Category: The Authority

 

By Robbie Morrison, Dwayne Turner, Whilce Portacio & Sal Regla (Wildstorm/DC Comics)
ISBN 1-84023-988-3

The sixth collection of comics’ most “in your face” team of superdoers (it’s becoming increasing difficult to call them ‘heroes’ – which is surely the point) sees them combat the machinations of a televangelist who actually has the power of God (‘Godhead’) and then deals with the aftermath of their taking over the US government (‘Fractured World’). A small bone of contention here is that the events of that regime change are recounted in a whole ‘nother book – Coup D’etat – and if this was disconcerting to an old veteran like me it must be annoying as hell to the casual or new reader.

There are no quibbles with the quality of work. Robbie Morrison has a good handle on all the characters, and if you like seeing the planet decimated every night and twice on Sunday the artists are all capable of depicting it crisply and cleanly, but gosh, every single person on Earth must be hip deep in Prozac to keep going, day in, day out. When you set out to write Realism in superheroes surely the after-effects on the populace must factor in there somewhere?

More to my taste is the smaller story in ‘Street Life’ as Jack Hawkesmoor, patron deity of cities and current President of America investigates the murder of an old girlfriend, which adds more to our understanding of his character than his last fifty appearances combined – and no planets were decimated in the making of this vignette.

All things considered, still a series worth looking at, but the lack of variety is starting to show.

© 2004 WildStorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics. All rights reserved.

By Ed Brubaker, Dustin Nguyen & Richard Friend (WildStorm)
ISBN 1-84576-251-7

Three years later, the world is not a happy place and eight-year-old Jenny Quantum – the spirit of the 21st Century – realises that something is cosmically wrong. She also realises what has to be done to fix it. Using her swiftly developing powers she unravels the mystery of her missing team-mates, how the pernicious plans of the mystery villain managed to defeat both heroes and governments and just why she is the only “person” who can deal with this particular crisis

On its own terms this is quite an engrossing adventure, full of the nihilism and ironic dark sparkle that typified the earlier tales, but if you look closely you can’t fail to see that under all that realistic language and powerful, cutting edge art are all the tired old clichés of the super-hero genre that this title initially rejected and often mocked. Has the nonsensical quest to invest grittily-grim-realism into what is inescapably ultimately high fantasy finally run out of reality to work with?

© 2005, 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Ed Brubaker, Dustin Nguyen & Richard Friend (WildStorm)
ISBN 1-84576-177-4

This reductionist saga of real-world super-heroics reaches a worrying point in a slow but marked decline with a year long mini-series collected as two volumes here. The Authority are a team of super-beings who eschewed the traditional societal role of heroes in favour of a pre-emptive strike policy, and a no-nonsense One-World paternalism, that allowed them to tackle real problems such as hunger, pollution, genocides and corporate piracy as well as demented super-villains and alien invasions. They set themselves above the Machiavellian dances of world politics in a mission to save the entire planet, which naturally, did not endear them to the entrenched Interests of Government and Business.

Eventually, weary of the continual hindrances put in their way by the US Government, they forcibly supplanted it and as Book 1 opens are in charge of the country and thus, arguably, the world. As their reform and salvation programs begin to take effect however, a mysterious enemy is manipulating various other US superheroes to begin a popular revolt.

Stuffed with the signature intense language and violence that characterises both this series and author Brubaker’s other work, things begin to go terribly wrong, terribly quickly, and the situation worsens when Midnighter is catapulted into the future, where he sees what the eventual result of their efforts will lead to. On his return, he quits the team to save the planet, but still the situation seems to worsen. As the first volume ends, the demoralized team have all retired or disappeared and America and the world are free, although now in the hands of a corporate dictatorship.

© 2004, 2005 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Garth Ennis & Glenn Fabry (WildStorm/DC Comics)
ISBN 1-84576-040-9

Garth Ennis is not particularly fond of superhero comics. That’s a shame since whenever he does write men in tights he tends to bring a wicked eye and vicious sense of the absurd to the party. The Authority as a rule tends to be a little po-faced and ultra serious in its Sturm und Drang, dystopic, angst-ridden, post apocalyptic way and Ennis would seem to be first choice not to write one of their adventures. However, Kev, collecting together both a special and a miniseries (Kev one-shot and More Kev #1-4) is one of the best volumes in this franchise so far.

The Authority are a small band of superbeings who live in a colossal, trans-dimensional spaceship, who use their god-like abilities to, in essence, rule the world. This, obviously, does not sit well with Earth’s politicians and militarists, but The Authority does not much care, choosing to right wrongs rather than follow any nation’s policy agenda.

Great Britain takes it upon itself to rectify this situation by sending an ex-S.A.S. assassin to murder them in their own space ship. There are only two problems. One is that Kev Hawkins, although a highly proficient death-dealer, is also an incredibly jammy, total screw-up, so even when he does accomplish his mission he then discovers that the entire plot is an insidious alien invasion scheme, and has to resurrect all the super-tossers to defeat the would-be conquerors. The second problem is that the resurrected heroes are quite unhappy about being murdered in the first place, and truly enjoy bearing grudges.

When the special first appeared, it was a welcome, if coarse, vulgar, crude, excessively violent and hilariously funny alternative to the cosmic histrionics of the parent series. Something that successful couldn’t help but spawn a sequel, and More Kev debuted a year later. When an alien embassy holds most of the super-team hostage against the return of an interplanetary criminal who has concealed himself amongst Earth’s population, only drastic action can save humanity.

A major complication is that only The Midnighter and Apollo – a gay couple – are free to hunt him/it, and they need the unwilling help of the last man to see him/it alive. That, of course, would be a certain homophobic gunman who they still haven’t forgiven for killing them earlier in this book. What follows is vintage Ennis, brimming with soldier-boy camaraderie, ugly shagging, brilliantly foul and funny dialogue and the now mandatory pop at any and all governments, whilst Glenn Fabry’s art weaves a fine, unobtrusive line between realism and caricature without ever stealing the focus from the narrative.

There are plenty of hilarious set-pieces, vast amounts of gratuitous gore and a shed load of harsh language in this wonderful antidote to the heavy- handed hyperbole that is bogging down so much of modern comics’ output. An absolute hoot!

© 2005 WildStorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.