Sunday, November 17, 2024

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!

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