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SEQUENTIAL CULTURE #12 19 July 03 |
Mark Millar’s The Authority and the Polemic Over Iraq |
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JULIAN DARIUS |
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In retrospect, the tale Mark Millar crafted
of a super-team’s unilateral intervention against the wishes of the world’s
governments seems remarkably parallel to the invasion of Iraq. |
For some reason, as I think of the polemic
over Iraq (as I often do), I keep thinking about The Authority. Perhaps this is because I’ve studied The
Authority in some depth, presenting on it at an international scholarly
conference in early 2003, as the debate over Iraq was reading its final
pre-war stages. In retrospect, the
tale Mark Millar crafted of a super-team’s unilateral intervention against
the wishes of the world’s governments, causing fantastic controversy, seems
remarkably parallel to the Bush administration’s perceivedly unilateral
invasion of Iraq with its surrounding ferociousness and strongly divided
political rhetoric and protests the world over. The problem with this parallel, to the degree that one finds it
(and it’s fairly obvious despite the fact that no one’s written about it, to
my knowledge), is not only one’s stance on Iraq but also on The Authority. In Mark Millar’s The Authority,
super-heroes stop only fighting the super-villain of the month. To be sure, they do this too, but the
whole of his work on the title was defined by the titular team’s role in
real-world affairs. His very first
issue begins with the team invading a nation and killing its political
leadership which prospered while the citizens starved and were killed for
wanting democratic reforms. As I
covered for Sequart.com, the original sequence that was censored by DC Comics
explicitly referred to Jakarta’s President Habibe, known for his unprosecuted
crimes against humanity -- taking the “real-world” aspect of the Authority’s
interventionism all the further.
Issue #17, the first chapter of Millar’s second storyline, “Earth
Inferno,” showed the Authority getting the Russians to withdraw from Chechnia
and referred to them having already gotten the Chinese to withdraw from
Tibet. Attacked for these unilateral
actions, the Authority defended themselves in interviews, as seen in Millar’s
very first issue, as only doing what any decent human being would do if he
had the power to change these situations. |
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We did not get
a creative depiction of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime at the hands of
The Authority, but we could easily imagine it. And, I’m willing to bet, we would have cheered. |
We did not see the Authority intervening
to create an autonomous Palestinian state (nor stop Palestinian suicide
bombers), nor depose North Korea’s dictatorship that similarly prospered
while millions starved, nor depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq (where he gassed
the Kurds, routinely killed political adversaries or those suspected of
disloyalty, and generally instituted a state where videotaping someone’s
daughter’s rape to give to the father or cutting the throat of the wife in
front of her husband were viewed as legitimate mechanisms of the state to
coerce and control its population).
We did not see these particular interventions, but we could easily
imagine them. We did not get a creative
depiction of the fall, over a single day, of Saddam Hussein’s regime at the
hands of super-powered individuals, but we could easily imagine it. And, I’m willing to bet, we would have
cheered. The problems come into the picture when one
considers that the main villains of Millar’s The Authority included
the United States itself. Indeed,
leader Jack Hawksmoor puts President Clinton in his place in Millar’s very
first issue, the villains of that first storyline are super-powered products
of a covert U.S. operation, the magical character the Doctor makes Al Gore
and George W. Bush embrace and kiss during a 2000 Presidential debate, and in
the final storyline the G7 nations (the seven nations with the biggest
economies) led by President George W. Bush (censored in appearance in the
final issues) have the Authority killed (or attempt to do so) and
replaced. Given that the U.S.
government is the enemy, yet the most obvious parallel today to the Authority
is the controversial and arguably unilateral intervention in Iraq, how does
one make sense of Millar’s The Authority in the context of the 2003
war in Iraq? |
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More on The
Authority. Also see Censorship
of the Authority. |
There are at least five different
positions on the matter, and they depend often enough on whether one likes
the war or not or whether one approves of the Authority’s actions or
not. The first is to like the
Authority and to approve of the war, in which case the unilateralism or lack
thereof of the war is irrelevant to the moral question of deposing brutal
dictators when one has the power to do so.
Lacking super-heroes, the closest thing the world has is the United
States, known as the sole remaining Super Power (to use Cold War
terminology). The United States,
lacking the precision evident in a few-page comic book sequence in which a government
is changed, is bound to make human mistakes.
Perhaps even some manner of self-interest will enter the picture, as
in fear of Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism or (now hotly debated after the
fact, yet never before the fact) possession of weapons of mass destruction in
the hands of such a brutal dictator, but that may be attributed to the
politics and the economics of real-world humanity rather than the lack of
need for money or for political alliances exhibited by the Authority. Whatever past wrongs the United States has
committed, including in Iraq, would thus have little to do with helping
people when one has the power to do so, as the Authority so splendidly put
it. The second position one could take is to
dislike the Authority’s actions and disapprove of the U.S. war effort. Though I do not know his position on the
war, Warren Ellis, the writer who created the Authority (the first issue
appeared a year before Millar took over as writer), has publicly stated that
the Authority represent totalitarian and unilateral solutions and that they
are the “bad guys” of their own story.
Granted, he did not realize this until the widespread backlash against
The Authority, particularly its unilateral violence, occurred in the
wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks upon the United States. Others, including prominent writers such
as Grant Morrison, publicly joined the backlash. By such reasoning, the cause in question -- whether regime
change in Iraq, stopping super-villains or extra-terrestrials from another
dimension (as the Authority did during Ellis’s tenure), or stopping vicious
dictators and political occupations (as the Authority did during Millar’s
tenure) -- does not matter. The
violence and unilateralism of the methods themselves render the protagonist
in the wrong, an argument akin to believing that war is wrong no matter the
circumstances. The third position one could take is to
fail to see a parallel. This seems to
be the position most have taken, if their silence serves as any
indication. Yet it is difficult to
see how such a position could be taken, given the obvious parallels between
the liberation of Iraq in the face of a screaming world and the Authority’s
unilateral ousting of dictators and occupiers. Of course, the parallel is not perfect: the Authority is not a nation-state, nor
are any two actions or sets thereof equal in all respects, including their
level of unilateralism or altruism.
But failing to see a parallel, at least in general principle, can also
be a convenience: one can thus have
inconsistent views, cheering the vigilante who does right in the action movie
yet detesting the same in real life, wherein one is more likely to rely upon
police officers and the mechanisms of the state as the proper, more ordered
course of events. It is very much my
contention that many have avoided seeing the parallel precisely because of
its implications on the remarkably contentious subject of Iraq. As we discuss the fourth and fifth
positions, in which one’s attitude towards the Authority and one’s attitude
towards Iraq differ, we will see how failure to find a parallel or emphasis
upon the differences between the two might help justify one’s position; as
such, the largely indefensible third position of not seeing a parallel at all
overlaps with the fourth and fifth position in which one finds a parallel but
conveniently finds it faulty to justify one’s own views. In the fourth position, one likes the
Authority’s actions and dislike the U.S.’s in Iraq. This position would likely rely upon not finding an exact
parallel between the two. For
example, one could feel that the U.S. was not as altruistic in its actions
regarding Iraq as the Authority clearly were regarding other brutal
dictators: perhaps one could feel
that the U.S.’s real interest was oil (despite that Iraq’s oil, already
controlled by the U.N., could more easily be obtained through Saddam Hussein
than through invasion, especially if one were willing to both aggressively
negotiate with the U.N. and to defy it if it failed to see things one’s way,
and despite that oil companies prefer stability and don’t care whether the
people living a mile from the oil wells are shot). One could, also, believe in the principle of consistency, thus
faulting the U.S. for failure to act in many African nations wherein genocide
and genocide-level murders have occurred with little more than verbal
responses, though the same could be applied to the Authority -- who, after
all, intervened in Jakarta but not in Iraq. In the fifth and final position, one
disapproves of the Authority’s actions and approves of the U.S.’s in
Iraq. This position might rely upon
the belief that the world’s (legitimate) governments alone hold the right to
take such actions (a view not out of line with the naturally nation-centric
U.N.) and that a band of super-powered individuals do not have such a right;
such a position, of course, runs up against theories of nationhood and their
arbitrariness or their legitimacy, though such matters are beyond the scope
of this present effort.
Interestingly, this position might equally rely upon the notion of
unilateralism, with interesting effects.
If one fails to find an exact parallel on the grounds of
unilateralism, it is the Bush administration which has so routinely been
charged with unilateralism that is the less unilateral of the two: the
Authority did not spend months at the U.N. before intervening, despite that
conditions for invasion were deteriorating as the season for worse weather
approached; the Authority did not have allies around the world who endorsed
the war effort; and the Authority did not exist more than a year beforehand,
much less experience twelve years of the regime being targeted having
flagrantly defied United Nations mandates and routinely firing on the
Authority’s aircraft. |
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We long, in other words, for an Authority that was just -- that
really did go after the bad guys and make a finer world. In short, we long for a synergy of power
and the moral discipline to use it that we rarely see in this flawed world of
quotidian details. |
The lack of consideration of the parallel
between the Authority and the war in Iraq betrays a desire, fundamentally,
not to address such issues. After
all, however rarely we talk about this fact, one is used to liking and approving
of actions that characters take in fiction without liking or approving of
them in real life. Approving is key
here, as we often do approve and disapprove of characters’ actions --
of them cheating on their spouses, for example -- and this is quite different
from liking, or being entertained by, a character or his actions --
say, a serial killer’s. Just as it is
hard not to like and feel approval for the vigilante in fiction, it is hard
not to like the Authority telling off the President and making a finer, more
just world -- without having to deal with the details of the reconstruction,
as the U.S. is presently in Iraq. But
let us not pretend that this discrepancy does not bespeak something
deeper: we would like to be
vigilantes, to yell when the car repairman rips us off, to have someone who
rescues the missing child who the police cannot find. Through most of our history, and our
evolution, we functioned with far less law and systems of state-run
negotiation than we do today. We
long, in other words, for an Authority that was just -- that really did go
after the bad guys and make a finer world.
In short, whether we approve or disapprove of the war in Iraq, we long
for a synergy of power and the moral discipline to use it that we rarely see,
or think we rarely see, in this flawed world of quotidian details. |
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In The Authority, there are no news reports counting the
dead killed in the team’s interventions. |
In The Authority, there are no news
reports counting the dead killed in the team’s interventions, relaying the live
video of the accidental civilian wounded around the world -- without stating,
each time, that however many thousands of such rightly tear-producing
casualties, they cannot compare with the numbers and the horrors of those
being vanquished. Appendix:
The Authority in France As I write this, I am in France, now most
famous not for being the cradle of so much of the world’s literature, art,
architecture, and philosophy but for opposing the U.S.-led efforts to win the
United Nations, an opposition so strong that French President Jacques Chirac
promised to veto the abortive second resolution, which would have explicitly
authorized force, leading the U.S. in turn to never officially propose it
after months of diplomatic work.
Along the way, Americans poured French wine in the gutters (ignoring
that this helped the French economy), American senators threatened to boycott
French cheese (but couldn’t because of international agreements), and many
American restaurants changed the French fries on their menu to “Freedom
fries” (despite that French fries were invented in Belgium and the link, or
lack thereof, between France and freedom is less than clear by this elision
of a nation’s name from the menu). So
too did France share U.S. intelligence with Iraq (according to some reports )
-- the nation for which they had built a nuclear reactor (despite knowing
that its nuclear materials would be used in an attempt to fabricate an atomic
bomb) and the nation that owed the French government untold billions -- and
continue to meet with Iraq diplomats with rather checkered pasts on human
rights; in the French streets, some cases of anti-Americanism have emerged,
including the beating of one student while the police did nothing (according
to some reports) and some limited hassling of Americans abroad. While Bush’s rhetoric has felt unilateral
to many, when Eastern Europe (ravaged by the Soviets) endorsed the war,
Chirac proved himself a hypocrite by calling the endorsement unconscionable
and mal élevé (meaning bad behavior, but carrying the literal meaning
of having been poorly brought up), adding that Eastern Europe missed a good
chance to shut up. In polls, the
French support Chirac’s stance against the U.S. war effort as strongly as the
Americans support that effort. The two
nations have a grand history together, both champion liberty and equality
(albeit with different cultural notions of the two), and can both be a bit
arrogant, especially after a traumatic terrorist attack (in the case of the
U.S.) or a crisis of identity (in the case of France, formerly home of the lingua
franca but now one of many states in the European Union). |
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I am holding in my hands a copy of the French edition of Mark
Millar’s The Authority. One might
think that the Iraq issue would be important to negotiate for the American
volume of unilateral interventionism unleashed upon the unsuspecting French
public at precisely this time. |
Why is all of this relevant? Because I am not only in France; I am
holding in my hands a copy of the French edition of Mark Millar’s first and
best storyline on The Authority, “The Nativity” -- probably the
storyline most evidencing the Authority’s unilateral intervention in
sovereign nations. Published in April
2003 (the second volume is slated for publication in August) by Semic Books,
known as probably the major adaptor of American material for the French, one
might think that the Iraq issue would be important to negotiate for this
American volume of unilateral interventionism unleashed upon the unsuspecting
French public at precisely this time. And indeed it does. The back cover’s able guide to the first
year of the series (prior to Mark Millar’s taking over as writer) and to the
present volume describes the Authority as anarchistes opposing and
guiding the world’s gouvernements.
The language of interventionism is conveniently absent. So too inside, on the title page, where
Jack Hawksmoor’s speech to President Clinton from The Authority #13
(the first chapter of “The Nativity”) is used to explain the characters and
simultaneously excite readers. The
speech is conveniently chosen. As
quoted, it begins, “Authority est un groupe multiculturel sans affiliation
nationale” (“The Authority is a multicultural group without national
affiliation”), thus avoiding the tag of being American. For that matter, the biographies of Millar
and Quitely each volunteer their Britishness in their first sentences -- and
while Britain (seen in general as repressed by the French but nonetheless a
part of Europe) not only endorsed the war but sent troops, British sentiment
was far more conflicted than that in America. Though the rest of the speech does include -- and unavoidably
so given the original -- some interventionist language about “des
violations des droits de l’homme” (“violations of the human rights”), it
concludes on a decidedly different note, in the only portion of the speech
given a separate paragraph: “Vous
n’êtes pas en position de défenir notre juridiction, monsieur le président”
(“You are not in a position to define our jurisdiction, Mister
President”). In the last pages, after
the conclusion of the story, one final quote is given in the margin of the
cover to #14: in it, responding to
Clinton, Hawksmoor says “Je pourrais vous dire le même chose, M. le
président” (“I could tell you the same thing, Mister President”). Clearly, these quotes in which the
Authority explicitly and forcefully puts the American President in his place
are considered especially seductive to the reader. |
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“Voudriez-vous que nous sauvions le monde des invasions
extra-terrestres, mais que nous détournions le regard quand les dictateurs
bien terrestres commettent des génocides?” |
More subtly, they may be seen as a guide for
the reader in interpreting the book.
After all, while Hawksmoor telling off the President was certainly a
high point emotionally (one I repeated to others at the time in arguing for The
Authority’s revolutionary nature), I would think that other quotes more
adequately defined Millar’s The Authority. For example, quotes that position the Authority as preemptive,
contrary to status quo super-heroics, and as having not a right but a
responsibility to be active in world affairs. Such strains can be found in Hawksmoor’s speech on the title
page -- “Nous ne sommes pas des super-héros de bande dessinée qui
combattent des super-méchants tous les mois juste pour préserver le statu quo”
-- and in the final quote given before the story commences -- “Voudriez-vous
que nous sauvions le monde des invasions extra-terrestres, mais que nous
détournions le regard quand les dictateurs bien terrestres commettent des
génocides?” But, at the very
least, this volume seems to privilege more strongly the passages in which Hawksmoor
tells off the American President, and we can only imagine regret that the
President in question was Clinton (in 2000) and not Bush (who would be
censored by DC editorial from appearing in Millar’s final issues). |
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The text remains the same, but the
U.S. has assumed a position closer to that of the Authority than of the U.S.
in “The Nativity.” |
Let us examine how these quotations
actually function with regards to the text in the present political
climate. The quotes telling off the American
President were indeed meant, as they originally appeared, to distance the
Authority from the U.S. government.
But they were meant to distance an inactive administration playing
politics instead of intervening against dictators. They were hardly a critique of interventionist U.S. military
actions, especially against dictators.
Yet, in the interim between their original publication in the U.S. and
their publication in France, the U.S. has changed its symbolic or rhetorical
position openly towards preemptive action against the bad and powerful men of
the world. The text remains the same,
but the U.S. is as moving rhetorical target:
semantically, it has assumed a position closer to that of the
Authority than of the U.S. in “The Nativity.” Yet this is lost on most readers, and the emphasis on extracted
quotations against the American President seems to be a criticism of U.S.
policies rather than a criticism of specific policies, in this case political
inaction while people are killed by oppressive regimes. If the American President stands for his
nation, telling off that President may seem to distance the speaker from the
United States rather than what the United States represents in a particular
rhetorical context, such as a debate over the Authority’s humanitarian
interventionism. In real life, many would argue, the roles
have been reversed. Is it the
Iraq-invading U.S. in 2003 that of the inactive, careless U.S. of The
Authority -- or does France better fit that bill, while the Authority, de
facto rulers of the world by force now using that world power to openly
oppose and to oust brutal dictators, better represent America in 2003? In the debate over quasi-unilateral
interventionism, the characters as symbols represent stances and perhaps
inherited past policies and positions -- but who best represents those
stances, and thus who is represented by those characters, may indeed change. Now, it is not my intention to argue that
the 2003 French publication of Millar’s The Authority explicitly plays
upon anti-Americanism. While I find
French governmental policies problematic in many respects, I can say the same
for American governmental policies.
No, there has been too much French-bashing as of late; I love the
French, and have not had any problems with the French even in this climate
and even having the occasional discussion about the war in Iraq -- though I
do not parade myself drunkenly and loudly about the streets in the wee hours
of morning, in general, either here or in the U.S. My point is not about the French, but about the way Millar’s
work on The Authority intersects with this present extremely charged
political climate. And I cannot
imagine that whomever was in charge of selecting the quotations that decorate
the book’s non-story pages and that describe the book imagined that
quotations in which the book’s protagonists tell off the President of the
United States would not fly in the present political climate. |
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These are the accidents of
history: the people who save you,
whether from super-villains or Nazis, can someday disagree with you along the
same lines as their reasoning for saving you, at least as they perceive it. |
It is worth noting, finally, that Millar’s
first storyline features, in the final issue (#16) a sequence in which the
U.S.-created swarms of super-villains who attack the capitals of the world’s
nations. In Paris, a gang of flying
super-villains strafe and kill civilians, then deny that such things as
French civilians exist, since to be a civilian one must be civilized. The French, they point out, eat
horses. One super-villain thug talks
of being promised Chirac’s skull once he raises the French government. Their deaths are given to the Authority’s
leader, Jack Hawksmoor, whose power innovatively relies on speaking to cities
and getting them to do things. Thus,
as Hawksmoor makes clear, Paris herself kills these bastards. One can easily imagine the special venom
of such foes and the special affinity the Authority would seem with France
when one reads this sequence in French.
Yet while the Authority is right to stop such racist thugs (whose
racism explicitly in their dialogue is not limited to the French), again the
appearance may seem to be that of the Authority defending French identity in
particular, all the while defying the United States’s government. One could almost forget, in the present
polemic political climate, that the Authority saving Paris would probably
have equally saved the people of Iraq from its government. These are the accidents of history: the people who save you, whether from
super-villains or Nazis, can someday disagree with you along the same lines
as their reasoning for saving you, at least as they perceive it. |
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Read every Sequential Culture on
Sequart.com! Read about the author on our About page. Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com. Discuss this column online on Sequart.com’s messageboards. |
I can only imagine the glee, and perhaps
the fear if he thought deeply enough, that some editor felt at Semic Books as
he carried this edition through translation and publication here, at this
time. Read more about the Authority on Sequart.com. |
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