The Authority #8 (December 1999)

Hey, hey! We're The Authority! Love to watch us kill and slay!

If The Authority were The Monkees, Midnighter would be Mike Nesmith, Jack Hawksmoor would be Mickey Dolenz, Apollo would be Davy Jones, and The Doctor would be Peter Tork. The three women would be women Davy Jones fucked because whenever a woman appeared on The Monkees, Davy Jones fucked her. It was a running gag that wasn't maybe such a funny gag when you listen to the song "Cuddly Toy." At that point, you want to both vomit and call the police every time you see Davy interacting with a woman. To be fair to The Monkees (which I feel they need because they just seem so innocent and whimsical and carefree (even though they were punk as fuck)), the song was written by Harry Nilsson. I bet Davy Jones never even thought about the words he was singing. He probably took it literally because who has time to deconstruct the lyrics of a song when you're banging every woman who says hello to you? I'd be so much more stupid than I am if women were throwing themselves at me constantly. I probably would have read three books in my entire life and those books would have been Where the Red Fern Grows, The Autobiography of Jim McMahon, and Rambo: First Blood.

When we last left The Monkees, their Earth was being invaded by Alternate Dimensional British Racists (you know, UKIP!) and they were all out of songs to sing to confuse the baddies and win the day. But Jenny Sparks had an idea to buy them some time: throw Apollo out of a Door over Northern Europe where he may or may not fall to his death as he recharges in the sun. The only person who is okay with that plan is Apollo. Not because he wants to die but because he knows he's the only one who can stop the invasion. It's a theme we'll see often in The Authority: the members do heroic and deadly things not because they want to but because they're the only ones left who can. Most of them could retire if they just found a way to make Midnighter fly.

While Midnighter slowly walks Apollo to the Door, interdimensional shiftships are fucking the shit out of Northern Europe.

Midnighter has time for a quick blow job before he pushes Apollo out the Door and possibly to his death. I would have Doored Apollo directly into the sun with a boomerang Door to Northern Europe waiting just a few seconds drop beneath the first Door. But what do I know? Like is that even more dangerous to Apollo? Could he survive on the sun? He's a Superman insert so I guess it depends on what version of Superman we're talking about. But this is The Authority so it's probably the greatest and most powerful version. What I mean to say is I'm right and my plan would work out better than Jenny's plan.

As you can see in the first panel, Jack Hawksmoor gets the job of cleaning up the corpses and throwing them into a Door which probably exits on the sun. Man, if they were only smart enough, one of them could be saying that two birds pap right now!

Swift stays on Wildstorm Earth to help guide Apollo to the ships he needs to destroy. The rest of the group head to Sliding Earth with the help of The Carrier.

Who modeled this ship after the head of a blow-up doll?

I'm not criticizing Bryan Hitch by saying that The Carrier looks different from earlier issues but does The Carrier looks different from earlier issues because Hitch is terrible at his job?

Calm down! That was a symmetry joke! Hitch isn't terrible at his job at all. My guess is that it took Hitch a few issues to realize that the whole vibe of this comic book is technological kinky sex addiction.

The Doctor uses his magic to help heal The Carrier after all the damage it suffered at the hands of Apollo and the Sliding Albions. Maybe that's why it now looks like the head of a sex doll. It's transitioning into its chosen form. I hope Regis's shiftship looks like a massive cock (which makes sense! He lost his to Jenny so he'd want to own a vehicle that says, "I've lost my cock but this makes up for it, right?!") so that The Carrier can just ingest it and bite it off, thus castrating Regis yet again.

Meanwhile on Earth, Midnighter is about to be very, very, very, um, very sad.

Byyyyyyyyeeeeeeee!

Once The Carrier enters Sliding Albion airspace and stops moving at Bleed Speeds, it seems to regain its proper shape. I failed to take into account that it was just moving quickly in that other scan so it was slightly distorted. Man, Bryan Hitch is super good at his job!

The Carrier's so massive that it blocks out the sun over Sliding London when it arrives and a bunch of blue aliens shit their reverse spider holes just before Jenny Sparks Independence Day's Sliding Parliament.

Byyyyyyyyeeeeeeee!

Maybe I should have said she "Reverse Guy Fawkes' Sliding Parliament"? Reverse in that she actually blew it up while he didn't and also she blew it up from above instead of from below.

Unluckily for everybody (but especially Regis), Regis was inside Parliament at the time. He comes running out, every spider orifice ablaze. You know why I said unluckily for Regis. I meant unluckily for everybody else because Jenny wanted to re-attach his dick before ripping it off again and the others probably wanted to, I don't know, watch that? Maybe I should have thought the beginning of this paragraph through a bit more before typing it and then shrugging and thinking, "Why edit anything I write ever? What's the point? Why was I even born?"

Quick Wildstorm Earth check-in: Apollo wakes up before hitting the ground and destroys loads and loads of Sliding Albion shiftships. Swift gives him some advice on how to read the wind so she doesn't seem as useless as every reader knows she is. I can't think of a worse description than "Hawkman without a mace." Oh wait! "Green Arrow with a bow!" Fuck. If somebody called me that, I'd have to eat out their asshole and call them God.

No, it doesn't count if you say it to me now that I've put it out there, you kinky bastards!

Is he more ominous because he put raping and killing in that order? Or is it worse the other way around? It probably depends on if you're the victim or somebody watching from nearby.

Regis kicks Midnighter's ass but I don't know if that's because Regis is more powerful than Midnighter or the plan calls for Midnighter to get his ass kicked as a distraction. Either way, it works because Jack Hawksmoor's able to climb into the city's bowels and explode up through Regis.

Does this count as a second castration? Or just dead?

Jack Hawksmoor is like a Magic the Gathering creature that gets more powerful for every land you control. Except by land I mean city and by Magic the Gathering I mean what is that? I'm too cool to know what that is.

After Regis is dead, The Doctor takes care of the alien base in Italy. He does this by putting Italy on a timeout while the rest of the Earth keeps on orbiting the sun. Everybody in Italy dies a frozen popsicle after everything inside them bursts. Jenny tells Sliding Earth that they can have a second chance now that the alien regime is gone. She didn't destroy the rape camps in China or clear out the bacterial infection from every single piece of land in the world. I think she's a little bit pissed off at the whole place right now. She'll come back if Mark Millar runs out of ideas during his run on this series.

The Engineer freaks out a little bit about how much power they have to manipulate an entire world. But everybody else is all, "This is what we do! We make things better! Not everything. Just some things. Like killing Regis and destroying Italy. What will that do in the huge scheme of things on a planet where aliens and alien hybrids still run rampant doing whatever they want to the human populace? Who knows! We didn't even touch the rape camp that is China. Why should we? They weren't trying to invade our Earth and nobody asked us if we would! Not our problem. I mean, it's kind of our problem since we declared we're going to make Earth a better place. But it's not like we said 'every Earth!' And we certainly didn't say Sliding Earth! Fuck this place. We're going home. Have your existential crisis there, Angie!"

The Authority #8 Rating: A. The Authority are meant to be a bad-ass team with loads of cool and somehow Warren Ellis got that pretty much right without it feeling likes he's trying too hard. Yes, he does try too hard at times. But it's forgivable because how can you not love Midnighter and Apollo being all sweet on each other one moment and destroying the fuck out of anybody they look at the next? How can you not love Jenny Sparks, so casual and cool and above it all because she's more than a person; she's an idea. And Jack Hawksmoor who runs around barefoot kicking people's spines out of their bodies because he's some kind avatar of urban landscapes, strengthened by dirty alleys and massive freeways and corner delis and fucked up sewer systems? And The Engineer who's mostly nanotechnology but retains more of her humanity than any of the others (mostly because half of the others are barely human)? And The Doctor who channels the power and utilizes the knowledge of every Doctor who came before him, every shaman who mastered the magic of Earth and who's always fucked up on some psychedelic because he can't help it, being too in tune with nature? And that's it! That's all of the members of The Authority! There aren't any more that I love!

The Authority #7 (November 1999)

This looks majestic but Midnighter can't fly so they're not actually that far off the ground.

The cover to Issue #8 looks like a rehash of this cover but at night. I don't know if that means anything or if Bryan Hitch just had a bunch of generic covers ready to go so he wouldn't have to wait on Warren Ellis's scripts. It's a pretty decent cover for a generic "here come the heroes" kind of thing. At least they're not all looking at the reader Kevin Maguire style. For The Authority looking at the reader, you'll have to wait until next issue. Midnighter's pretty intense so I'm warning you now: wear your diaper, fam.

This issue begins with Regis and Yngvi discussing how their dicks don't work anymore. Maybe they work. I don't know. Regis loses himself in the nostalgia of days gone by when he wasn't a eunuch so it seems like not much going on down there. But then the discussion moves toward how the aliens fucked nearly all of Earth by turning it into an unlivable hellscape due to their conquest of it. The only place left with living things and a healthy biome was Albion and they fucked that too in 1953 with their bacterial attack to take it over. So now they dream of the days when they could procreate, sloppy flaccid alien dicks in their hands (unless their genitals aren't dicks? But I have to believe they are because they interbred with humans. Maybe they've just got a weird hole down there where their alien sperm crawls out across their belly like spiders birthed from an egg sac, scattering in all directions in search of an egg to fertilize?).

So the reason for invading Wildstorm Earth was a little more complicated than "lebensraum."

Part of the idea of "lebensraum" (a small part and — let's be clear — most of the parts were racist. Probably because they borrowed from that other great racist reasoning for expansion, "Manifest Destiny") was that Germany would have more Germanic territories to move its population to prevent overpopulation of any one area. But these aliens need more land because they're just shitting all over the land they already have. They're less about lebensraum than they are about toterraum. They destroy their territory forcing them to expand into a place where they can actually live and breed. But then they destroy that space while conquering it. And they don't seem to learn because they've done it to their entire Earth and now want to do it to another Earth. I wonder if they've considered that they're kind of a shit race and maybe aren't fit for existence?

Yngvi gives Regis the intel from their first invasion: inferior technology, unstable civilization, possibly nuclear weapons. And Regis responds with, "Oh how I loved fucking Asian women!"

"Do you remember the Chinese women before we destroyed their wombs with our virulent spider sperm?"

The last of Yngvi's intel concerns the appearance of Jenny Sparks and her entry into the field of battle through Door technology. Regis realizes Jenny and her team are using one of their shiftships and that they can track them via the Door technology they used. Do I have an actual memory of this story arc? Doesn't Midnighter go through some kind of Die Hard aboard The Carrier as it's invaded by Regis's alien army?

Currently not on The Carrier: Jenny, The Engineer, and Swift. They're busy interrogating Jenny's ex-husband, Lorenzo of the spider sperm.

If The Engineer were to spread her butt cheeks, would it be perfectly smooth or would I see a silvered butthole? Asking for the part of me that loves to look at buttholes.

In the interrogation, we discover that Jenny Sparks was married to Lorenzo for political reasons. But those reasons were lies because Jenny quickly found out the aliens were simply looking to take over Sliding Albion. Jenny wants to know how Sliding Albion survived the bacterial attack of 1953 and why they invaded her version of Earth. Lorenzo simply explains it was Regis. And Jenny is all, "What? I killed him in 1925!" And Lorenzo is all, "No, you merely castrated him." Oh. Well, that explains all that eunuch talk and not being able to fuck Chinese women. But now I want to know how you castrate somebody who just has a leaky spider hole in their crotch? Oh wait! That was just speculation on my part! The blue aliens could have any manner of tool down there that delivers sperm.

By Jenny's reaction, my guess is the blue aliens have a cigarette down there.

The Engineer and Swift get to learn some fascinating history about Regis and the Sliding Sicilians and all the various Sliding World Wars that Regis headed. She also mentions to The Engineer what happened to China.

Jenny's sucking on that cigarette like it was a blue alien dong.

It's a good thing Jenny mentioned that Regis murdered all of the men of China so that he could use the Chinese women as breeding stock to create more alien/human hybrids because I was on the fence about how I should feel about him before then. Kicked off nine World Wars? I don't know, maybe he had a reason. Decimated every continent with biochemical weapons? Everybody makes mistakes! Invaded Wildstorm Earth because he and his people have shit on every ounce of land on Sliding Earth? A guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do, ya know? But rape camps?! Man, this guy must be bad news!

Aboard The Carrier, just as Jenny ends her interview with her ex, multiple Doors open up and Alternate Universe UKIP members storm aboard on horseback. At the same time, shiftships Door in over multiple locations on Wildstorm Earth. All hell is breaking loose because Regis needs another, much bigger, rape camp.

Jack Hawksmoor displaying his favorite move: kicking people in the chin so that their spine flies out of their body.

After issue twelve of this series, Mark Millar takes over until the end. My theory is that Mark Millar saw that panel of Hawksmoor's extreme violence and thought, "I could write this!"

Millar probably jizzed his pants after this. He's a two-panels-of-Jack-Hawksmoor-kicking-people's-spines-out-of-their-body chump.

Later, Jack decides to try something different so he pulls the arm off of one guy and beats another guy to death with the arm. And Mark Millar is hard again.

Apollo collapses after taking out most of the invaders, drained of solar energy. The rest of the Alternate Universe UKIP soldiers rush off where they run into Jenny, The Engineer, and Swift returning from their London Holiday. They haven't been warned of the invasion due to some kind of technological interference by the invaders. The Engineer casually takes them out (and their horses! Sad!) with a flick of her machine gun wrist. The women decide Sliding Earth needs to be wiped of the multiversal map completely. Now they just have to let the guys know.

See? Planet Rape!

You might be thinking, "Tess, who would call a planet 'Planet Rape', you vile piece of shit?" But might I point out that we call one of the planets in our solar system "Jupiter" and, well, you know. Pretty much the same thing, no?

I just remembered who a bunch of idiots voted into office next year and now I'm thinking, "Shit. Probably a lot of assholes want to call a planet 'Planet Rape'. And their gonna try to drag everybody along with them." My entire life I've been unmanageable (which is why I have my own business now with zero other employees). I have no problem stepping that up to ungovernable soon.

Jenny sends Apollo out to fight an entire army by himself with Swift on comms giving him enemy movements and positions. Jenny and The Engineer will be moving The Carrier, possibly to Sliding Earth to re-castrate Regis. I don't know what the other fellows are going to do. Piss and moan, probably.

The Authority #7 Rating: A. Somehow Warren Ellis tells a tale with massive repercussions to Earth about one small team that's all that stands in the way of Planet Rape and it's believable. Aside from all the time spent fighting guys on horseback while an entire Alternate Dimension UKIP attack Northern Europe. I think we're supposed to believe that the shiftships haven't quite gotten around to destroying everything before the battle on The Carrier concludes. I'm willing to buy into it though because I'm a comic book reader and I've learned to believe in a lot of truly stupid and unbelievable shit so that I can keep being entertained. Questioning the sense of comics just leads you to not thoroughly enjoying the comic book. That's why so many readers used to always write in to Marvel and DC to offer their explanations for plot holes and inconsistencies. We didn't mind doing the heavy lifting to make this stupid hobby more believable when the writers and editors were busy shrugging their shoulders, collecting their paychecks, and, I'm assuming, calling us shitty names behind our backs! Jerkos!

The Authority #6 (October 1999)

You can tell Jenny Sparks is cool because she smokes.

Was it still cool to smoke in 1999? Is it still cool to smoke in 2024? I've never smoked because I'm not an extrovert and it seems the only reason you'd smoke is so you could hang out with other people who smoke who only smoke to hang out with other people who smoke who only smoke to hang out with other people who smoke who only smoke to hang out with old people. See, the reason Jenny Sparks smokes isn't because she's cool; it's because she's fucking old as shit. You didn't need to be an extrovert to smoke when you were old because it was just one of like four things to do with your precious little non-working-your-ass-off-to-survive time. Plus you could do it while working your ass off! Introverts sometimes become smokers too but I don't know why. But I can make an uneducated guess as to why! When introverts try smoking for the first time, it's usually finding a cigarette somewhere and squirrelling it away to smoke later behind the garage all by yourself so you don't get caught doing something you suspect is naughty and adult. The intenseness of the experience and the knowledge of doing something forbidden turns the act into something masturbatory and full of arousing feelings. So if an introvert is a smoker, it's because they totally got off in their pants on smoking cigarettes in private until they were addicted and it just became another boring habit that doesn't actually fulfill any of their needs. It fulfills a ghost need that died many years ago but still haunts your every waking moment while the inside of your pants, sadly, remain dry of sexy juices.

Most of that is unresearched opinion but it's probably correct being that I thought it up and wrote it down and why would God allow that if it was all dumb bullshit and lies?! Hmm, could it be because God is also dumb bullshit and lies? I think I need a cigarette.

I know Bryan Hitch drew the cover but it strikes me that maybe Warren Ellis told him, "Can you make Jenny Sparks look like the women I interact with online whom I want to manipulate into weird sex situations, most of whom I hope won't ever compare notes with each other about my predatory behavior? Thanks! That'll probably get me laid a bunch at the next convention!"

A young Jenny Sparks with her science gun hijacks an Alternate Universe UKIP ship.

Jenny's currently writing in her diary. Or explaining her history to somebody. Or engaging in comic book exposition. She explains how she stopped aging at twenty years old, the year Sliding Albion's shiftships first visited Wildstorm Earth and she, being an adventuress young lass with a massive science gun, hopped aboard a ship, crossed into a new dimension, and fucked her way through a series of blue-skinned princes with a fart of alien DNA. She calls it an "age of scientific romance" because of all the science and all the fucking. Sounds like a good time!

By the '50s, Great Britain had an intimate partnership with Alternate Universe UKIP (or Sliding Albion, as I should probably get used to calling them) and Jenny Sparks was a Colonel in their military space program (being that alternate universes were part of "space" although are they really? Time, maybe? Harmonics? Music? But surely not "space" in the traditional sense. "Space" is the place stuff exists within your own universe. Another universe can't be your "space," surely! It's like two competing storage unit companies). I'm glad she's a Colonel and not a Lieutenant or else my brain would have to read "Lieutenant" as "Leftenant" and I just can't abide that. It's bad enough my brain reads "Colonel" correctly even though there aren't any "R"s in it. What the fuck is wrong with military people? Are they illiterate?

Oh. The space group is a cover story. Never mind.

Jenny Sparks smokes and she's a millennial child with the spirit of the century she's born into. Those combined made me think, "Was there a Jenny Tobacco?" I know there was a Jenny Freedom but that just forces me to think, "Spirit of the Century? That means there must have been a Jenny Slaver." Jenny Imperialism! 珍妮 Gunpowder! Jenny Christianity! Snake Water Two Reeds Pyramid! Jenny Aqueduct! Jenny Frontier! Jannah Algebra! I'm here for all the fucking Jennies! Except maybe Jenny Slaver. Gotta be a different spirit in those dark times, right? Maybe just tone it down to Jenny Imperialism (which is really stretching the meaning of "tone it down", I suppose). Maybe Jenny Revolution and she was born into one of the nations other nations tried oppressing but who fought back and gave them plenty of black eyes (as opposed to feathers in their caps). Like maybe Jenny Waylayer from Waziristan! Or Jenny Peyote, a shaman of the Rarámuri of North America who were never conquered by the Spanish or fully converted by the Jesuits! Or Jenny Herero fighting, perhaps in vain, against the genocide of her people by the Germans! Basically a thousand thousand Jenny Resists all over the continent of Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Although I guess Jenny Resist would have had to make way for Jenny Sparks as Jenny Resist met Lord Quinton Itsfutile the Third.

I guess Jenny Resist was actually Jenny Freedom! So never mind yet again.

In 1953, Sliding Albion went to war with Sliding Europe. It was over in mere minutes but not before Sliding Albion, in a last ditch attempt to save themselves, tried to shift Sliding Europe's bacterial attack into Wildstorm Earth space. It didn't save them and, luckily, it didn't destroy Wildstorm Earth. I don't think. Not sure if there were any lasting repercussions from it. Maybe the bacteria caused a shift in consciousness that brought about the '60s? What it did do was cut the world off from Sliding Earth until 1999. It's why Jenny Sparks thought they were destroyed.

So back to the big battle in 1999 Los Angeles.

They're going to beat up an empty building?

Midnighter only smiles like that for two thing: Apollo's fresh out of the shower butthole and murdering people. I don't know what Jack Hawksmoor smiles about. Freely running sewage systems? Well patterned traffic signals?

The shiftship crashes through the building and crashes to the ground. The Alternate Universe UKIP terrorists inside prepare for their invasion which they don't realize will last about thirty seconds total, judging by their welcoming party.

With this greeting, it could be the actual Midnighter or just some guy in a costume from the sidewalk outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Jenny Sparks becomes a massive, monstrous electrical field in the shape of Jenny Sparks and threatens to destroy every last shiftship that doesn't get the fuck off of her Earth. Those that survive her and Apollo and The Engineer and The Doctor and Jack Hawksmoor and Midnighter and, fuck, I guess Swift also, turn their ships around and Door back to Sliding Albion. Regis is going to be fucking pissed because there are still two chapters in this story.

After the invasion is repelled, Jenny Sparks gives her team a quick rundown on the history of Sliding Albion.

Jenny said she'll provide details later. Fingers crossed those details are how the aliens and humans fucked.

Jenny Sparks contacts her old friends in the British military because she needs some intel from an alien they've got locked away there: some blue guy named Lorenzo who was Jenny Sparks' first husband.

The Authority #6 Rating: A. Way better than the previous issue that just didn't have enough meat in the pages. That may or may not be a metaphor about plot. That may or may not be literal because I was eating a pulled pork sandwich when I first read this. This issue was entertaining with a few cute surprises. It might have received an A+ but The Engineer didn't flash a single nipple. I'm surprised I deigned to purchase Issue #7 back in 1999 after that lack of nip.

The Authority #5 (September 1999)

What is this shit? Fuckin' UKIP from the future?

The Authority did what they said they were going to do in the first four issues (made the world a better place, theoretically, by giving the United Nations cloning and teleport tech but also threatening them to use it for good by simply telling them they'll be watching) so the rest of the series will just be the members all fucking each other in the most disgusting ways Warren Ellis can think of. The only disgusting way I can think of to fuck is missionary but I don't know if that's because of my limited experience or my limited imagination. I bet if I could think of more ways to fuck grossly, I'd have a website dedicated to my past behavior too!

The back cover of this issue is Stone Cold Steve Austin double fisting milk. That sounds hot until you remember milk isn't a person and Stone Cold Steve Austin. That sentence sounds incomplete but I assure you that it is. Oops, that sentence was incomplete! It should have ended with "not."

This is the first issue of a four issue story called "Shiftships." I wonder if this will explain all of the shift ships that appear in Grant Morrison's map of the DC post-Infinite-Crisis New 52 Universe? Maybe it'll just be the origin story for The Carrier. I hope it wasn't sexually abused as a young ship. That's a real worry being that this was written in 1999 when writers often thought the best ways to give a character a traumatic back story was to have them fucked in unwanted ways. Couldn't somebody occasionally have just had their puppy smeared all over the road right in front of them when they were five? Wait, is that worse? I think that's worse. I know Pig destroyed me far worse than The Prince of Tides, so, um, yeah. You know. Dead pet is worse than sexual assault.

This story begins on an alternate Earth where the English are imperialist bastards (that part isn't too alternate) and the Italian are gross (I assure you that part is alternate, you racist).

Is that a percentile ranking in 23 and Me results? "No more than fart"?

The Italians aren't as gross as I first thought. That was my initial reaction because my reading comprehension is terrible and I put the comic book down for a moment believing that I had just read that part of their DNA was "wet fart." Did I get the dialogue that wrong in my head because I wanted to get it that wrong? My reading was far more entertaining than the description of the amount of alien DNA in the Italian blood as "fart." How many farts are in a pint? I suppose it depends on the thickness of the gas passed. By "thickness," I mean moles. I'm assuming the stronger the smell, the more moles of weight the fart is.

Windsor, the smug Brit, saunters through an orgy happening in the halls of Buckingham Palace as he discusses his kingship with Yngvi the farty alien. It's then he hears somebody name Regis question whether or not Windsor the King loves his King, Regis. It wouldn't confuse me as much as it has if this panel didn't appear before Regis began projecting his voice out of thin air.

Tits!

Regis could be the tits since Windsor doesn't know where the voice is coming from. The voice even says, "Do you love me?" and I think, "Well, yes, definitely if you're the tits!" It turns out Regis is an alien who gave Windsor "Albion" to rule after World War IV. Windsor has upset Regis by comparing his alien DNA to a fart. Now Regis threatens to take it all away. This causes Windsor, in a panic, to shoot the fuck out of everybody at the orgy while Yngvi the Wet Fart stands off to the side and tsk-tsks him.

Regis appears behind Windsor and invents a new knot.

It doesn't work so good on human necks though. I'm sure he'll perfect it later.

"Lebensraum" is the German idea of "living space," or the need for a nation to continually expand its territory in order to grow. It's, you know, associated with the Nazis. So I was pretty fucking right on with my UKIP comment earlier!

Since this comic book is about The Authority, I'm guessing Alternate Universe UKIP are going to war with the Wildstorm Earth. That's not insightful nor a joke. That's just me trying to create a quick and easy passage of time for the next part of the comic book I want to talk about which will probably contain scans of The Engineer's nipples.

The Engineer is currently wearing a robe and not just naked under a slimy paste of nanotechnology so no nipples yet. She's hanging out having lunch while talking to The Doctor and Jack Hawksmoor.

Nobody follows up on why The Engineer used to shout at garbagemen.

While The Engineer describes more of her life she left behind, like fucking her ex-boyfriend on a scheduled basis and eating clams (which could be her way of saying she's also been fucking an ex-girlfriend because Warren Ellis is writing this), Alternate Universe UKIP rips into The Authority's dimension with a fleet of shiftships and begins levelling Los Angeles. Or re-leveling. Is it re-levelling if the subject never levelled the object but the object had already been levelled once before?

Four pages of this issue are used to depict two huge splash pages of ships racing across the sky. Four more pages are simply Los Angeles being destroyed. Is this a picture of that guy looking at the butterfly and saying, "Is this decompression?"

Jenny takes a moment to inform everybody that she recognizes the enemy before the final pages are used up with Apollo smashing shit.

Apollo does spend just about the last few pages destroying ships so that The Doctor can cast a spell to turn the other ships into leaves. Then Jenny Sparks declares that another Earth is invading Earth. That explanation was for her team and not the reader because the reader already read it during the first few pages that actually had some story in them.

The Authority #5 Rating: B-. Warren Ellis must have loved this job! It seems like he wrote about seven pages of script and then wrote a page that read, "Bryan! Just draw a bunch of cool ships destroying Los Angeles. Then draw Apollo destroying those ships. I'm being lazy on my script so you should throw in at least two double splash pages! Cash Wildstorm's check as quickly as possible this month!" The only reason it didn't take me exactly thirty seconds to read this comic book is because I kept putting it down to do other things. No, not weird things! Unless completely cleaning and scrubbing the walls and floor of my bathroom is weird. Is tat weird? Here's another thing I did: I finished re-reading John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, set it down, said out loud to myself, "I really need to stop re-reading books that are also mind-bending structural puzzles," and then I picked up John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor to re-read. So now I know yet another person who never listens to me: me!

Map of the DC Universe from Multiversity

I couldn't find a readable version of this map online for my old eyes so I figured I'd post one here.

Shrunken version. It's actually huge so click thru to see the thing as big as you need.

The Authority #4 (August 1999)

Comics were allowed to have villains like this in 1999?

If you don't know what I'm alluding to (and "alluding to" the historical context of this image is all I'm going to do because, you know, it's way easier than actually discussing it intelligently), just go to your local library and research "Yellow Peril." Or maybe don't. Even the term "Yellow Peril" to describe a time when the West was using racist propaganda against Asian nations seems like racist propaganda! If you go to research it anyway, maybe just ask the librarian, in a hushed whisper, for books about the history of Fu Manchu. And maybe don't even say, "Fu Manchu." Spell it out! If you get past spelling out the first name without the librarian throwing you out, they'll probably understand what you're looking for.

If you're a reader who understands the name of this blog, you probably understood the joke about spelling out Fu Manchu's name. If not, just spell it out right now. Just the first name. Out loud. To somebody you love.

Here's the part of the review where I talk about myself (Don't worry. It's not as needlessly personal as the review where I wrote a Dear John letter to my own father). I cried twice today, both times because of cats. No, no! Don't worry! It's nothing sad! It was happy crying. The first time was because I heard the Schoolhouse Rock song, "Mr. Morton." That one always makes me tear up because of the end where they sing, "Now Mr. Morton is happy! And Pearl and the cat are too!" It's so lovely that they include the cat from earlier in the couple's eventual happiness. The second time I cried was during the final episode of Fear the Walking Dead when Daniel and his cat Skidmark were reunited after seven plus years. Stupid cats! I want them all to be happy and not lonely and well loved. They can kill all the birds in the world, for all I care. Stupid birds! They never made me happy! All birds are worth are for reminders of man's limits and metaphors for imprisonment and isolation when people keep them in cages. Except for Corvids. Corvids are cool. But I'd like to see a cat try to take down a Corvid without forever after being attacked by every Corvid in the neighborhood for the next seventeen years.

When we last left The Authority, Midnighter had been Doored onto Gamorra to assassinate Kaizen Gamorra. But first he needs to kick the ass of the super soldier who discovered him.

Midnighter says he knows what this guy will do next. But he's lying.

Midnighter isn't psychic and he's also not very good with expressing himself. Because he doesn't mean he knows what this guy is going to do next. He means he knows how he's going to react to any one of the nearly infinite things the guy might attempt to do next. Maybe that just takes too long to explain when you just want the guy standing in front of you to know that he's already lost the fight. "I'm like a quantum computer with infinite parallel processing power! I have calculated every variation of the near infinite variations of how this could go, right down to the possibility that a raccoon could fall on my head just as you attack me, and I know exactly how to react to every single one of those situations in a way that gives me an advantage for the next nearly infinite possibilities that could happen after my reaction (all of those which I've also calculated how to best react to which stems to another near infinite set of choices which I've computed et cetera). You might be thinking, 'You have that kind of brain power and you're using it to win fist fights? Fucking cure cancer, you idiot!' But I've already formulated a response to that possibility too! That response is, 'Go fuck yourself, terrorist! Killing baddies makes me fuck Apollo so hard!'" See? There's just not enough space for a speech bubble that big. So Midnighter just says, "I know what you're going to do, loser!"

Midnighter goes on to win the fight and a raccoon does not fall on his head. So that was a waste of computational brain power. But he knew what he'd have done had it happened and that's satisfying in its own right, right? Isn't that why we all spend so much time fantasizing about the way conversations we'll be having later will go because we're so anxious about talking to another human being that we try to perfect the conversation before we even know what's going to be said? We all do that, right?

Oh, also when we last left The Authority (which was Issue #3!), Los Angeles was being bombed by human super men freefalling out of the sky and smashing buildings with their faces. That might sound like a terrible job but your choices of profession are limited when you're grown in a vat by a Yellow Peril mastermind who hates the rest of humanity. You either launch yourself out of a teleporter to smash buildings with your grimacing mug or you slather some lipstick on and join the other concubines. No wonder the guy's crashing head first into stone walls have such big smiles on their faces. They could have gotten the other job!

"Yahoo! At least we're not sucking Kaizen's Yellow Peril dick!"

Six members of The Authority against six hundred (estimated) super powered terrorists. Luckily they haven't wasted any space on the team for somebody like Aquaman. Sure, Swift comes close. But at least she can fly and get right in there on the action. I suppose Aquaman can fly too if the fight is close enough to the ocean for him to ride in on a breaching whale or standing astride two flying fish. Man, now I want to see The Authority's version of an Aquaman!

One of their team is The Doctor who is basically a guy on peyote so tuned in to the universe that he can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. He's like The Fonz and every particle in the universe is a lady Milwaukee high schooler whose panties drop at the snap of his fingers. He casts a little spell and whammo! three hundred terrorists are fucking him in the first stall of the men's bathroom in Arnold's.

Magic makes you come hard.

Have you ever wondered if The Fonz was actually a virgin? Is he just cool because he's actually fingered a chick while the other nerds have only ever done over the sweater stuff? Mr. C's probably the only character on the show getting any on the regular. Oh, and Mrs. C too! I bet she fucked Malph's dad in high school. She was frisky, remember?

Of course you don't remember! Unless you remember from MeTV, I guess.

Apollo calls for back-up and Swift arrives. But knowing she's just Swift, she lets Jenny know that if she's Apollo's back-up, she's going to need back-up. The Engineer would be that back-up but she's busy trying to figure out how to make engineering deadly. So the only one left is Jack Hawksmoor.

Jack Hawksmoor was conceived when his parents kicked a puppy?

As long as Jack Hawksmoor currently has his dick inside of a city, he's invulnerable and super strong and kind of sassy. But he still can't kill enough terrorists to save the day by himself. At least The Engineer figures out how to kill loads of terrorists at once by projecting her nanotech blood around her in a force field of tiny knives that can slice things up at an atomic level. That probably still leaves about 200 more terrorists. 199 if you count the one whose skull exploded around Hawksmoor's fist.

Jenny and Midnighter have a little conversation via their nanotech implants and Jenny reveals the total number of terrorists is 400. So I guess that means about 99 are left. My math wasn't that far off. You know, in the scheme of things and considering I just took a wild fucking guess at how many there were.

Midnighter has discovered Kaizen's cloning procedure is way bigger than he imagined (which must be pretty big because Midnighter can imagine near infinite things). Kaizen discovers Midnighter discovering his cloning chamber and accidentally gives Midnighter an idea about how to defeat him. Idiot. He should have kept his stupid Yellow Peril mouth shut! Hasn't he seen an episode of House? As long as people keep blathering on, you're going to say something that sparks an idea in the mind of some autistic quantum-computer-brained sociopath nearby!

Jenny's also doing good work with electricity. I didn't want anybody thinking she wasn't pulling her 95 pound soaking wet weight. But her juice is running out and the terrorists just keep coming. So she needs Midnighter to execute his plan to execute the clones as quickly as possible.

I hope Midnighter's dad wasn't a veterinarian.

Midnighter convinces The Carrier to exit Bleedspace and enter Earthspace so that he can ram Gamorra Tower with the ship. The Carrier is something like fifty miles long or high or something so it easily gets the job done, splattering Kaizen Gamorra on the windshield in the process. And I guess all the terrorists are killed in Los Angeles.

You personally? Maybe three?

After the fight, Jenny Sparks learns from King and Trelane that the United Nations will be sending in troops to secure Gamorra Island. They'll find the cloning machines and the teleport system. She seems happy about that for some reason. I guess it's better than the USA having them. But the United States still has some kind of veto right in the UN, don't they?! She thinks that they'll only use them for the good of the world simply because the United Nations knows that The Authority is watching them. I guess that's logical enough. Most people only act kind and moral because they fear the consequences of not acting that way. I mean, most people who are kind and moral, not most people. Most people are absolute abject assholes willing to do and say whatever the fuck will get them whatever the fuck they want. Sure, they'll pretend they're religious or patriotic or upstanding simply because they know a thin veneer of ethical lies will hide the stinking reek of a ramshackle den of sins beneath it. From most people. Because, again, most people are assholes and they want other people to believe they're not assholes so they're willing to believe the other assholes' lies about not being assholes. It's mostly assholes pretending not to be assholes all the way down. And I'm fucking sick of it. I hope The Authority ends the fucking world before this is over. And I don't mean the world in the comic book! Please, The Authority, please be real and come put us all out of our misery soon!

The Authority #4 Rating: A. The lesson this comic book tries to teach is this: violence redeems because assholes don't listen to words because words don't hurt them at all. Also assholes don't believe in anything so words are useless. They only use words because they know words mean something to non-assholes. The words don't mean anything to themselves though. They'll say anything to try to get people to accept them and their terrible beliefs. But they only use words when they're outnumbered. Once they've convinced enough people to give them enough power, they stop lying and just start doing whatever they want. So congratulations to all the dumb assholes in America who voted for the assholes who now will do whatever best suits their interests! Because they don't need words anymore. You gave them power! Good job, fuckwits! Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea. Oh, wait, I forgot you are fuckwits. Let me say it more plainly: Eat shit.

The Authority #3 (July 1999)

"Protect the dick!"

The Authority are battling some crazy warmonger old man and that made me think about a thing I've been planning to do to an old man! For some time now, I've been toying with writing a letter to my dad which wasn't actually a letter to my dad but an expression of the tsunami of feelings he left me with after leaving when I was two, and his subsequent incursions into my life, and eventual weight of the bags I'd been packing for so many years. This is what I have so far, although it's not very letter-like:

— — — — —

Father,
I wonder if you truly understand that you're eventually going to die without ever speaking with me again. Last time I saw you was in 2019 when your nieces (my cousins) were in town and I drove them up to see you. I stood in the living room, behind the furniture, behind the people, skulking, seething maybe, possibly just bored, definitely petting the dog. I'd stopped wanting to visit some months before this. But it was a last chance. A test, if you will, to see if maybe a glimmer of the man who told me at an early age that if our country ever brought the draft back, he'd drive me to Canada personally. The person who dragged us out of Every Which Way But Loose because too many men got punched by too many monkeys. The man who existed before he became consumed with watching post-9/11 war footage, expressing his fascination with this modern media experience of war, goggle-eyed at the tube, filled with too much excitement to express any condemnation. At this family get together, you said the thing you always say, the thing that makes me wonder what media you listen to, what reality you perceive: "We can't even make jokes anymore." I should have asked you what you meant. What kind of jokes can't you make? I say jokes all the time on the Internet. What do you fear will happen if you tell your jokes? Why are your jokes so dangerous, so damaging? Do you understand their power yet deny it at the same time? But then I remembered as he told a joke: he still tells jokes. Nobody has stopped him from telling jokes. What could he possibly mean then? If you can't joke, why then did you say, "They installed yet a third disabled ramp at the nearby plaza. I guess that one's for the trans." You laughed at your own words then so I assume that was a joke.

You say you want to be able to say whatever you want but they won't let you. And yet you always say whatever you want. But I think what you really want is for nobody to actually hear you. You want a time when people were too intimidated to say to you, "That's not funny." You want a time when people wouldn't stop being your friend because you loved telling jokes in poor taste, jokes that hurt people around you that you didn't know you were hurting, jokes that perpetuated systemic bias and racism. Because they never said anything. Maybe they even politely chuckled while hiding their true feelings about you. But now they have started to say things and your response isn't to examine why you find certain things funny that others do not. Your response is simply, "We can't even make jokes anymore."

I remember being out with you and your fourth wife, eating breakfast. Your fourth wife was complaining about what my niece (your granddaughter) was watching on television, iCarly or Hannah Montana. "Nothing on that show is realistic," she said. I retorted (joked, even, some might say), "Just like that news channel you watch." She looked at me as if I had slapped her. As if I had taken my balls out and slid them slowly across her scrambled eggs. As if I had screamed in her face something terrible inside her head that nobody was supposed to know, reveling in a secret exposed. She looked at me as if I wasn't supposed to make that joke. But I made it. Because I'm not worried about exposing to others what I believe. What jokes are you not telling because people might look at you as if you've slapped them in the face? Why don't you elaborate?

There's a kind of person who declares, "People shouldn't stop being friends with others over political opinions." But you know who says that, right? People with terrible and disgusting political opinions. "Don't judge me on my politics," they will say, as if knowing their politics damn them. "Judge me on the person I show you I am," they say on the witness stand, defending their right to have a relationship with you. As if their politics can somehow be divorced from how they see and treat other people. You grew up in the '60s. So you know. You know better than even I know: everything is political. Every fucking thing. So how am I supposed to judge you free from the America you vote for?

You consistently told me that you loved me. But you showed me that you didn't by defending terrible ideas, by being angry at things that didn't have any impact on your life, by regurgitating Fox News stories about local places that weren't local to you. It's like people were deciding things that you didn't approve of, decisions made to make their communities better, and you were angry they could do that without your stupid fucking opinion, opinions like "They shouldn't have to make cakes for gay people," or "The Washington Redskins isn't a racist name at all. My Indian friend agrees with me." You showed me you didn't love me, you hardly knew me, by supporting ideas that destroyed any government safety nets for people like me who have never been able to fit into society, who can't network, who can barely hold a job, who don't dream a status quo dream of bank accounts and bootstraps.

You once told me money is freedom. I responded, "No, time is freedom." Of course you still disagreed. Because to you, money was time. To me, earning money stole time. I understand what you're saying. Sue, if a person were rich, they could be as free as possible. But you didn't see what I was saying. That the demands to get the kind of money to make you free were too much for me, or simply too unethical. I understand it's easy for some people, for a lot of people. So easy that they don't even see or consider or acknowledge that those who don't fit in exist, those who don't find it easy, those who find it incredibly hard, nearly impossible.

Did you ever really know me? How could you? You missed fifteen formative years. Sometime around when Facebook began, you joined up like everybody. Then on Father's Day, a day I've rarely ever acknowledged because why the fuck would I even know when it was, you posted, "Waiting for the phone to ring." So I posted, "I waited fifteen years for the phone to ring." Did you look like I had slapped you in the face? Was that a joke I shouldn't have made? What shame did I unearth that you decided maybe Facebook wasn't for you and silently disappeared from the platform? Was it too easy for people who know you to expose to so many others the flaws you'd rather they not see? You want to be heard from but you don't want people to hear.

I didn't know you were an alcoholic for most of my childhood. The one time I remember shopping for a Father's Day present for you, probably early on before you completely disappeared in the forests and sand dunes of the Oregon coast, my mother suggested I get you a mixed twelve pack of international beers. I suppose that was a joke too. For her. I found it funny once I realized you were an alcoholic. Not funny as in "Ha ha let's get this person with a crippling addiction some shit that'll keep the addiction going." I found it funny in "You left my mother with two young children because you were drunk and selfish and irresponsible and she decided to give you a little 'Fuck off, prick.'"

I suppose part of the reason I wanted to end our friendship (and that's all it ever was. Me getting to know a guy whom I just happened to call Dad) was that I didn't think you deserved it. My mother was there for me and my sister. But being there meant being there for everything, good and bad. We had conflicts, of course. My sister and my mother no longer talk but she moved away and now lives near you and you get to have an adult relationship with her. All because you abandoned her, and my mother stayed. She stayed for the fights and the conflict and the drama. How is that fair? Maybe I'm being punitive and living out a simple desire to punish you for not being there. My mom lost her daughter; my father can lose his son.

You didn't fucking earn my friendship.

Sincerely,
Your Son.

P.S. I've been to a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with you. I'm glad you found the support you needed. But the clarity of the program didn't help endear me with you. They say it's a disease. It's a disease that you alone can cure, when you're ready, with the support of a community and the help of the program. But that's the thing, isn't it? You get to choose when your life has become so unmanageable that it's time for the cure. And I get to see that you didn't think your life was too unmanageable when you'd lost your relationship with your family. We weren't enough. And I guess that hurts too. Also, what's up with that 9th Step, buddy? It's possible you made amends to me at some point. But is it actually amends if I don't realize that's what's happening? It couldn't have been that week we spent with your sister (my aunt) in Truckee because you were still drinking then (and, when I look back at that time, it feels like maybe you were trying to say goodbye? Were you thinking of suicide then, Dad?). Did you tick "9th Step with Son" off your list because you talked about getting sober with me while riding in your beat up truck and yelling at me to turn off the tape because the helicopter noises from Joel's "Goodbye, Saigon" struck a PTSD chord? Was it the week we spent on Vancouver Island, the weekend Jerry Garcia died while we were out of touch with civilization? It's possible, I guess, which is why I don't let it bother me too much. But you know what the real last straw was? When I barely spoke with you during the pandemic and when your wife finally contacted me around my birthday, she said, "Your father thought you were mad at him so he was giving you his space." What the fuck, Dad? Your son doesn't speak to you for that long and you don't think, "I wonder if my son is hurting? Why haven't I heard from him? Maybe I should check in?" Enh, never mind. Have a good life.

— — — — —

Of course I'm not sending it to him! That's just for me and every random stranger on the Internet to read!

Swift is barely useful when she kills. Can't imagine what she'd do as a pacifist hero.

Swift shows me exactly what she'd do as a pacifist hero in the panels immediately following her revelation. She hears a couple of hearts beating beneath the rubble that the emergency responders didn't find. I might have a bit of a bias against winged super heroes because I always found Hawkman and Hawkgirl uninteresting and also Hawkman was a gigantic conservative prick. How Ollie, just as useless, never put an arrow in each eye is a testament to Ollie's superpower. His superpower was patience, right? I mean, if all Oliver Queen had was a quiver full of stupid boxing glove arrows, he's even worse than I imagined. No, no. He definitely must have had super patience. It's why he never dropped the arrow for a gun. Those are for the hyperactive kids!

What is Swift doing in that last panel? Is she doing a Jim from The Office?!

Did Bryan Hitch model Swift after Björk? If that's the case then I like Swift much better.

After helping out at the disaster sites (half of London and most of Moscow), The Authority begin planning to infiltrate Gamorra Island. It seems when I asked incredulously how they couldn't just use the Carrier's Door technology to get past the forcefield surrounding Gamora Island, I was asking the right question but probably could have toned down my attitude a bit. Of course they knew about that loophole! Jenny just had to make sure the team didn't rush right into Door and get themselves killed by not having a plan. Or get Swift killed by not having a plan. I think everybody else is pretty much invulnerable. Fuck, she might be too. It might be the only real qualification needed to be on this team.

The Engineer figures out, by projecting Gamorra's brand logo onto the Earth with two of the knots covering London and Moscow, that the next attack will be in Los Angeles. Jackson and Christine, the world liaisons for Stormwatch (now The Authority), have a conference call with Kaizen Gomorra to find out what he's up to. His answer is that he's up to a little bit of terrorism for terrorism's sake. Then he laughs like a lunatic.

Jenny's plan is to protect Los Angeles with most of the gang and send Midnighter onto Gamorra Island to pull Kaizen's teeth and discover his plans. But before he goes, he gets in a quick lesson on The Carrier.

The Doctor probably wants to fuck it.

Midnighter fucks up his mission by kicking the first guy he comes to in the face and not knocking his spine out of his body. The guy takes it and is all, "I don't think you're supposed to do that." But it doesn't really matter because as soon as The Authority get to Los Angeles, so do hundreds of Kaizen Gamorra's super terrorists. I guess L.A. is fucked. But so is Kaizen Gamorra because if Midnighter was captured, it was all part of the plan and Kaizen's about to lose not just his teeth but every other body part that's quite easily snapped off.

The Authority #3 Rating: B+. It's no Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth but what is, really? I'm only halfway through my re-read of Lost in the Funhouse and I've wept at least three times. One may have been partially exacerbated by my Aunt's death last night (and my really well done dramatic reading of the story "Title" out loud. You might be thinking, "Wow! You read a story out loud. Way to do something any person over the age of five can do!" But I have a feeling not even 1% of the population could do what I just did on the fly! Dare I say I'm a reading out loud genius? I'm pretty sure I have a certificate for that from when I was five!).

P.S. My Aunt was quite religious so if what she believed was true, and she's suddenly up in Heaven and able to look down on all of her loved ones, then she just saw me masturbate for the first time in her life (unlife?) today! Gross! Stop looking, Melva!