The Authority #14 (June 2000)

"This is my ultimate version of the Avengers." -- Mark Millar as five thousand light bulbs explode over his head

Mark Millar has made a lot of money as a comic book creator so a lot of people are going to rightfully but also wrongfully call me a jealous (wrongful) asshole (rightful) when I criticize his career as a writer. But this is my career as a, um, "writer"! Well, writing is my hobbyhorse anyway and that's a lot more important than a career. Granted, I haven't read everything Mark Millar has ever written (like everything he ever wrote for 2000 AD because what am I? British?) but I have read like six things he's written! So I'm pretty much an expert on Millar.

I suppose the first thing of his I read was The Authority. It's possible I read some of his earlier Marvel or DC stuff (like his run of Swamp Thing. If I read it, I don't remember it. But I'll eventually review it if it's in one of my dozens of short boxes!). One thing I've always thought about Millar's writing which he's never proven me wrong about: he loves the ultra-violence. If this series was the first thing I ever read by him, I was introduced to his ultra-violence passion five panels into his first comic after taking over for Warren Ellis: a panel with a man being decapitated by a flying piece of glass while another gets his head completely crushed into his torso by a concrete block. You can bet that made me hard! I mean a fan!

With this second issue of Millar's, I learned another thing about him: he loves to fucking re-imagine The Avengers! In Millar's mind, The Avengers were cool but not "kill a maternity ward full of babies" cool. He was here to fucking fix that shit! What's worse than a wasp? A hornet! What's more dangerous than a man of iron? A man of tanks! What if the God of Thunder had a flail instead of a stupid hammer?! What if Giant Man killed people by smashing them with his cock? Um, that hasn't happened yet but I'm assuming it will. Either that or Hornet will get him off by flying up his urethra and/or his rectum. I don't know what's going on with his version of The Hulk but I'm going to assume he eats people and wears a diaper full of human shit (not shit by humans but shit made of humans). I don't even know the name of this version of Captain America yet. It's Commander Something but I can't guess what that "something" is. Commander Black Ops? Commander Cannibal? Commander Don't You Fucking Look Me in the Eyes? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

The third thing I learned about Mark Millar (unless it's also part of the other two things) is that he thinks super hero stories are more interesting when the super heroes are corrupt bastards and the villains whom they beat the shit out of should be the characters readers empathize with. Maybe that's the fourth thing because Kick Ass and Hit Girl happened before Jupiter's Legacy and Supercrooks. The only thing I learned from Kick Ass and Hit Girl was that ultra-violence and making a young, innocent girl into The Batman could earn you tens of millions of dollars.

This issue begins where the last issue left off which was The Doctor saying, "Oh shit," as Gigantic Man appeared from crouching behind a nearby skyscraper for his surprise entrance. The Hulk Thing also shat itself.

Holy shit! They make fun of missing and exploited children? They really are bad! Even worse than the type of people who would gleefully kill every baby in a maternity ward!

I probably shouldn't toot my own horn and compare myself to these assholes but I'm pretty sure I've sat at a breakfast table eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles while looking at the side of a milk carton and said, "Who would want to take this uggo?!" Don't judge me too harshly! I wrote "pretty sure" which means I almost certainly didn't do that and I'm trying to look cool now by pretending I'm a horrendous douche! It's really hard to walk the tightrope of trying to gain compassionate readers and Comicsgaters! I'd also like to point out that I've never once killed all the babies in a maternity ward nor have I ever even thought about it!

The Doctor has found himself surrounded by all the Avengers, even the ones that didn't appear on the cover, like Purple Arrow and Scarlet Bitch and 20/20 and some guy in a beret. Was there a French Avenger? I have no idea why they've let him live for so many panels when their mission to kill Jenny Quantum was so important that they just murdered an entire hospital full of babies and cancer patients. They've cut The Doctor off from his magic so this confrontation has already lasted over five panels too long (and it's going to go for many more). Why doesn't Gigantic Man just step on him? Were they just bluffing when they told him he can't do magic now and they're actually afraid that the bluff hasn't worked? None of them want to be the first to attempt to murder him because none of them want to be turned into a four foot high pink double-headed dildo.

Oh, well then, by all means, just go ahead and leave with the baby. I'm sure Doctor Krigstein will go easy on us when we return to The Hangar as failures.

Tank Man tries to talk some sense into The Doctor instead of just running him over with his iron body in the shape of a man. Look, I don't get where the tank shit comes in. Maybe he farts artillery? He approaches The Doctor and puts his massive arm around him without crushing him into paste topped with Jenny Quantum crème fraîche. The only reason I can imagine that he's not killing The Doctor to kill Jenny is that Doctor Krigstein forbade them from murdering any of The Authority for some public relations reason. So the best defense The Doctor can come up with is holding Jenny Quantum so close that they can't kill her without also killing him.

I've never identified more with a character than I do with The Doctor right now.

Anyway, whether they kill The Doctor or not, I think it doesn't matter. I'm sure The Doctor isn't holding Jenny Quantum at all. He probably created some kind of living loaf of bread that puts out Jenny Quantum level power signals every time he squeezes it. Midnighter probably snuck off with the real baby through the sewers.

Apparently one of the members called Titan has been blocking The Doctor's powers. Titan could be Thor, or Giant Man, or The Hulk. Commander Fascist doesn't give out more information than he needs to. He also explains that they're letting him live because they think it's funny. They want The Doctor to kill the baby and then they promise to let The Doctor go. Weird suggestion from a guy they already know almost killed himself when his cat died. Pretty sure he's not killing a baby just to save his own fucking life. I guess when you're a bad-ass, don't-give-a-shit-about-anything, ultra-violent super hero, you can't help suffering from the drawback of being "interminably stupid." It's basically a proven theory thanks to seeing what happened to Twitter! The worst people in the world paid to have their posts be given priority and to also show everybody (because of the priority posts) just how motherfucking dumb and unimaginative they all were!

Fuck! I just fell off the tightrope and lost all the Comicsgater readers!

The Doctor refuses to kill the baby so Commander Eatsadick commands Titan to finish the job. Titan winds up being Giant Man. Oh! I guess his power to control ants has been modified in a way to control the brains of other creatures as well. If Giant Man is also Ant Man, does that mean Titan is also Tan Man? Or Tit Man?

Titan grabs a plane and proceeds to smash it into The Doctor and Jenny Quantum. But Jenny Quantum, not being a loaf of bread at all, decides she doesn't want to be smashed into crème fraîche and explodes in a blast of white light. It's also possible it was a huge coincidence and Jenny Quantum just took a Quantum Shit. The Killvengers throw up some kind of shield around themselves but I think Titan takes the full force of Jenny's blast in his stupid dick and face. With him dead, that enables The Doctor to get the hell out with Jenny Quantum.

Back on The Carrier, Shen gets her fuck on.

I've often complained that comic book artists can't help making characters look extremely sexy, even when they're dead or dying. Frank Quitely has the opposite problem. He can't make anybody look sexy enough because they all look like they've had subdermal pudding injections.

So she's slept with loads of teenagers?

I don't care that Shen has slept with a bunch of teenagers. I'm going to assume they were all 18 or 19 which makes it technically legal. But I do care that she's slept with enough teenager boys to know that they never satisfy her in the bedroom and yet she keeps fucking doing it. Also she claims to have assaulted him by smashing him in the head and dragging him up to her room. I'll assume she's joking before I convict her in the court of my opinion of committing sexual assault and normal assault and rape. As we saw last issue when she blasted through a brick wall and a man's body, she's plenty powerful enough to have given this guy a serious enough concussion to question whether he gave consent for whatever she did to his dick and butthole and probably face.

Jenny Quantum's blast has alerted The Authority to the fact The Doctor needs their help. They were all partying and fucking and fartying and pucking all night so they probably didn't even know The Doctor had gone to secure Jenny Quantum. Now they need to wipe off their genitals, suit up, and go save the day.

With that kind of power, I'm sorry Jenny didn't get Titan in the dick and face. Also surprised, being Millar wrote this.

The Doctor's powers have returned because Titan can't stop thinking about his lost feet. But instead of using his powers to turn them all into the purest cocaine and snorting them all up his nose and then writing fifteen truly terrible poems about his left testicle, The Doctor just telepathically gives all the intel on these jerks to his ultra-violent teammates. That makes sense since he's got a baby to protect and doing loads and loads of cocaine while holding a baby is almost certainly a terrible idea. I wouldn't know for sure, never having done cocaine and also never having taken care of a baby. I'm so ignorant on both subjects that maybe it's the exact opposite and the best way to take care of a baby is to be fucking sky high on coke. I should do a double blind study!

Was the totality of The Doctor's telepathic message, "Decapitation probably works." Decapitation!

I'm not sure who just got their head cut off but I suspect it was the guy in the beret who may have been a Black Panther stand-in. Was Black Panther ever in the Avengers? Was Wakanda within a country that was colonized by the French? I know so little Marvel trivia!

Titan begins crawling to the fight and then chastises The Authority for showing up to a battle drunk and with hangovers. That's when Apollo shows up to blast a hole through his head with his own body. I hope he kept his mouth closed or he's going to get Mad Titan Disease. I wish he'd exploded his head so I could count it as an explosive decapitation but Apollo's simply too precise. Darn it!

On the opposite page of the page where Titan's brains are splattered all over Singapore and Apollo's hair is an anti-drug advert. What was it with this comic book that the anti-drug people were all, "The readers of this funny magazine are definitely into mind altering substances. But they also see themselves as being too cool for the status quo. How do we make them understand that you can still be cool and not do drugs?!

Bingo! They just never knew how to not do drugs while also staying cool!

One of the ways to say no and still be cool is "Top three answers on the board, survey says . . . NO!" Does that mean "NO" wasn't a top answer on the ways to answer if you want to smoke some pot? So the top three answers were like, "Hell yeah!," "YES!", and "Can I suck your dick too?"? Or did it mean "NO!" was one of the top three answers and the other two answers were "YES!" and "Maybe?"? Maybe I'm not cool enough to understand. I'm certainly not cool enough to refuse to do drugs with any of their super cool suggestions. Although "Not now. Maybe in the next Millennium" is a crazy answer seeing how there were just six months until the next millennium when this advert came out! So that's a hard maybe then?

Seriously though, I think at least half of these answers would wind up in your ass being kicked, even if it were your close friends offering you the pot.

Meanwhile, Doctor Krigstein explains his change of plans to his underlings.

I mean, that was always a fucking option. You just didn't want to be saddled with a baby who couldn't decimate armies.

Thor Stand-in blasts Apollo with lightning and he crashes to the ground while Jack Hawksmoor, in the foreground, twists off Hercules Stand-in's head. But it's not twisted all the way off at the moment caught on panel so do I count it as half of a decapitation? I probably should, right? Look at it!

This is kind of worse, right?

I don't know for sure if that guy's supposed to be Hercules but he's topless and he's got big bracelets so probably? Swift also drops somebody from the sky to fall to their deaths but she's too small in the panel to determine who it is.

The Engineer has to fly up to catch Apollo to make sure he doesn't land on an innocent Singaporean. But as she tries, she's tackled by The Hulk Stand-in, Boom Boom. Or whatever. I don't know his actual name in this comic book because none of the other characters seem to want to acknowledge his existence.

He's got a self-loathing problem. Oh, and also I'm offended, I think?

Fuck you, Mark Millar! You blocked me for an innocent joke on Twitter?! Well I block you from life for calling me a retard! You're blocked! Blocked, I say! Double blocked even!

Hmm, for some reason, Mark Millar isn't acknowledging my existence and doesn't seem to know I exist! That's probably because I just double blocked him! Ha ha! Take that, rich guy with a satisfying life!

Why am I angry at Mark Millar?! It was his character who said that terrible thing about people who like comic books! Just more proof that these guys are the worst of the worst! Killing babies, making jokes about kidnapped children, and calling the very people who have made Millar rich "retards." They're so despicable!

The Engineer can't find a way to hurt Boom Boom but Shen gives her an idea. She flies Boom Boom into space (without having to build a rocket pack on her back like last time she flew into space because she probably perfected her technique for reaching escape velocity. Once she's in thin enough atmosphere (or space? Who knows how high she goes), Boom Boom swells from the internal pressure of all the human beef lodged in his colon and he pops like a disgusting balloon. That's what you get for hating on comic book readers, you jerk!

Pretty gross but not a decapitation!

Angela Spica was born in Queens, New York, but she gives Boom Boom the British flip-off, or the two-fingered salute. She probably learned that from Jenny Sparks or watching The Young Ones and didn't do it that way because Frank Quitely is Scottish.

Oh! I bet the fake Hulk's name was The Bulk! So obvious!

Thor's name is Storm God which yawn. I still don't know the Commander's name. Also, there are way, way more Marvel characters than I realized on this mission to kill one single baby that Doctor Krigstein didn't even know had any powers. Jack Hawksmoor is about to fight four more: She-Hulk, Quicksilver, Vision, and some other guy.

Okay! That 1/2 a decapitation just became a full decapitation!

The Vision creature (or whoever it's supposed to be a duplicate of. Probably Doctor Strange) follows The Doctor into the Dreamtime where he went to stash Jenny Quantum. I suspect this robot thing will kidnap Jenny because the cover of Issue #15 shows Doctor Krigstein cradling Jenny Quantum in his decrepit hands. Stupid spoilers!

Tank Man goes about the job of killing Midnighter but Midnighter, having been a member of a Black Ops team like this, knows what he's feeling psychologically. He breaks him down with a quick bit of psychoanalyzing, hugs him, and sends him on his way. Tank Man leaves his helmet with Midnighter and wanders off to try his first Slurpee. I won't count it but it's a metaphorical decapitation. Midnighter gets in his head, fucks it up so that it's not actually the same head, and is left with the symbol of Tank Man's head in his hands, his helmet. That's my favorite Millar decapitation so far!

Doctor Krigstein's people successfully retrieve Quantum Jenny from The Doctor and the whole operation is called off. Commander Fascist and Storm God leave off murdering Apollo (leaving him comatose at best) and flee the scene. Almost all the other Marvel heroes are probably dead. Everybody else is pretty much fine. The Doctor did lose one tooth. I wonder if you can bury his teeth and they'll grow into some kind of monster and/or hallucinogenic plant?

The Authority #14 Rating: A+. This easily could have turned into a low panel, low dialogue, spectacular visual fight that a person could read in five minutes (yes, even when really looking at every panel like one of those people who consciously look at every panel for a specific amount of time to show how much they appreciate the art). But it was balanced well with fun dialogue and absolute carnage. I love to make fun of Millar because of his penchant for ultra-violence but, come on, his shit is really entertaining. It's why I own so many of his comics!