Hey,

Got a serious deadline today so I'll be quick...

Basically, I chose to attack Wildstorm/ DC because I have some insider-knowledge of the company and I have been seriously undermined by the machinations of the corporation. I'm not alone in this and this was evident by the number of people who jumped ship last year when Bill and Joe seized control of Marvel and raised the good flag.


Authority is a perfect example. The book was brilliant, but was stuck around number eighty or ninety in the sales chart (which made no sense given that it was the best book on the market). Quitely and I took over with issue 13 and sales stayed the same. We did an international promotional stunt with Apollo and the Midnighter and sales jumped over five months to make the book not only Wildstorm's biggest seller, but DC's THIRD biggest. Our last issue together outsold Superman and Batman and was only beaten into third place by JLA and Kevin's Green Arrow. We picked up a bundle of awards, got nominated for a dozen more and were named as Wizard's book of the year.

But they still f*cked us.

At a time when the industry was dying on its feet, this was defying all the odds and actually rising up the charts. But they still f*cked us. The reason was simple; DC is a corporation and they didn't like a character who looked like Batman having a relationship with a guy who looked a bit like Superman. They also disliked the attitude, the violence and sometimes the language, but this was always a smaller concern. Wildstorm did, however, like the sales. They liked the sales so much that they spun the book out into two ongoing series and had a whole gaggle of special projects planned. But DC were making things VERY uncomfortable for them and an eighteen month assassination took place.

First off, they let Marvel steal Quitely. Frank would have stayed for an extra few bucks a page, but they said they wouldn't pay him a cent. I don't think this was planned, but it was very, very stupid. The time needed for a new artist to start from scratch would mean that the issue would be delayed a few months. Art Adams, brilliant that he is, is famously meticulous and very, very slow. This meant the book would be delayed for TEN months. Between parts one and two of my final story, they then sandwiched a four part series and then, to make matters worse, they started chopping into my scripts (and Art's art) making the book as vanilla as possible. They liked the sales, but they didn't like the reasons the book had so much heat. Could this be any MORE of a corporation?

Add this to the fact that I received two personally abusive messages from the New York office (too obscene to be printed here) and had people at Wildstorm and DC briefing against me in private to Rich (Johnston) and other people at a time when everyone thought I had cancer last year, I think I have every reason to feel slighted and to lash out at what I think are a bunch of people making very bad decisions and slighting the people who have a tendency to sell a lot of comics. The final insult, I discovered last month, was when they held back the solicitation for the next Authority trade until I handed in the final dialogue for issue 29 because, and I quote, "we knew he wouldn't hand it in if he saw that we were splitting us his last two story arcs over two collections."

Again, I can only wonder at the logic of annoying a creator who's writing two of the top 5 books at the moment, someone who sold a great deal of comics for them recently and someone who (let's face it) didn't bugger off. I stuck around and finished my commitment, despite everything they did to me.

Yeah, Marvel was a piece of sh!t for a long time and the creators were treated badly in a great many cases, but I didn't blame Bill Clinton for the Nixon administration. Bill and Joe have done a lot of good things since they took over Marvel. They killed the pay-freeze for creators, they NEVER interfere with the scripts, they treat the artists like artists and, no matter how much of an ass you think Jemas is, he and Joe have pulled that company from the red into the black and Marvel have 21 of the top 25 books. This isn't just sales, this is also critical acclaim so they must be doing SOMETHING right.

Meanwhile, I wouldn't rule out working for DC ever again. John Byrne says that every five years and it always comes back to bite him on the ass. What I WOULD rule out is working for many of the personalities who made a lot of stupid decisions in the last eighteen months. But I don't think they'll be there by the time my Marvel contract expires anyway.

Cheers,
MM

PS So much for being quick.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
09:11 / 21.05.02
Modest guy.
 
  

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