Pshaw! If I had nanobots for blood, I'd have a body like that too. Literally. Just like that. So fucking hot.
I have this theory that sex is 10% as good for men as it is for women. It must be! Why would heterosexual women put up with men if dick wasn't so fucking awesome? Hell, I'm 100% a real man who does women and everything and I find the cock the most appealing part of other men! Sometimes I watch porn that's just a guy getting jerked off because a fat hard dick is fucking sexy. Wait. Is it gay to like dick? Maybe I'm 72% real man? Bah, what is a real man anyway? Probably somebody who likes naked women and erect cocks and occasionally things inserted into their buttholes. Why am I putting percentages on who is and isn't a real man anyway?! If you say you're a real man, that's good enough for me! Like what you like, daddy! Why would anybody spend their lives trying to satisfy other people's ideas of who they should be instead of going all in on your own needs and desires?! Can you imagine how boring it must be to be one of those guys who's afraid to enjoy anything because somebody might think they're gay?! Don't they know how much better life is when you accept who you are and embrace that shit? Oh! I bet they realize exactly that which is why they're always so angry at people who defy convention and just do what makes them happy! Imagine how angry you'd be every time you saw somebody happily doing something you want to do but you're afraid some other fucking jerk will make fun of you for doing it?
The above paragraph may or may not have been trying to convince myself that I should embrace only wearing women's underwear. It makes me feel special! Sometimes so special that I have to immediately change my women's underwear!
Enough about whoever wrote all that nonsense! Who was that person who totally wasn't me? So weird that hackers can hack a blog and then make it so I can't delete any of it! I'm just here to talk about comic books!
This is the final issue of The Authority. Mark Millar killed it by being too lazy and too edgy and too whiny when editorial said things like, "You can't have racist slurs all over Last Call's dorm walls," or "You can have that weird fleshy fringe on the front of Seth but you can't overtly refer to it as 'his penises.'" I'm pretty sure Millar kills every comic book he winds up writing on because there's only so many ways you can decapitate characters in your script before you finally get bored and begin spending over a full year to write four issues of comic that are mostly violent battles and Rush showing her bottom. If Millar hadn't slacked off, we would have had a Garth Ennis run on this book followed by a Brian Azzarello run. It's possible we don't really need those runs because we can all pretty much imagine exactly what Garth Ennis would have done and taken a good crack at what Azzarello would have come up with. But they would have been fun to read!
Oh, one more thing: Arthur Adams only managed to hang around for two issues before he huffed off in a huffy huff. Am I categorizing that correctly? I have no idea because I don't like to research behind-the-scenes shit. I wouldn't even know where to find that kind of gossip!
This issue begins with Swift coming to rescue Angie from her terrible fake memories and worse fake marriage. She explains how when Machine died, the implants in their heads that gave them their false memories were destroyed. Swift got her mind back just in time to hear the bigwigs discuss Seth's kill switch. She also brings an example of what eventually happens to anybody who fucks with her while she's being written by Mark Millar.
The above paragraph may or may not have been trying to convince myself that I should embrace only wearing women's underwear. It makes me feel special! Sometimes so special that I have to immediately change my women's underwear!
Enough about whoever wrote all that nonsense! Who was that person who totally wasn't me? So weird that hackers can hack a blog and then make it so I can't delete any of it! I'm just here to talk about comic books!
This is the final issue of The Authority. Mark Millar killed it by being too lazy and too edgy and too whiny when editorial said things like, "You can't have racist slurs all over Last Call's dorm walls," or "You can have that weird fleshy fringe on the front of Seth but you can't overtly refer to it as 'his penises.'" I'm pretty sure Millar kills every comic book he winds up writing on because there's only so many ways you can decapitate characters in your script before you finally get bored and begin spending over a full year to write four issues of comic that are mostly violent battles and Rush showing her bottom. If Millar hadn't slacked off, we would have had a Garth Ennis run on this book followed by a Brian Azzarello run. It's possible we don't really need those runs because we can all pretty much imagine exactly what Garth Ennis would have done and taken a good crack at what Azzarello would have come up with. But they would have been fun to read!
Oh, one more thing: Arthur Adams only managed to hang around for two issues before he huffed off in a huffy huff. Am I categorizing that correctly? I have no idea because I don't like to research behind-the-scenes shit. I wouldn't even know where to find that kind of gossip!
This issue begins with Swift coming to rescue Angie from her terrible fake memories and worse fake marriage. She explains how when Machine died, the implants in their heads that gave them their false memories were destroyed. Swift got her mind back just in time to hear the bigwigs discuss Seth's kill switch. She also brings an example of what eventually happens to anybody who fucks with her while she's being written by Mark Millar.
Decapitation Count: 15!
Gary Erskine's art reminds me of a combination of Chalie Adlard and Steve Dillon. If you love their art, consider that a compliment. If you find their art lacking, congratulations on seeing reality correctly. I sincerely apologize about that comment made toward Steve Dillon. I've never been a fan of his but I know a lot people are. I always thought most of his characters looked like they all had the same face but were wearing different wigs.
On The Carrier, Seth has ripped out one of Midnighter's two hearts and is about to poke his finger through Jenny Quantum's skull. Apollo decides he doesn't want that to happen even though with Midnighter probably dead, maybe Jenny being killed would be easier than being a single parent? No, no! Even I'm not that cynical! Obviously a dead baby is worse than a living baby even if that living baby makes me think of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for some odd reason.
Apollo tackles Seth out of a Door, leaving Jenny Quantum and old Midnighter One-Heart alone on The Carrier. Apollo and Seth wind up in the Arctic Circle (the top of the world location and not the restaurant) to do battle.
On The Carrier, Seth has ripped out one of Midnighter's two hearts and is about to poke his finger through Jenny Quantum's skull. Apollo decides he doesn't want that to happen even though with Midnighter probably dead, maybe Jenny being killed would be easier than being a single parent? No, no! Even I'm not that cynical! Obviously a dead baby is worse than a living baby even if that living baby makes me think of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for some odd reason.
Apollo tackles Seth out of a Door, leaving Jenny Quantum and old Midnighter One-Heart alone on The Carrier. Apollo and Seth wind up in the Arctic Circle (the top of the world location and not the restaurant) to do battle.
I bet Arthur Adams quit when editorial wouldn't let him draw the panel where all of Seth's dicks fire off at once, spraying a bunch of government officials in rancid hillbilly jizz.
Swift and Angie pick up Jack Hawksmoor and they all head back to The Carrier. The Doctor wakes up in the Garden of Ancestral Memory with no memory of how he got there. They discover Midnighter nearly dead so Angie and The Doctor set to work on saving him. But that's when Seth returns with the near-corpse of Apollo and uses one of his 1200 super powers (Larynx-freezing Vision) to keep them from saying the code word that activates Seth's kill switch.
Before all of that is a scene where Angie takes her nanobots back from the corpse of Machine. Normally I would scan a picture like that because we get the return of Angie's nipples. But Gary Erskine fucks it up so bad that it amounts to body horror. I will not be exposing anybody to that nipple, not even with a content warning!
Seth kicks the shit out of The Authority yet again by using all of his super powers that Mark Millar made up on the fly: Thought Defecation, X-ray Strength, Rainbow Breath, Speed-Squared, Shame Vision, and Nuclear Poop-Vision. I'm not sure who gets hit with what but I do know Jack Hawksmoor gets hit with simple Big Fucking Muscular Foot Action.
Before all of that is a scene where Angie takes her nanobots back from the corpse of Machine. Normally I would scan a picture like that because we get the return of Angie's nipples. But Gary Erskine fucks it up so bad that it amounts to body horror. I will not be exposing anybody to that nipple, not even with a content warning!
Seth kicks the shit out of The Authority yet again by using all of his super powers that Mark Millar made up on the fly: Thought Defecation, X-ray Strength, Rainbow Breath, Speed-Squared, Shame Vision, and Nuclear Poop-Vision. I'm not sure who gets hit with what but I do know Jack Hawksmoor gets hit with simple Big Fucking Muscular Foot Action.
Millar knew he could get away with this in an American comic but just remember: to Millar and his UK brethren, fanny means pussy.
Seth is about to rape Jack Hawksmoor with one (or all of?) his three dicks he was born with (as opposed to the other 597 he added later for more rape) when Jenny Quantum decides to say her first words. They are, of course, the kill switch phrase and they're pretty fucking stupid on the face of things: "Welcome to the oval office, President Gore." The phrase is supposed to be something that nobody would ever think to say so Millar thought, "Ha ha! That would be a funny phrase that nobody would ever say because Gore never would have become president!" Which, if I want to give Millar the benefit of the doubt, could be a clever way of saying, "Gore could never have won because everything was already written and pre-planned by the terrible choads who actually run everything and, well, it actually happened that way what with the Supreme Court handing Bush the victory when Gore would have won had the votes been allowed to be tallied correctly in Florida." But as a phrase that nobody would ever think to say? I guarantee that phrase was said multiple multiples of times in really fucking sarcastic voices by tons and tons of filthy power-loving bastards. So basically Seth was just lucky he never had the kill switch thrown.
Tell me Seth minus all of his super powers doesn't look exactly like somebody outta Preacher? Fuck, and The Walking Dead!
The Authority punish Seth by having The Doctor turn him into a chicken and set him loose on Seth's uncle's (father's?) farm. Those hillbillies obviously love fucking chickens so that's the punishment. To be cloaca-raped until he's eventually eaten by the men who fucked his mother and made his incest little ass.
I'd just like to point out that I went really easy on critiquing Mark Millar's writing when I said it loses something without any on-panel decapitations. I could have said his writing loses something when there isn't any implied rape.
The Authority decide to leave tear in The Bleed to non-super powered Earthlings while they take care of Midnighter. In the spaces between pages, regular humans somehow survive whatever apocalypse just almost happened due to the tear. They're all super happy about their ability to not have to rely on super heroes. And The Authority are happy that they've changed the world somehow. I'm not sure exactly how. I guess because they showed the world that heroes shouldn't give a shit about bank robberies and muggings in alleys? They should stop actual systemic injustice and genocidal violence? Sure, that sounds great if you're not cynical. But to a cynic like me, it just sounds like Mark Millar is shitting in Batman's open mouth. Not that Batman doesn't deserve it! I just hate to see Millar so smug about making a comic book that's about more than just heroes stopping crime. It's about heroes making a difference! And also about having the bad guys act as racist and homophobic as possible while the good guys consistently see violence, rape, and threats of rape as means of punishment to make the world better.
The Authority #29 Rating: C. Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Midnighter and Apollo get married at the end, right after Midnighter sends George W. Bush through a Door to Iraq to, I'm guessing, be raped by Saddam? I'm only guessing that because I'm trying to put myself in Millar's writing pants! The main theme of the entire series was that heroes should be working to make the world an actual better place to live instead of being street cops. And that makes sense for heroes powerful enough to get that shit done. Let guys like Batman and Green Arrow keep stopping alleyway muggings and coffee shop hold-ups though. Within that theme of making the world better was always the question, "Who gets to decide what makes the world better?" Kind of a riff on the "Who Watches the Watchmen?" thing. The Authority generally seem to want to move the needle toward more justice and freedom for everybody. But generally the people who want to be the world's "authority" do so because they want to be in control. And they want to be in control because they fear what would happen to them if somebody more powerful were in control. But they never seem to worry about how they abuse their "control." They mostly run things by thinking, "If these other people we've oppressed ever take control, we're fucked. So we have to do the most fucked up things imaginable to never lose our power." We're seeing that writ large by Israel right now. They'll never willingly let go of control because their fear and need to control things in the name of their own safety (safety which they themselves harm the most by the way they apply their power and control) wind up ramping up the harm they do. Too many people want pure freedom but they fear what other people with pure freedom will do. Living with the fear of what other people might do if they're not controlled properly isn't freedom. It's like I wrote earlier: suck a dick if you want to suck a dick but you also have to allow other people to suck or not suck dicks as they please. You can't fucking live with the fear of how other people choose to live differently from you. That need for control just means your life will always feel out of control. Let it go, man! What do the Taoist's say? "I'll try to pay you Tuesday for a gallon of wine today. But if I can't, well, no biggie, right?"
Total Decapitation Count: 15!
I'd just like to point out that I went really easy on critiquing Mark Millar's writing when I said it loses something without any on-panel decapitations. I could have said his writing loses something when there isn't any implied rape.
The Authority decide to leave tear in The Bleed to non-super powered Earthlings while they take care of Midnighter. In the spaces between pages, regular humans somehow survive whatever apocalypse just almost happened due to the tear. They're all super happy about their ability to not have to rely on super heroes. And The Authority are happy that they've changed the world somehow. I'm not sure exactly how. I guess because they showed the world that heroes shouldn't give a shit about bank robberies and muggings in alleys? They should stop actual systemic injustice and genocidal violence? Sure, that sounds great if you're not cynical. But to a cynic like me, it just sounds like Mark Millar is shitting in Batman's open mouth. Not that Batman doesn't deserve it! I just hate to see Millar so smug about making a comic book that's about more than just heroes stopping crime. It's about heroes making a difference! And also about having the bad guys act as racist and homophobic as possible while the good guys consistently see violence, rape, and threats of rape as means of punishment to make the world better.
The Authority #29 Rating: C. Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Midnighter and Apollo get married at the end, right after Midnighter sends George W. Bush through a Door to Iraq to, I'm guessing, be raped by Saddam? I'm only guessing that because I'm trying to put myself in Millar's writing pants! The main theme of the entire series was that heroes should be working to make the world an actual better place to live instead of being street cops. And that makes sense for heroes powerful enough to get that shit done. Let guys like Batman and Green Arrow keep stopping alleyway muggings and coffee shop hold-ups though. Within that theme of making the world better was always the question, "Who gets to decide what makes the world better?" Kind of a riff on the "Who Watches the Watchmen?" thing. The Authority generally seem to want to move the needle toward more justice and freedom for everybody. But generally the people who want to be the world's "authority" do so because they want to be in control. And they want to be in control because they fear what would happen to them if somebody more powerful were in control. But they never seem to worry about how they abuse their "control." They mostly run things by thinking, "If these other people we've oppressed ever take control, we're fucked. So we have to do the most fucked up things imaginable to never lose our power." We're seeing that writ large by Israel right now. They'll never willingly let go of control because their fear and need to control things in the name of their own safety (safety which they themselves harm the most by the way they apply their power and control) wind up ramping up the harm they do. Too many people want pure freedom but they fear what other people with pure freedom will do. Living with the fear of what other people might do if they're not controlled properly isn't freedom. It's like I wrote earlier: suck a dick if you want to suck a dick but you also have to allow other people to suck or not suck dicks as they please. You can't fucking live with the fear of how other people choose to live differently from you. That need for control just means your life will always feel out of control. Let it go, man! What do the Taoist's say? "I'll try to pay you Tuesday for a gallon of wine today. But if I can't, well, no biggie, right?"
Total Decapitation Count: 15!
Putting it like that actually makes putting the Authority in power make some more sense since they don’t have to worry about what happens if they’re not in power. So that takes care of one corrupting factor.
ReplyDeleteBut also “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” always makes me think of my favorite novel and one of the few I’ve reread, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency 💙