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