RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Comic Books History of The Authority

In early 1999, Warren Ellis dropped two bombs on the super-hero genre. The first was Planetary, a new series that chronicled a small and secret team's investigations of a super-hero universe. The second was The Authority.

The Authority, though a new series, was actually a revamping of Stormwatch. It featured the same writer and artists as Stormwatch, as well as a number of the same characters. But it felt incredibly new. Ellis, Hitch, and Neary had invented "widescreen" super-heroics -- as it quickly came to be called. The art was impecably smooth and tight, colored expertly. The transitions between scenes were rapid, and the transitions between panels were smooth, focusing on the three-dimensionality of each shot rather than the flat, literary quality of the page. The overall effect was not only cinematic but felt like a big-budget blockbuster. Super-powered villains flew through major cities en masse, devastating them. This was a super-hero world turned loose, with no restrictions keeping villains from simply doing massive damage. The effect was like the destruction of London in Alan Moore's Miracleman, only in a world where super-heroes abounded -- creating a "yes, this would happen" effect on the scale of an entire line of super-hero titles rather than just one. This would be the great strength and a continuing problem for the series, as the damage inflicted on the world added up and went unreflected in other Wildstorm titles.



Each story was set at four issues. The stakes were high: whole cities, millions of lives, and heroes whose powers together seemed the greatest ever assembled. Pressure built; a reader knew the actual number of pages left to each story and wondered how it could possibly be resolved. The Authority #4 concluded the conflict by having Midnighter use the team's ship as a blunt instrument, literally running it through the villain, his entire island, and all of his seemingly unstoppable technology. It was brilliant.

The next two stories only escallated the stakes. The second storyline featured the Authority very questionably annihilating an entire global regime on an alternate Earth; the Doctor held Italy in place while the planet rotated, burying the world capital underwater. Admittedly, the regime was detestable, unsophisticated, and warmongering -- but a careful reader got the sense that Jenny Sparks, bitchy psudo-feminist (and appropriately the spirit of the 20th century), was willing to kill everyone in Italy because the ruling regime had used rape on a wide scale -- a motivation hinted at her comments as she visits her former husband, who she says she only loved from the waist down (right... as it penetrated her, fucked her, came in her -- facts she can easily forget as she smokes cooly), and only takes the female members along. The final storyline had the team fight "God" and had Jenny Sparks die -- predictably but appropriately -- on 31 December 2000.



The entire creative team left with issue #12, unable to trump what he had already done. He knew to leave the stage when things were high. Still, it felt like a tragedy. From the opening of a new issue to the final page, had been little breathing room. I would sit and smoke two cigarettes as I read nervously, my eyes and mind at worst tightly attentive and at best absolutely reeling. A second reading quickly followed. The month between issues felt impossibly long. The dialogue was snappy and sparse, the art crisp and beautiful, often depicting scenes of grand scope with (at least) the mastery of the best Hollywood special effects company.

Many doubted that anyone could follow Ellis and Hitch, but the next team had been hand-picked by Ellis himself and was scheduled to fuck everything up for a year and then do the same. It looked like The Authority was becoming a kind of super-hero journal wherein great creators could really let loose with their ideas, changing the entire genre in the process. It looked like the only rule for The Authority was to be bold in one's vision -- to do something new in order to meet the challenge set by one's predecessors. Chosen as writer was Mark Millar, whose inconsistent but at times incredibly brilliant run on Swamp Thing years before was all anyone knew him for. The penciller would be Frank Quitely, who had illustrated Flex Mentallo, a brilliant mini-series written by Grant Morrison, but who had done little visible work and who had a wavy style that, while perfect for a mini-series that might entirely be an acid trip, might not work for the widescreen super-hero series.

All doubts ended with the publication of #13. Millar took Jenny Sparks' notion of changing the world for the better, rather than fighting super-villains simply to restore the status quo, to the logical extreme: #13 opens with the Authority interveneing in world politics, overthrowing a corrupt regime. As a result, the Authority become celebrities, interviewed as such and featured on magazine covers; super-models and actors have parties on the Carrier with super-heroes. And Jack Hawksmoor, now leader, tells off President Bill Clinton. When they attempt to secure Jenny Quantum -- Jenny Sparks reincarned as the spirit of the 21st century --, they face a government-run group of super-heroes that obviously parallels Marvel Comics' Avengers. Over the course of the storyline, virtually every Marvel Comics hero is featured in modified form as part of a covert super-hero project that remains from the Cold War. Their leader -- an old, dwarfish, savage version of Jack Kirby -- and the "heroes" themselves are shown as cruel: Tank Man (a version of Iron Man) explodes a full nursery, believing Jenny Quantum inside. The Captain America parallel has the compulsion to rape everyone he defeats, actualizing his conquest sexually, and rapes none other than Apollo before the Midnighter has his revenge by raping back -- with a jackhammer. Apollo flies through the head of a version of Giant Man, whose legs have already been vaporized; Apollo later uses his heat vision to cut the legs off the version of Captain America. References to the stupidity of comic book characters, including their defense of the status quo, abound. It was a literalization of what Millar had stated to the press:



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The thing I had in mind when I took on the Authority, the brief I had in my head when I started the first page, was that this book should begin where the Justice League and The Avengers draw the line.



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Revolutionary from his first panel, Millar literally kills off the past history of super-heroes, paving over their corpses in order to build a new utopia. A few moments of cleverness stand out as truly revolutionary in a storyline full of cleverness: most of all, the ending -- in which, in the context of an ultra-violent story, the brilliant mad scientist villain is not killed but offered a job working for the Authority to make the world a better place -- which was, after all, his goal all along. But this was not only a brilliantly original move in terms of the narrative. This was nothing less than Kirby himself, corrupted by the corporate comic culture he spawned, being co-opted, his original utopian spirit (the man himself had died, having made -- like his alter ego here -- many bitter statements about the industry in the years prior, and would probably not have approved of Millar's work), being pulled into the ranks of The Authority, into this transformation of the genre, this new work that stripped away the bullshit.

Millar's first storyline, "The Nativity," was a tour de force that stands as a classic -- and it launched the new creative team to immense popularity. The Authority had made Warren Ellis, its first writer, into a celebrity who received offers that made other writers jealous. Hitch, the artist under Ellis, quickly began a run on JLA, DC's most popular title. Now the new team, which had long labored in obscurity, were becoming celebrities just like their characters -- and, just like their characters, being rewarded for doing things their way, for fucking things up.

Part 2: Earth Inferno, Spin-offs, and Fill-ins

Things went downhill from there, however. The next two issues, for the first times since the title began, had art by a fill-in artist -- a good one, to be sure, but not as good as Quitely and certainly inconsistent with Quitely's style. Quitely, besides being slower than many artists (who work at an alarmingly fast speed due to the demands of monthly publication), took time off to illustrate the final issue of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. It was understandable: The Invisibles was nothing if not a noble cause, and the final issue was one of the greatest works of literature ever published. But it threw off the new storyline, which featured the seemingly invincible Authority battling the one foe they might not be able to defeat -- the Earth itself. We saw the Authority interveneing more in world affairs, including getting the Russians to withdraw from Chechnia and the Chinese from Tibet! It was moving; it was wonderful -- it was what super-heroes should be doing. We also saw New York devestated by a tsunami -- raising the issue of how the world could deal with all of this devestation. Eventually, we saw a super-villain prison outside of time and the moving evacuation of the entire planet's population to alternate Earths. Quitely did return for the second half of the storyline, and, though the book lost a month in addition to the two artistic fill-in issues, all seemed right as the team headed into their final four-issue storyline.

The situation of The Authority was made worse during this time, however, by the beginning of Wildstorm's spin-offs designed to capitalize on the title's remarkable success, which had begun with its first issue and, in the face of all expectations, actually become much stronger under the new creative team. Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority was the first spin-off -- a mini-series that, while below the quality of the main book, was at least written by Mark Millar. It attempted to fill in the gap between Stormwatch and The Authority and gave us background information on a number of characters. Around the start of this mini-series came Planetary / The Authority: Ruling the World, a prestige-format one-shot written by none other than Warren Ellis and featuring the great art of Phil Jimenez -- all quite impressive, though the story itself had some pacing problems. Even these, however, shattered the four-issue storyline pattern that had worked so well for the book. A few months later, Wildstorm published The Authority Annual 2000 as part of a crossover through its 2000 annuals, resulting in a compitent story with good art, though one utterly inconsequential and disposable, an episode servicing a crossover never even explained in the annual. Had the spin-offs retained the quality of these three, however, the house Jenny Sparks built would have remained quite solid. In fact, the worst was yet to come.

Before the final storyline of the Mark Millar year could commence, however, we got a fill-in issue. Issue #21 also served as an introduction to the new monthly spin-off, The Monarchy, which would feature the characters from Stormwatch that had been largely dropped in The Authority. The scale was to be more limited, leaving the epic battles to the Authority and the problems too small for the Authority's attention to this new team. Issue #21, however, was hardly an issue of The Authority: not only did it break the structure of the book by not being a part of a four-issue story (it didn't even feature the format of the title page, with a black bar at the top and bottom of a single wide panel) and not featuring any members of that year's creative team, but it destroyed the book's numbering -- the second year would have to finish two months late and with #25 instead of #24. Combined with the two artistic fill-in issues, Frank Quitely had only illustrated two issues of the last five. That the title was not simply delayed, putting quality (or at least consistency) over quantity (i.e. the income from a monthly title), stood at sharp odds with a title that had been defined by great creators being given the liberty to go crazy with a title. Moreover, Wildstorm had been mildly censoring the new team from the beginning -- making the overthrown dictator a generic one instead of a specific one in a specific country (which might make the sequence seem like a writer's revenge fantasy against a real-world ruler -- as if such a thing were bad) and insisting that Apollo's flight through the version of Giant Man, beautifully rendered by Quitely, had a red filter applied to it in order to obscure the violence. And Millar had been writing around such problems -- making the version of Captain America's many rapes strongly implicit rather than explicit, for example. Millar and Quitely had actually talked of quitting when they were censored. But, all these problems aside, we were going to get Millar's final storyline, completely pencilled by Quitely, concluding in #25 (rather than #24) with a new one-year run by some new, unannounced team to follow and hopefully to fuck things up all over again.

Part 3: The First Derailment (Quitely), Plus More Spin-offs and Fill-ins

#22 was published on schedule, though two months behind and numbered one higher than it should have been. And it was unimaginably fabulous. But as soon as it was published, the trade press reported that Frank Quitely had left the title, having been offered nothing less than Marvel Comics' X-Men, a very high-profile book soon to be revamped, retitled New X-Men and given Grant Morrison as a writer. Mark Millar had already begun Marvel's Ultimate X-Men, another high-profile book -- though this had not sabotaged The Authority because it takes less time to write a book than to illustrate one. As a result of Quitely's sudden departure, The Authority had been pulled from the schedule, meaning -- because of the distribution system -- that a new issue could not arrive for at least four months. It seemed that The Authority was a victim of its own success. This was particularly upsetting because the entire team had -- remarkably -- been killed in #22!

Wildstorm soon announced that Arthur Adams was to fill in for Quitely and complete the "Brave New World" storyline. Adams had apparently been Millar's choice; it was a respectable move under bad circumstances. But Adams had other commitments that would delay this completion. Wildstorm thus announced an intermediary storyline, "Transfer of Power," to have four parts but to take place after #22 -- during the "Brave New World" storyline. It made sense, in a way; after all, a new, government-run Authority had been featured in #22, ready to substitute for the old, government-challenging one. Written by Tom Peyer (who many good writers like but whose work is tremendously inconsistent) and pencilled by Dustin Nguyen (a good artist but with little published work), "Transfer of Power" would feature the new Authority during its early days, being vicious instruments of the elite. Their first act was to dump the refugees in the Carrier onto an alternate Earth. They drew their fights -- much like mainstream super-heroes, a parallel not explored in the story -- away from cities and towards the poor who were a problem for ruling politicians and the Alaskan wilderness that could not be developed by oil concerns because it was too pristine. The story also featured a super-hero priest brought in for camera oportunities and propaganda about how this Authority had so respected the former one. Moreover, the Apollo equivalent cried constantly at the war crimes they were committing, while the Midnighter equivalent feared being thought a homosexual -- a phobia that ultimately, and delightfully perversely, saved the day. It had its moments, and was definitely far above average, but it was no Warren Ellis or Mark Millar.

#27, which featured part two of Millar's final storyline, was scheduled to carry a December 2001 cover date. #22, the first part of the storyline, carried a March 2001 cover date. In this gulf of time, Wildstorm not only published a four-issue fill-in storyline but also two short Authority stories in Wildstorm Summer Special and an appearance by the Authority in the childish Wildstorm series Gen13; in this time, Wildstorm also began two spin-off series. The Monarchy, which had used The Authority #21 as a lead-in, was published all through the absence of Millar issues.

Regretably, this series was of fairly poor quality. The Establishment used a back-up in The Authority #24 as a lead-in and premiered the same week the fill-in "Transfer of Power" concluded. Regretably, this series, while featuring a few good ideas, was largely incomprehensible. The hiatus for Millar's final story began with The Authority running two months late (due to a fill-in and a missed month); Millar's storyline was scheduled to wrap up some ten months later than it had been originally -- and it was scheduled to do so as just one of three titles, the other two being far below the par set by Millar and Ellis.

Part 4: The Second Derailment (11 September), the Widescreen Retreat, and the Successors' Withdrawl

On 11 September 2001, just a day before the last issue of the four-part fill-in storyline ("Transfer of Power") was published, everything went to Hell. That day, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by three of four hijacked planes. The twin towers of the World Trade Center that had defined the New York skyline were reduced to rubble; the fact that the terrorists had used passengers on commercial jets as cannonballs to slam into targets, including the utter destruction of two civilian skyscrapers filled with people -- skycrapers from which, prior to their rapid collapse, people jumped rather than be burned alive --, only added horror to a staggering numerical death toll as New York City ordered 4000 body bags -- then thought to be a rather conservative number. In the wake of this tragedy, while sentiments of shock were heard around the world, there was immediate concern over how this would affect comic books, especially after a number of big-budget but violent Hollywood films were indefinitely postponed. But if any title was to be affected by this paranoia in the artistic community over depicting violence on a grand scale, it would be certainly be The Authority, the book that had partially made its reputation by depicting terrorism and death on a scale paralleled only by the 11 September attacks. In the wake of a real life attack, fictional ones seemed in bad taste -- and bad taste is fine as long as it doesn't lead to bad publicity for a multi-national corporation.

The Authority: Widescreen, a 48-page special, had been solicited just a few weeks prior and was due to arrive some two months later. It was to feature an 18-page Jenny Sparks and Jenny Quantum story with writing and art by Bryan Hitch, the original artist on the title, not to mention a wraparound cover by Hitch and Andrew Currie. (It was also to feature a tale of Apollo and the Midnighter with a Tom Peyer script and Cary Nord art, as well as pin-ups by John Cassaday, Seth Fisher, Michael Golden, Gene Ha, Jose Ladronn, Jim Lee, and Matt Wagner.) Because Hitch's tale featured carnage in New York City, the special was indefinitely postponed with Hitch's agreement. Hitch stated to the press:

The reason we all thought to delay or suspend publication was basically because the entire story takes place against the backdrop of appalling devastation in New York. The opening scene of the story features a multipage heavily detailed sequence of destruction as a very large area of the city is leveled due to a spreading shockwave caused by the opening of a quantum tunnel on Fifth Avenue. While Jenny Sparks, The Engineer and The Doctor put their heads together to solve the problem, the rest of the team were shown searching for survivors and injured amongst the devastation.

Shortly thereafter, Mark Millar revealed that The Authority #27, though finished, was to be delayed yet again. Fans were in an uproar, some claiming to boycott DC Comics. Supposedly, the delay was because, as was earlier the case with the violence in #14, Wildstorm wanted to make a few minor changes. Initially, Mark Millar was reassuring. He told the press that the delay would only be a couple weeks to make mild changes, stating:



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The Authority's trademarked widescreen action is noticeably missing from this final arc. As anyone who read part one of “Brave New World” knows, it's really more of an up-close-and-dirty story where the team are taken down by corporate interests in the G7 economies. The only 'wide-screen' action in the next three issues are [sic] a five-page sequence where the new team annihilate thirty super-human teenagers from the 30th Century and it's really nothing anyone in editorial has complained about. I'm sure -- and hoping -- that this really is a storm in a teacup. As far as I know, there's no real problem with content and the issue will be released pretty much as is.



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Within a few weeks, however, DC announced a that changes would be made -- being far less diplomatic in describing them -- and announced a new schedule that had #27 published in December, some three months after the attacks.

As if this were not enough, the much-anticipated team scheduled to replace Millar backed out. Brian Azzarello (then writing 100 Bullets and Hellblazer for DC's Vertigo imprint) and Steve Dillon (famous for his work with Garth Ennis on Preacher and Punisher) had been announced as the creative team for the year to follow Millar. Due to the hyper-sensitive environment after the terrorist attack, which included a wave of anthrax attacks through the mail (and a plane crashing into a neighborhood in New York, ironically, supposedly due to mechanical failure), Azzarello backed out of the project, saying that the kind of stories he had planned would be utterly impossible. His focus was apparently to be religious, and his plans apparently included making Jesus Christ into The Doctor's successor; since he had not talked about intending to fill his work on The Authority with excessive violence, the patriotic didacticism in the air and the analogous self-censoring urge at DC were likely the real culprits. However the causes are dissected, however, the fact remained that not only had the future of the title (i.e. Millar's "Brave New World") been postponed hideously, but now it had been utterly changed.

Part 5: The Backlash

Another rapid effect of the terrorist attack that was worse than that on The Authority was that on the industry as a whole. The intelligence of The Authority had been linked to violence, and the curtailing of violence following the attack acted as a catalyst for a backlash against The Authority. Creators who felt resentful of the sudden fame given to the title's creative teams could now make statements such as this (hypothetical one):



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I've never approved of the violence in that title. When I use violence, I try to characterize its results -- to show that these are people suffering. The Authority didn't do that. So the sensitivity now over violence won't change me one bit. But I hope it reigns in this excess.



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Such responses were more a sign of inner resentment and of unease at the unappologetic way the super-hero genre had been changed. The Superman titles had incorporated an Authority-like team and global threats, but most had not. And, while this metaphor is certainly exaggerated, the creators who reacted against The Authority seemed all too much like filmmakers attacking talkies as lacking subtlety: the world, once changed, is different forevermore; the eyes, once opened, cannot easily be closed. As the World Trade Center disaster changed global politics and the world's conception of America irrevocably, so The Authority had violently changed super-heroics -- and a lot of creative people with egos had their livelihood -- or at least their relevancy -- threatened as a result. No less than Grant Morrison condemned The Authority was an extreme version of the power fantasy that had always been a part of super-heroics; he pointed out to that violence wasn't going to liberate Tibet and claimed that depicting so was an easy out. Of course, this was nonsense; given the Authority's power, it would have been a crime not to do as much -- and depicting this was simply a result of the "what if?" school of writing that takes a possibility such as super-powers and follows it through to its logical conclusions. That no one else dared write such a passage previously was the remarkable thing. But, moreover, it could be said that the use of violence -- or, in the case of the Authority's liberation of Tibet, the threat of violence -- in such an instance makes the inverse argument than it would otherwise, an effect similar to Milton's depictions of angelic beings: what is good for gods like the Authority is not necessarily good for humans -- in fact, depicting something as good for gods may intrinsically argue that it is not good for us weak people here on Earth. Wasn't this implicit from the beginning of The Authority through Jenny Sparks's snappy dialogue that, while charming to read or in a god, is detestable and maddenly annoying if said by a human being on the street? All of this smacked of a backlash, but it was one of misreading; after all, wasn't such a backlash incorporated into Millar's final storyline, as the powers-that-be in the world resist the change represented by the Authority and seek instead a return to the old status quo? All of this seemed lost on far too many.

Even Warren Ellis got into the act, writing (on his message boards in February 2002),



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Bryan [Hitch]'s warm, personable, sexy characters worked well to obscure the fact that The Authority are, really, The Bad Guys. I mean, come on. A band of freaks headed by a one-hundred-year-old alcoholic 1) annihilate a city and steal a teleportation process that they will eventually see unleashed on the world and probably **** the structure of society in doing so 2) wipe out a country, expunge a culture and perform blackmail-with-menaces on an entire planet and 3) kill God. The Authority are right out of JUDGE DREDD: They Are The Law. Look at the third story: Jenny Sparks says "behave yourselves" and a rioting planet drops its arms and stands quietly until she comes back.



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Ellis's comments clearly had more to do with his run, from which all of his examples come, than with Millar's. But this was revisionist history on his part, as well as, perhaps, a move to put himself back into the spotlight -- or even to court DC editorial to hire him back, which he openly discussed as a possibility. The Authority certainly blured the lines between good and bad, but only in a world this fucked up, this accomodated to politicians explaining why killing civilians en masse is acceptable and alleviating genocide and starvation around the world isn't practical, could people decry The Authority's actions. Certainly, civilians were killed. Certainly, The Authority's actions did not take into account the global politics that would play out in the real world, the escalations of violence that every nation from China to The United States would take. But when you have the power to change things, to just feed people, to just save people from regimes that are detaining and killing them, you have to do something as a moral person. For super-heroes, as for those of us who are responsible today, the world, the cosmos, is our neighborhood, our polis. What Millar did was put Ellis's philosophy, as espoused by Jenny Sparks, into practice and try to make the world a finer place. If Ellis, like so many others, couldn't handle it -- which should be no surprise, as he never did put that philosophy into practice --, he gets left behind too. One could criticize the way The Authority intervened, certainly, but not that they did so. The alternative is super-heroes (and people) who put "the American way" before "truth" and "justice." Moreover, as far as Ellis is concerned, Millar had just carried out, however brilliantly, the set-up that Ellis had so capably offered.

The Authority #27, containing Arthur Adams's rendition of the second part of Millar's "Brave New World," was indeed published in December, according to DC's revised revised publication schedule. Millar's, and fans', hope for only minor changes was not, however, answered. Page after page of changes, some minor and some not so minor, began to circulate on the internet. More importantly, the printed version felt censored, as if areas of panels and moments in the script were repressed and uniquely lacking the mind-blowing effects that his earlier issues had produced in readers' brains on a page-by-page basis. This is not to say that #27 did not have some of this effect, merely that it seemed muted. The news of the alterations, however, did not go over well, especially given that the second part of the storyline was published a full year, rather than a month, after the first.

The Authority #28 saw print in February, some two months after the preceding issue. It too would be clouded by scandal, though for different reasons. First, Arthur Adams quit, leaving the storyline's final installment without an artist, prior to the issue's publication. Between delayed scripts and having to redraw so much artwork, Adams had found his experience on The Authority less rewarding than expected. Secondly, although alterations to #28 had been much less than to #27, this was due to much tamer -- and in some places illogical or quite unclear -- story. A couple of weeks after publication, news broke that Grant Morrison had secretly written the original script for the issue as a favor to Mark Millar, who was in the hospital with what doctors thought was cancer. Millar had then somewhat rewritten the script in accordance with his own and DC's desires.

The Authority #29 (né #24) was finally published in May 2002, three months after the preceding issue. Featuring the capable art of Gary Erskine, it wrapped up the storyline, feeling a bit rushed but still possessing a good deal of brilliance -- and even irreverence, from a gay kiss and marriage to the depiction of hillbillies as animal-rapists, that one could only be surprised had not been censored. An era had ended, but its glory had faded some time before. The Authority, as characters, survived, but their future as planned was limited to a special, by Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry, that had originally been intended to be published after Millar's run as the final two issues of the series.

Ellis's run had been brilliant and concise. Millar's run, while undisputably brilliant, had been hampered by delays and quality-lessening decisions on the part of DC / Wildstorm. Whereas the Warren Ellis year had been published over the course of a year and had featured the same artistic team, the Mark Millar "year" had been published over the course of over two years. Its main artist, Frank Quitely, had illustrated just seven of Millar's twelve belated issues (not counting the five fill-in issues, the Jenny Sparks mini-series, the annual, and the special). The title's numbering had gotten off by five, all of which had been fill-ins without any Millar involvement, and one of these five had violated the four-issue storyline rule. By the publication of the final issue, The Monarchy, begun when just three issues remained of Millar's run, had already run its 12-issue course (thirteen with The Authority #21 included), and The Establishment (issue #9 of which was published on the same day as the final issue of The Authority) was already slated for cancellation. Millar's contribution had been mind-bendingly good, but the publication itself had been a disaster in many ways.

Though Millar's work had been brilliant, the history of his "year" was certainly bittersweet. Between the publicaton of issue #28 and that of issue #29, Millar (then successful at Marvel not only with Ultimate X-Men but with The Ultimates) summed up his feelings about the experience:



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The Authority was a very wounding experience in many ways. The way the book was treated by DC when it was their third or fourth biggest seller and fastest rising book was disgusting. Absolutely unprecedented in the medium. However, the good outweighed the bad.



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Asked if he would work with DC in the future, Millar responded in more detail:



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To be honest, I'd have serious reservations about working with any company which was under the DC umbrella while they're under the current administration. The Authority was selling more than Superman by our eighth issue, we'd been all over the international press, we'd received huge critical acclaim and been nominated for a ton of awards. And they still dicked us around. How could you possibly trust them with another series when they could decide, on a whim, to do the same again? I should point out that I bear no ill-feeling towards Wildstorm. They fought our corner from the start and I still have a good relationship with all the people there.



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As always, it was the art, the work itself, that would remain.

The final words of the final issue, spoken by Jack Hawksmoor, offered not only a commentary on The Authority's real-world interventionalism but how Millar's run had changed super-heroics:



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Even with all the crap they [DC editorial and the industry] threw at us, we completely changed the [super-hero] landscape over the last twelve months [two years and two months]. Superheroes walk different now. Superheroes talk different. Even the people who disagreed with us have ended up just following our lead. Guys who can hear atoms whizzing around [such as Superman] can't get away with ignoring screams for help from third world concentration camps anymore. Capes and spandex just don't get the same adulation they used to get for going out every night and kicking the hell out of poor people. We've changed things forever, Angie. There's no going back now.



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Like in the wake of 11 September, the world feels different after the accomplishment of Millar's Authority. A fictional genre may go back, but a reading populace may not. Super-heroes defending the status quo, which they did even in Ellis's Authority, can still be written. Super-heroes still will battle other idiots in capes while ignoring the world's clear injustices. But we, as a literate public, cannot read such somnambulistic tales in quite the same way -- because, ultimately, we remember The Authority and how they, not unproblematically, tried to make a finer world.

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THE Bastard said:
Hey, Can somebody fix the format of the article so that you don't have to scroll side to side to read it?

Thanks.

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Too good to scroll, huh?

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Prometheus said:
From Sequart.com:



Warren Ellis The Authority Era (1999-2000)

In early 1999, Warren Ellis dropped two bombs on the super-hero genre. The first was Planetary, a new series that chronicled a small and secret team's investigations of a super-hero universe. The second was The Authority.

The Authority, though a new series, was actually a revamping of Stormwatch. It featured the same writer and artists as Stormwatch, as well as a number of the same characters. But it felt incredibly new. Ellis, Hitch, and Neary had invented "widescreen" super-heroics -- as it quickly came to be called. The art was impecably smooth and tight, colored expertly. The transitions between scenes were rapid, and the transitions between panels were smooth, focusing on the three-dimensionality of each shot rather than the flat, literary quality of the page. The overall effect was not only cinematic but felt like a big-budget blockbuster. Super-powered villains flew through major cities en masse, devastating them. This was a super-hero world turned loose, with no restrictions keeping villains from simply doing massive damage. The effect was like the destruction of London in Alan Moore's Miracleman, only in a world where super-heroes abounded -- creating a "yes, this would happen" effect on the scale of an entire line of super-hero titles rather than just one. This would be the great strength and a continuing problem for the series, as the damage inflicted on the world added up and went unreflected in other Wildstorm titles.



Each story was set at four issues. The stakes were high: whole cities, millions of lives, and heroes whose powers together seemed the greatest ever assembled. Pressure built; a reader knew the actual number of pages left to each story and wondered how it could possibly be resolved. The Authority #4 concluded the conflict by having Midnighter use the team's ship as a blunt instrument, literally running it through the villain, his entire island, and all of his seemingly unstoppable technology. It was brilliant.

The next two stories only escallated the stakes. The second storyline featured the Authority very questionably annihilating an entire global regime on an alternate Earth; the Doctor held Italy in place while the planet rotated, burying the world capital underwater. Admittedly, the regime was detestable, unsophisticated, and warmongering -- but a careful reader got the sense that Jenny Sparks, bitchy psudo-feminist (and appropriately the spirit of the 20th century), was willing to kill everyone in Italy because the ruling regime had used rape on a wide scale -- a motivation hinted at her comments as she visits her former husband, who she says she only loved from the waist down (right... as it penetrated her, fucked her, came in her -- facts she can easily forget as she smokes cooly), and only takes the female members along. The final storyline had the team fight "God" and had Jenny Sparks die -- predictably but appropriately -- on 31 December 2000.



The entire creative team left with issue #12, unable to trump what he had already done. He knew to leave the stage when things were high. Still, it felt like a tragedy. From the opening of a new issue to the final page, had been little breathing room. I would sit and smoke two cigarettes as I read nervously, my eyes and mind at worst tightly attentive and at best absolutely reeling. A second reading quickly followed. The month between issues felt impossibly long. The dialogue was snappy and sparse, the art crisp and beautiful, often depicting scenes of grand scope with (at least) the mastery of the best Hollywood special effects company.

Mark Millar The Authority Era (2000-2002)

Part 1: Millar's Nativity

Many doubted that anyone could follow Ellis and Hitch, but the next team had been hand-picked by Ellis himself and was scheduled to fuck everything up for a year and then do the same. It looked like The Authority was becoming a kind of super-hero journal wherein great creators could really let loose with their ideas, changing the entire genre in the process. It looked like the only rule for The Authority was to be bold in one's vision -- to do something new in order to meet the challenge set by one's predecessors. Chosen as writer was Mark Millar, whose inconsistent but at times incredibly brilliant run on Swamp Thing years before was all anyone knew him for. The penciller would be Frank Quitely, who had illustrated Flex Mentallo, a brilliant mini-series written by Grant Morrison, but who had done little visible work and who had a wavy style that, while perfect for a mini-series that might entirely be an acid trip, might not work for the widescreen super-hero series.

All doubts ended with the publication of #13. Millar took Jenny Sparks' notion of changing the world for the better, rather than fighting super-villains simply to restore the status quo, to the logical extreme: #13 opens with the Authority interveneing in world politics, overthrowing a corrupt regime. As a result, the Authority become celebrities, interviewed as such and featured on magazine covers; super-models and actors have parties on the Carrier with super-heroes. And Jack Hawksmoor, now leader, tells off President Bill Clinton. When they attempt to secure Jenny Quantum -- Jenny Sparks reincarned as the spirit of the 21st century --, they face a government-run group of super-heroes that obviously parallels Marvel Comics' Avengers. Over the course of the storyline, virtually every Marvel Comics hero is featured in modified form as part of a covert super-hero project that remains from the Cold War. Their leader -- an old, dwarfish, savage version of Jack Kirby -- and the "heroes" themselves are shown as cruel: Tank Man (a version of Iron Man) explodes a full nursery, believing Jenny Quantum inside. The Captain America parallel has the compulsion to rape everyone he defeats, actualizing his conquest sexually, and rapes none other than Apollo before the Midnighter has his revenge by raping back -- with a jackhammer. Apollo flies through the head of a version of Giant Man, whose legs have already been vaporized; Apollo later uses his heat vision to cut the legs off the version of Captain America. References to the stupidity of comic book characters, including their defense of the status quo, abound. It was a literalization of what Millar had stated to the press:



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The thing I had in mind when I took on the Authority, the brief I had in my head when I started the first page, was that this book should begin where the Justice League and The Avengers draw the line.



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Revolutionary from his first panel, Millar literally kills off the past history of super-heroes, paving over their corpses in order to build a new utopia. A few moments of cleverness stand out as truly revolutionary in a storyline full of cleverness: most of all, the ending -- in which, in the context of an ultra-violent story, the brilliant mad scientist villain is not killed but offered a job working for the Authority to make the world a better place -- which was, after all, his goal all along. But this was not only a brilliantly original move in terms of the narrative. This was nothing less than Kirby himself, corrupted by the corporate comic culture he spawned, being co-opted, his original utopian spirit (the man himself had died, having made -- like his alter ego here -- many bitter statements about the industry in the years prior, and would probably not have approved of Millar's work), being pulled into the ranks of The Authority, into this transformation of the genre, this new work that stripped away the bullshit.

Millar's first storyline, "The Nativity," was a tour de force that stands as a classic -- and it launched the new creative team to immense popularity. The Authority had made Warren Ellis, its first writer, into a celebrity who received offers that made other writers jealous. Hitch, the artist under Ellis, quickly began a run on JLA, DC's most popular title. Now the new team, which had long labored in obscurity, were becoming celebrities just like their characters -- and, just like their characters, being rewarded for doing things their way, for fucking things up.

Part 2: Earth Inferno, Spin-offs, and Fill-ins

Things went downhill from there, however. The next two issues, for the first times since the title began, had art by a fill-in artist -- a good one, to be sure, but not as good as Quitely and certainly inconsistent with Quitely's style. Quitely, besides being slower than many artists (who work at an alarmingly fast speed due to the demands of monthly publication), took time off to illustrate the final issue of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. It was understandable: The Invisibles was nothing if not a noble cause, and the final issue was one of the greatest works of literature ever published. But it threw off the new storyline, which featured the seemingly invincible Authority battling the one foe they might not be able to defeat -- the Earth itself. We saw the Authority interveneing more in world affairs, including getting the Russians to withdraw from Chechnia and the Chinese from Tibet! It was moving; it was wonderful -- it was what super-heroes should be doing. We also saw New York devestated by a tsunami -- raising the issue of how the world could deal with all of this devestation. Eventually, we saw a super-villain prison outside of time and the moving evacuation of the entire planet's population to alternate Earths. Quitely did return for the second half of the storyline, and, though the book lost a month in addition to the two artistic fill-in issues, all seemed right as the team headed into their final four-issue storyline.

The situation of The Authority was made worse during this time, however, by the beginning of Wildstorm's spin-offs designed to capitalize on the title's remarkable success, which had begun with its first issue and, in the face of all expectations, actually become much stronger under the new creative team. Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority was the first spin-off -- a mini-series that, while below the quality of the main book, was at least written by Mark Millar. It attempted to fill in the gap between Stormwatch and The Authority and gave us background information on a number of characters. Around the start of this mini-series came Planetary / The Authority: Ruling the World, a prestige-format one-shot written by none other than Warren Ellis and featuring the great art of Phil Jimenez -- all quite impressive, though the story itself had some pacing problems. Even these, however, shattered the four-issue storyline pattern that had worked so well for the book. A few months later, Wildstorm published The Authority Annual 2000 as part of a crossover through its 2000 annuals, resulting in a compitent story with good art, though one utterly inconsequential and disposable, an episode servicing a crossover never even explained in the annual. Had the spin-offs retained the quality of these three, however, the house Jenny Sparks built would have remained quite solid. In fact, the worst was yet to come.

Before the final storyline of the Mark Millar year could commence, however, we got a fill-in issue. Issue #21 also served as an introduction to the new monthly spin-off, The Monarchy, which would feature the characters from Stormwatch that had been largely dropped in The Authority. The scale was to be more limited, leaving the epic battles to the Authority and the problems too small for the Authority's attention to this new team. Issue #21, however, was hardly an issue of The Authority: not only did it break the structure of the book by not being a part of a four-issue story (it didn't even feature the format of the title page, with a black bar at the top and bottom of a single wide panel) and not featuring any members of that year's creative team, but it destroyed the book's numbering -- the second year would have to finish two months late and with #25 instead of #24. Combined with the two artistic fill-in issues, Frank Quitely had only illustrated two issues of the last five. That the title was not simply delayed, putting quality (or at least consistency) over quantity (i.e. the income from a monthly title), stood at sharp odds with a title that had been defined by great creators being given the liberty to go crazy with a title. Moreover, Wildstorm had been mildly censoring the new team from the beginning -- making the overthrown dictator a generic one instead of a specific one in a specific country (which might make the sequence seem like a writer's revenge fantasy against a real-world ruler -- as if such a thing were bad) and insisting that Apollo's flight through the version of Giant Man, beautifully rendered by Quitely, had a red filter applied to it in order to obscure the violence. And Millar had been writing around such problems -- making the version of Captain America's many rapes strongly implicit rather than explicit, for example. Millar and Quitely had actually talked of quitting when they were censored. But, all these problems aside, we were going to get Millar's final storyline, completely pencilled by Quitely, concluding in #25 (rather than #24) with a new one-year run by some new, unannounced team to follow and hopefully to fuck things up all over again.

Part 3: The First Derailment (Quitely), Plus More Spin-offs and Fill-ins

#22 was published on schedule, though two months behind and numbered one higher than it should have been. And it was unimaginably fabulous. But as soon as it was published, the trade press reported that Frank Quitely had left the title, having been offered nothing less than Marvel Comics' X-Men, a very high-profile book soon to be revamped, retitled New X-Men and given Grant Morrison as a writer. Mark Millar had already begun Marvel's Ultimate X-Men, another high-profile book -- though this had not sabotaged The Authority because it takes less time to write a book than to illustrate one. As a result of Quitely's sudden departure, The Authority had been pulled from the schedule, meaning -- because of the distribution system -- that a new issue could not arrive for at least four months. It seemed that The Authority was a victim of its own success. This was particularly upsetting because the entire team had -- remarkably -- been killed in #22!

Wildstorm soon announced that Arthur Adams was to fill in for Quitely and complete the "Brave New World" storyline. Adams had apparently been Millar's choice; it was a respectable move under bad circumstances. But Adams had other commitments that would delay this completion. Wildstorm thus announced an intermediary storyline, "Transfer of Power," to have four parts but to take place after #22 -- during the "Brave New World" storyline. It made sense, in a way; after all, a new, government-run Authority had been featured in #22, ready to substitute for the old, government-challenging one. Written by Tom Peyer (who many good writers like but whose work is tremendously inconsistent) and pencilled by Dustin Nguyen (a good artist but with little published work), "Transfer of Power" would feature the new Authority during its early days, being vicious instruments of the elite. Their first act was to dump the refugees in the Carrier onto an alternate Earth. They drew their fights -- much like mainstream super-heroes, a parallel not explored in the story -- away from cities and towards the poor who were a problem for ruling politicians and the Alaskan wilderness that could not be developed by oil concerns because it was too pristine. The story also featured a super-hero priest brought in for camera oportunities and propaganda about how this Authority had so respected the former one. Moreover, the Apollo equivalent cried constantly at the war crimes they were committing, while the Midnighter equivalent feared being thought a homosexual -- a phobia that ultimately, and delightfully perversely, saved the day. It had its moments, and was definitely far above average, but it was no Warren Ellis or Mark Millar.

#27, which featured part two of Millar's final storyline, was scheduled to carry a December 2001 cover date. #22, the first part of the storyline, carried a March 2001 cover date. In this gulf of time, Wildstorm not only published a four-issue fill-in storyline but also two short Authority stories in Wildstorm Summer Special and an appearance by the Authority in the childish Wildstorm series Gen13; in this time, Wildstorm also began two spin-off series. The Monarchy, which had used The Authority #21 as a lead-in, was published all through the absence of Millar issues.

Regretably, this series was of fairly poor quality. The Establishment used a back-up in The Authority #24 as a lead-in and premiered the same week the fill-in "Transfer of Power" concluded. Regretably, this series, while featuring a few good ideas, was largely incomprehensible. The hiatus for Millar's final story began with The Authority running two months late (due to a fill-in and a missed month); Millar's storyline was scheduled to wrap up some ten months later than it had been originally -- and it was scheduled to do so as just one of three titles, the other two being far below the par set by Millar and Ellis.

Part 4: The Second Derailment (11 September), the Widescreen Retreat, and the Successors' Withdrawl

On 11 September 2001, just a day before the last issue of the four-part fill-in storyline ("Transfer of Power") was published, everything went to Hell. That day, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by three of four hijacked planes. The twin towers of the World Trade Center that had defined the New York skyline were reduced to rubble; the fact that the terrorists had used passengers on commercial jets as cannonballs to slam into targets, including the utter destruction of two civilian skyscrapers filled with people -- skycrapers from which, prior to their rapid collapse, people jumped rather than be burned alive --, only added horror to a staggering numerical death toll as New York City ordered 4000 body bags -- then thought to be a rather conservative number. In the wake of this tragedy, while sentiments of shock were heard around the world, there was immediate concern over how this would affect comic books, especially after a number of big-budget but violent Hollywood films were indefinitely postponed. But if any title was to be affected by this paranoia in the artistic community over depicting violence on a grand scale, it would be certainly be The Authority, the book that had partially made its reputation by depicting terrorism and death on a scale paralleled only by the 11 September attacks. In the wake of a real life attack, fictional ones seemed in bad taste -- and bad taste is fine as long as it doesn't lead to bad publicity for a multi-national corporation.

The Authority: Widescreen, a 48-page special, had been solicited just a few weeks prior and was due to arrive some two months later. It was to feature an 18-page Jenny Sparks and Jenny Quantum story with writing and art by Bryan Hitch, the original artist on the title, not to mention a wraparound cover by Hitch and Andrew Currie. (It was also to feature a tale of Apollo and the Midnighter with a Tom Peyer script and Cary Nord art, as well as pin-ups by John Cassaday, Seth Fisher, Michael Golden, Gene Ha, Jose Ladronn, Jim Lee, and Matt Wagner.) Because Hitch's tale featured carnage in New York City, the special was indefinitely postponed with Hitch's agreement. Hitch stated to the press:

The reason we all thought to delay or suspend publication was basically because the entire story takes place against the backdrop of appalling devastation in New York. The opening scene of the story features a multipage heavily detailed sequence of destruction as a very large area of the city is leveled due to a spreading shockwave caused by the opening of a quantum tunnel on Fifth Avenue. While Jenny Sparks, The Engineer and The Doctor put their heads together to solve the problem, the rest of the team were shown searching for survivors and injured amongst the devastation.

Shortly thereafter, Mark Millar revealed that The Authority #27, though finished, was to be delayed yet again. Fans were in an uproar, some claiming to boycott DC Comics. Supposedly, the delay was because, as was earlier the case with the violence in #14, Wildstorm wanted to make a few minor changes. Initially, Mark Millar was reassuring. He told the press that the delay would only be a couple weeks to make mild changes, stating:



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The Authority's trademarked widescreen action is noticeably missing from this final arc. As anyone who read part one of “Brave New World” knows, it's really more of an up-close-and-dirty story where the team are taken down by corporate interests in the G7 economies. The only 'wide-screen' action in the next three issues are [sic] a five-page sequence where the new team annihilate thirty super-human teenagers from the 30th Century and it's really nothing anyone in editorial has complained about. I'm sure -- and hoping -- that this really is a storm in a teacup. As far as I know, there's no real problem with content and the issue will be released pretty much as is.



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Within a few weeks, however, DC announced a that changes would be made -- being far less diplomatic in describing them -- and announced a new schedule that had #27 published in December, some three months after the attacks.

As if this were not enough, the much-anticipated team scheduled to replace Millar backed out. Brian Azzarello (then writing 100 Bullets and Hellblazer for DC's Vertigo imprint) and Steve Dillon (famous for his work with Garth Ennis on Preacher and Punisher) had been announced as the creative team for the year to follow Millar. Due to the hyper-sensitive environment after the terrorist attack, which included a wave of anthrax attacks through the mail (and a plane crashing into a neighborhood in New York, ironically, supposedly due to mechanical failure), Azzarello backed out of the project, saying that the kind of stories he had planned would be utterly impossible. His focus was apparently to be religious, and his plans apparently included making Jesus Christ into The Doctor's successor; since he had not talked about intending to fill his work on The Authority with excessive violence, the patriotic didacticism in the air and the analogous self-censoring urge at DC were likely the real culprits. However the causes are dissected, however, the fact remained that not only had the future of the title (i.e. Millar's "Brave New World") been postponed hideously, but now it had been utterly changed.

Part 5: The Backlash

Another rapid effect of the terrorist attack that was worse than that on The Authority was that on the industry as a whole. The intelligence of The Authority had been linked to violence, and the curtailing of violence following the attack acted as a catalyst for a backlash against The Authority. Creators who felt resentful of the sudden fame given to the title's creative teams could now make statements such as this (hypothetical one):



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I've never approved of the violence in that title. When I use violence, I try to characterize its results -- to show that these are people suffering. The Authority didn't do that. So the sensitivity now over violence won't change me one bit. But I hope it reigns in this excess.



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Such responses were more a sign of inner resentment and of unease at the unappologetic way the super-hero genre had been changed. The Superman titles had incorporated an Authority-like team and global threats, but most had not. And, while this metaphor is certainly exaggerated, the creators who reacted against The Authority seemed all too much like filmmakers attacking talkies as lacking subtlety: the world, once changed, is different forevermore; the eyes, once opened, cannot easily be closed. As the World Trade Center disaster changed global politics and the world's conception of America irrevocably, so The Authority had violently changed super-heroics -- and a lot of creative people with egos had their livelihood -- or at least their relevancy -- threatened as a result. No less than Grant Morrison condemned The Authority was an extreme version of the power fantasy that had always been a part of super-heroics; he pointed out to that violence wasn't going to liberate Tibet and claimed that depicting so was an easy out. Of course, this was nonsense; given the Authority's power, it would have been a crime not to do as much -- and depicting this was simply a result of the "what if?" school of writing that takes a possibility such as super-powers and follows it through to its logical conclusions. That no one else dared write such a passage previously was the remarkable thing. But, moreover, it could be said that the use of violence -- or, in the case of the Authority's liberation of Tibet, the threat of violence -- in such an instance makes the inverse argument than it would otherwise, an effect similar to Milton's depictions of angelic beings: what is good for gods like the Authority is not necessarily good for humans -- in fact, depicting something as good for gods may intrinsically argue that it is not good for us weak people here on Earth. Wasn't this implicit from the beginning of The Authority through Jenny Sparks's snappy dialogue that, while charming to read or in a god, is detestable and maddenly annoying if said by a human being on the street? All of this smacked of a backlash, but it was one of misreading; after all, wasn't such a backlash incorporated into Millar's final storyline, as the powers-that-be in the world resist the change represented by the Authority and seek instead a return to the old status quo? All of this seemed lost on far too many.

Even Warren Ellis got into the act, writing (on his message boards in February 2002),



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Bryan [Hitch]'s warm, personable, sexy characters worked well to obscure the fact that The Authority are, really, The Bad Guys. I mean, come on. A band of freaks headed by a one-hundred-year-old alcoholic 1) annihilate a city and steal a teleportation process that they will eventually see unleashed on the world and probably **** the structure of society in doing so 2) wipe out a country, expunge a culture and perform blackmail-with-menaces on an entire planet and 3) kill God. The Authority are right out of JUDGE DREDD: They Are The Law. Look at the third story: Jenny Sparks says "behave yourselves" and a rioting planet drops its arms and stands quietly until she comes back.



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Ellis's comments clearly had more to do with his run, from which all of his examples come, than with Millar's. But this was revisionist history on his part, as well as, perhaps, a move to put himself back into the spotlight -- or even to court DC editorial to hire him back, which he openly discussed as a possibility. The Authority certainly blured the lines between good and bad, but only in a world this fucked up, this accomodated to politicians explaining why killing civilians en masse is acceptable and alleviating genocide and starvation around the world isn't practical, could people decry The Authority's actions. Certainly, civilians were killed. Certainly, The Authority's actions did not take into account the global politics that would play out in the real world, the escalations of violence that every nation from China to The United States would take. But when you have the power to change things, to just feed people, to just save people from regimes that are detaining and killing them, you have to do something as a moral person. For super-heroes, as for those of us who are responsible today, the world, the cosmos, is our neighborhood, our polis. What Millar did was put Ellis's philosophy, as espoused by Jenny Sparks, into practice and try to make the world a finer place. If Ellis, like so many others, couldn't handle it -- which should be no surprise, as he never did put that philosophy into practice --, he gets left behind too. One could criticize the way The Authority intervened, certainly, but not that they did so. The alternative is super-heroes (and people) who put "the American way" before "truth" and "justice." Moreover, as far as Ellis is concerned, Millar had just carried out, however brilliantly, the set-up that Ellis had so capably offered.

Part 6: The Conclusion Trickes in

The Authority #27, containing Arthur Adams's rendition of the second part of Millar's "Brave New World," was indeed published in December, according to DC's revised revised publication schedule. Millar's, and fans', hope for only minor changes was not, however, answered. Page after page of changes, some minor and some not so minor, began to circulate on the internet. More importantly, the printed version felt censored, as if areas of panels and moments in the script were repressed and uniquely lacking the mind-blowing effects that his earlier issues had produced in readers' brains on a page-by-page basis. This is not to say that #27 did not have some of this effect, merely that it seemed muted. The news of the alterations, however, did not go over well, especially given that the second part of the storyline was published a full year, rather than a month, after the first.

The Authority #28 saw print in February, some two months after the preceding issue. It too would be clouded by scandal, though for different reasons. First, Arthur Adams quit, leaving the storyline's final installment without an artist, prior to the issue's publication. Between delayed scripts and having to redraw so much artwork, Adams had found his experience on The Authority less rewarding than expected. Secondly, although alterations to #28 had been much less than to #27, this was due to much tamer -- and in some places illogical or quite unclear -- story. A couple of weeks after publication, news broke that Grant Morrison had secretly written the original script for the issue as a favor to Mark Millar, who was in the hospital with what doctors thought was cancer. Millar had then somewhat rewritten the script in accordance with his own and DC's desires.

The Authority #29 (né #24) was finally published in May 2002, three months after the preceding issue. Featuring the capable art of Gary Erskine, it wrapped up the storyline, feeling a bit rushed but still possessing a good deal of brilliance -- and even irreverence, from a gay kiss and marriage to the depiction of hillbillies as animal-rapists, that one could only be surprised had not been censored. An era had ended, but its glory had faded some time before. The Authority, as characters, survived, but their future as planned was limited to a special, by Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry, that had originally been intended to be published after Millar's run as the final two issues of the series.

Ellis's run had been brilliant and concise. Millar's run, while undisputably brilliant, had been hampered by delays and quality-lessening decisions on the part of DC / Wildstorm. Whereas the Warren Ellis year had been published over the course of a year and had featured the same artistic team, the Mark Millar "year" had been published over the course of over two years. Its main artist, Frank Quitely, had illustrated just seven of Millar's twelve belated issues (not counting the five fill-in issues, the Jenny Sparks mini-series, the annual, and the special). The title's numbering had gotten off by five, all of which had been fill-ins without any Millar involvement, and one of these five had violated the four-issue storyline rule. By the publication of the final issue, The Monarchy, begun when just three issues remained of Millar's run, had already run its 12-issue course (thirteen with The Authority #21 included), and The Establishment (issue #9 of which was published on the same day as the final issue of The Authority) was already slated for cancellation. Millar's contribution had been mind-bendingly good, but the publication itself had been a disaster in many ways.

Though Millar's work had been brilliant, the history of his "year" was certainly bittersweet. Between the publicaton of issue #28 and that of issue #29, Millar (then successful at Marvel not only with Ultimate X-Men but with The Ultimates) summed up his feelings about the experience:



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The Authority was a very wounding experience in many ways. The way the book was treated by DC when it was their third or fourth biggest seller and fastest rising book was disgusting. Absolutely unprecedented in the medium. However, the good outweighed the bad.



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Asked if he would work with DC in the future, Millar responded in more detail:



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To be honest, I'd have serious reservations about working with any company which was under the DC umbrella while they're under the current administration. The Authority was selling more than Superman by our eighth issue, we'd been all over the international press, we'd received huge critical acclaim and been nominated for a ton of awards. And they still dicked us around. How could you possibly trust them with another series when they could decide, on a whim, to do the same again? I should point out that I bear no ill-feeling towards Wildstorm. They fought our corner from the start and I still have a good relationship with all the people there.



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As always, it was the art, the work itself, that would remain.

The final words of the final issue, spoken by Jack Hawksmoor, offered not only a commentary on The Authority's real-world interventionalism but how Millar's run had changed super-heroics:



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Even with all the crap they [DC editorial and the industry] threw at us, we completely changed the [super-hero] landscape over the last twelve months [two years and two months]. Superheroes walk different now. Superheroes talk different. Even the people who disagreed with us have ended up just following our lead. Guys who can hear atoms whizzing around [such as Superman] can't get away with ignoring screams for help from third world concentration camps anymore. Capes and spandex just don't get the same adulation they used to get for going out every night and kicking the hell out of poor people. We've changed things forever, Angie. There's no going back now.



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Like in the wake of 11 September, the world feels different after the accomplishment of Millar's Authority. A fictional genre may go back, but a reading populace may not. Super-heroes defending the status quo, which they did even in Ellis's Authority, can still be written. Super-heroes still will battle other idiots in capes while ignoring the world's clear injustices. But we, as a literate public, cannot read such somnambulistic tales in quite the same way -- because, ultimately, we remember The Authority and how they, not unproblematically, tried to make a finer world.

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theory9 said:

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THE Bastard said:
Hey, Can somebody fix the format of the article so that you don't have to scroll side to side to read it?

Thanks.

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Too good to scroll, huh?

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THE Bastard said:

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theory9 said:

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THE Bastard said:
Hey, Can somebody fix the format of the article so that you don't have to scroll side to side to read it?

Thanks.

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Too good to scroll, huh?

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Heh.

'sup, playa...where you been?

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THE Bastard said:
Hey, Can somebody fix the format of the article so that you don't have to scroll side to side to read it?

Thanks.

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theory9 said:

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THE Bastard said:

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theory9 said:

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THE Bastard said:
Hey, Can somebody fix the format of the article so that you don't have to scroll side to side to read it?

Thanks.

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Too good to scroll, huh?

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Heh.

'sup, playa...where you been?

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Got married, had a kid, gettin' ready to go back to law school. I's been busy. 'sup withchu?

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Pig Iron said:
Back to the Authority...I understand that Apollo and Midnighter are superman/batman clones, and the wingy, tibetan chick is hawkman/girl or something. But who are the other members supposed to represent I haven't read this stuff in ages.

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Prometheus said:
The Authority's influence completely altered the face of the superhero landscape as we know it.

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Rob Kamphausen said:

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Prometheus said:
The Authority's influence completely altered the face of the superhero landscape as we know it.

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how so?

just that it was a different take? or not-so-necessarily "good" good guys? cuz there was swearing and adult themes?

what'd you get from the title?

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Prometheus said:
Don't take the "heroes killing heroes" thing too much at face value, Jerry. You really need to see how it's presented. The entire story in particular is presented as a metaphor on the industry, and creative rights. I really think The Authority would be worth your time. If nothing else (and I know this is a cheap sale), it features the first two fully homosexual heroes in an open relationship, the Midnighter and Apollo...

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Prometheus said:
I don't think any of them except for Apollo and Midnighter are supposed to be specifically represenative of any pre-existing character. The fact that Swift has wings is just that....she has wings. Jack Hawksmoor is one of the most original characters I've ever seen in a comic. You simply can't compare his abilties (to communicate and talk to cities/suburban natural habitat) to any other character in comics.

If nothing else, I imagine Ellis was trying to go for an archetypical approach with the rest of the team. The Doctor, a mega-powerful modern shaman, would represent all the magic users (i.e. Doctor Fate, Doctor Strange, etc.). Engineer is Iron Man mixed with Green Lantern and taken to the next level. Hawksmoor and Jenny seem to be wholly original concepts...

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harleykwin said:

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Pig Iron said:
Back to the Authority...I understand that Apollo and Midnighter are superman/batman clones, and the wingy, tibetan chick is hawkman/girl or something. But who are the other members supposed to represent I haven't read this stuff in ages.

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Huh. Other than the whole Midnighter/Apollo-Bats/Supes angle - which is too obvious to miss - I never thought that the others were supposed to parallel JLA characters. I s'pose Jenny is WW taken to the next level with her 'tude about men and all, but methinks that even that is pushing it.

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Pig Iron said:
Back to the Authority...I understand that Apollo and Midnighter are superman/batman clones, and the wingy, tibetan chick is hawkman/girl or something. But who are the other members supposed to represent I haven't read this stuff in ages.

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Grimm said:
and Rose Tattoo was a fucking aweshome character.

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Grimm said:
Jerry, you should give the series a look and check it out. The Ellis/Hitch run is a pure adrenaline rush.

The Millar era, as the article said, takes the intent of Ellis' concepts, and puts them into practice.

The whole thing evolved out of Ellis' Stormwatch runs and continued evolving under Millar, at least until DC (and a big money offer from Marvel to Quitely) killed it.

I really consider it the Watchmen of it's time. It was an important precursor to books like The Ultimates, and pretty much every spandex book has followed in it's wake, either attempting to copy it or to "put the genie back in the bottle" if you will.

It "pulled a Sandman" as Aussie Dave once said, grasping an audience outside the typical spandex crowd. It appealed to people that didn't read superhero comics and if given an actual push from DC, could have gone mainstream.

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Beardguy57 said:

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Grimm said:
Jerry, you should give the series a look and check it out. The Ellis/Hitch run is a pure adrenaline rush.

The Millar era, as the article said, takes the intent of Ellis' concepts, and puts them into practice.

The whole thing evolved out of Ellis' Stormwatch runs and continued evolving under Millar, at least until DC (and a big money offer from Marvel to Quitely) killed it.

I really consider it the Watchmen of it's time. It was an important precursor to books like The Ultimates, and pretty much every spandex book has followed in it's wake, either attempting to copy it or to "put the genie back in the bottle" if you will.

It "pulled a Sandman" as Aussie Dave once said, grasping an audience outside the typical spandex crowd. It appealed to people that didn't read superhero comics and if given an actual push from DC, could have gone mainstream.

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I just might check it out, then...

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Chewy Walrus said:

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Grimm said:
and Rose Tattoo was a fucking aweshome character.

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Indeed. Which is why I made that not-so-subtle knockoff for the 'corrupt Vanguard' story. Remember?

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theory9 said:
I always liked the Authority, but felt like it was an extension of Watchmen.

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Grimm said:
Jenny Sparks is an analogy for the comic medium as a whole. The story of comics is her story. She begins her career as an Alex Raymond like space adventurer and goes through the entire history of the medium before dying and being reborn as Jenny Quantum. It's significant that her new incarnation is asian, as many people consider manga the future of the medium. (I don't agree, but it works as a metaphor).

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You should really read Ellis' Stormwatch runs. Good stuff and a lot of fun watching his ideas begin to develop into what ultimately (heh) became The Authority.

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Umm, I have. Remember? I borrowed some issues from you, and, bought some from Jim's shop.

Hi, I'm Prometheus...