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First Amongst Daves said:
The innovation in The Authority wasn't in the other titles you mention, Dave. It was the bald fact that if you're altruistically minded and have incomparable superpowers, how can you sit back and do nothing while innocents are murdered. Millar's run on the Authority begins with the team dumping the Indonesian president BJ Habibie into a truckful of corpses in East Timor, with survivors advancing on him with machetes, following the Indonesian-sponsored militia genocide of Timorese. It was Millar's contemporaneous act of revulsion enacted through the characters: they shared his revulsion and acted on it.



Okay, that gives me a clearer idea of what you mean. I previously read a few issues of the Warren Ellis series, 6 or 7 years ago, and all I saw was a group of powerful sadistic assholes calling themselves the Authority, who were kicking the crap out of people, comparable to PREACHER and other cynical profanity-laden celebrations of violence.

This Millar run you mention sounds interesting from what you describe, I'll check it out.


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First Amongst Daves said:
The Authority later intervene in Chechnya and, off-panel, Tibet.

Its not a utopian change like Miracleman or Red Son - its acting decisively on conscience.

In Watchmen, Dr Manhattan was so detached from his humanity that he regarded human life, even after his epiphany, as a terribly interesting science experiment. There was never altruism in his actions.

And Stan Lee never had Spider-man assassinate Pol Pot or Mao Zedong, although in a real world a man with a conscience and his powers should certainly have at least contemplated it.



Okay, again, clearer.

I see the distinction you make.
The one exception that I can think of that might cover the same ground is in ASTRO CITY #1, where the character who is basically Superman in all but name and costume, is rescuing people and stopping natural disasters all hours of the day and night. He doesn't allow himself to sleep or have time to himself, because he feels duty-bound to prevent any deaths he's capable of preventing.

But yeah, AUTHORITY as you describe it is going one step further than this, and dealing with specific real-world dictators and genocide.


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First Amongst Daves said:
If there is a precedent, its WW2 writers of superheroes, who regularly through patriotism fought Nazis and Japanese. Starman recaptured the Aleytians from the Japanese, even though this didn't obviously happen in history.



That patriotic confrontation with Nazis and the Imperial Japanese is, I think, what made comics so popular in the early 1940's, and so fondly remembered from that era long after.

While I think I'd like to check out the Millar issues, I'm repulsed by the level of over-the-top violence and cynicism in many of the books that pass for "realism" in comics over the last 15 years or so.


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First Amongst Daves said:
Millar asks, if you had a power ring or whatever, would you sit around while people are hacked or bombed to death? And if you wouldn't, what's the vastly less-self interested Justice League or Avengers doing in their mansions or lunar headquarters doing?

And the answer is too difficult for mainstream comics to address.



Last time I looked, wasn't THE AUTHORITY published by the Wildstorm imprint of DC? To me, that's pretty mainstream, to be published by one of the Big Two publishers.

You probably mean a mainstream title, like SUPERMAN, BATMAN, SPIDERMAN or AVENGERS. But aside from it being unlikely that any of the main characters would die in the story, I don't see why these themes couldn't be explored in a mainstream title. Many other mainsteam titles have broken ground on political issues in the past, such as GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, SPIDERMAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, DAREDEVIL, the 1985 HEROES FOR HOPE Africa-relief benefit book, and many others.

Why do you think this couldn't be done in a mainstream book, as you define mainstream?