The Authority #18 (October 2000)

Midnighter's point of view after making Apollo ejaculate.

At the end of the last issue, New York was hit by a tidal wave. It wasn't saved by The Authority because they're apparently cops now. How do you expect them to save lives when their main job is taking lives? What you want is a psychic who can tell you where not to be when the shit fucking goes down hard. Cops are just there to enforce mostly bullshit traffic laws and hand out fix-it tickets to poor people who already fucking know they've got a light out, officer, and how do you think fining them is going to help them pay for the fucking fix? Even when The Authority was stop Yellow Peril Terrorists, Cosmic Jizz, and Alternate Dimensional UKIP Soldiers, they were only stopping them after they'd killed thousands of people. It's tough to get excited about a team that stops end of the world threats when the threat destroys so many lives before it's over. I suppose that's a half full and/or empty glass situation. But it's also one of the reasons I've never liked wrath of nature action movies. As a member of the audience, why am I supposed to feel good that Tom Cruise and his family, or The Rock and his dumb kids, survive some huge natural disaster while watching dozens, if not hundreds, of people die all around them. "Oh, yay! The people the camera focused on made it to the end of the movie alive! Who the fuck cares about anybody else?!" But as an anybody else in the audience, I fucking care! I want to survive too! When do I get to be the main character?!

Anyway, have a look at New Yorkers drowning in a flood:

Most of them seem to having a nice time. Especially old "Holla Raise the Roof" in the lower left corner. Maybe a little bored but still partying!

That first page was basically the cover from last issue. So I guess the cover of this issue will be the first page next issue. That means this issue will end with Midnighter sucking off Apollo. Which is really nice in a symmetrical sort of way. Last issue ends in a tidal wave of seawater; this issue ends in a tidal wave of magma cum. Water and fire. So the next two issues will end in air and earth ejaculations?

The second page continues the "people drowning in agony and/or ennui" theme. Just loads and loads of people drowning. This is catastrophic! Millar must be going for a really dark tone in this one. Look how quickly life can end, and in such vast numbers as to be nearly incomprehensible. How does a mortal being look upon this kind of destruction and not weep high fashion two hundred dollar reusable water bottle?

No wait. It's a comedy.

Did you catch that joke? That male character has been in love with another male character since he first met him! Ha ha! Gays!

I think a better joke than revealing that one of these men is a homosexual would have been for the homosexual firefighter (who could be heterosexual in my joke because I'm not relying on his sexuality for a punch line) to be all, "I know you've been peeing in my coffee! Have you noticed how often I leave my mug unattended by the urinal? Can I get one more splash before we die?" Is that a funny joke? No? Well at least it's not homophobic!

Swift rescues the firefighters before they drown so now they're going to have to awkwardly work with each other without ever mentioning their near-death bed confessions again. I bet Billy is all, "You can keep boffing my wife, by the way. Really relieves some stress around the house. Also she kisses me after she blows you thinking she's getting one over on me. Although she always seems really confused by how much tongue I give her when she does."

The Engineer turns into 82 versions of herself to save some people from drowning. Swift saves the two firefighters. Apollo saves a few more. And Jack Hawksmoor, Jackson King, and Christine Trelane have teleported 40,000 New Yorkers aboard The Carrier to save some lives.

Are New Yorkers known for shooting at each other after they've been saved from near death?

Jenny Quantum needs to be taught about consent as soon as possible. She also needs to be drawn by somebody other than Chris Weston because right now she's the ugliest fucking baby in the world.

I'm not even sure she's technically alive.

That's not even the ugliest picture of Jenny Quantum in this comic. I just chose that one because I love the way Jackson King is just kind of holding her under his arm like a stack of books and the dopey fucking look on her face.

Everybody's upset The Doctor has overdosed on heroin because this is the kind of thing that he could fix up immediately. They're also wondering who might be behind all these natural disasters suddenly happening all over the Earth. None of them think, "Those two things are probably related, right? Take out the guy who can stop natural disasters in a heartbeat before you start seeding the globe with natural disasters." Also, Midnighter did say The Doctor's wife was a pain in the ass and causing tens of thousands of deaths via man-made natural disasters constitutes being a pain in the ass, I think. Let me check my Oxford English Dictionary. Yep. Pretty standard definition of pain in the ass.

The non-capitalized doctor wants to inject some of Midnighter's blood into capitalized Doctor because Midnighter's immune system has already fought every battle one million ways inside it's immune system mind and it knows exactly how the battle's going to end.

Don't you mean you beat HIV in six weeks? Words matter, sir.

The Engineer tells Apollo she wants The Doctor off the team because he coincidentally overdosed the exact same day a disaster happens that he could have prevented. Apollo does not say, "A-ha! I bet there's a connection there!" because Apollo isn't autistic. Am I wrong in thinking that every character in literature and television who can make "A-ha!" leaps of logic are autistic-coded? Like, um, Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, and House, M.D.? Probably others but I have an ass to scan and an apology to make to Chris Weston.

Half-ass all the faces you want, Chris, if you're going to full-ass all the asses like this. What's that thing Campbell Soup says? "Mmm, Mmm, Good"? "Never Underestimate the Power of Butt"? "It's Amazing What Butt Can Do"?

The Authority have done all they can for New York City so they leave it in the hands of the National Guard and some other heroes they picked up at Home Depot. If you think, because of that statement, that the heroes who came to help were Mexican, you're racist. I just meant they're heroes without regular jobs! Calm down, Internet. Sometimes looking for racism under every rock is the racist thing to do. Did that make sense? Did I sound wise?

Oh, also, there's an earthquake brewing in California that The Authority have tagged as an extinction level event. Please. A big earthquake in California isn't extinction level! It's fucking excitement for the Californian natives! Ain't nothin' like riding a big old fucking earthquake to make you feel alive. You know, if you survive it which most people do! It's not the earthquake that's dangerous; it's the shoddy man-made constructions we all scramble around in like gigantic pink and horny ants. I, a Californian native, missed the big Loma Prieta Earthquake in '89 because I was off at my first year of college like a big old stupid moronic idiot and I'll regret it until the day I die!

I don't get it.

Does Jack Hawksmoor equate prom night with rape? He can't seriously be suggesting people would peer pressure their virgin dates into a great big fuck and suck fest at the Red Lion, does he?! Or does he mean "sweating" as in "sweating between the legs because it's prom night and everybody is fucking horny and ready to go and nobody's actually nervous at all except for the guy who brought Wolfman as his date and felt Wolfman's huge rigid penis against his leg when they danced and now he's wondering if he has enough amyl nitrate to get him through until morning"?

Anyway, the brewing earthquake is in San Francisco because of course it is.

I don't remember any dormant volcanoes in the Santa Cruz mountains? But that's a nice shot of the Bay Bridge!

At least the people of San Francisco understand how to look terrified unlike the people of New York who met death with a hearty, "Enh. Whatever."

The Authority puts out an order to evacuate from Berkeley to San Jose. Oh no! MOTHER! I hope she gets out safely!

San Francisco won't talk with Jack Hawksmoor so he can't tell it to pull itself together. That means Apollo has to dive into the fissure that opened up beneath the city (which is different than the volcano? Or the cause of the volcano?) and convince it to close itself somehow. Probably with his heat vision!

Midnighter arrives to help although you can pull out the intestines of a natural disaster and feed them to itself so I don't know how much good he's going to be. He does announce The Doctor will be making a full recovery just as a bunch of trees suddenly sprout through the ground and swarms of locusts attack. I'm not sure why that was needed when volcanic eruptions and earthquakes usually don't result in instant trees and insects. Maybe Millar introduced the locusts because he wanted to do a bit where The Engineer creates a bunch of enormous bug zappers hanging in the sky?

This butt is a little too butty. But still acceptable.

Apollo shuts off the tap to the volcano after The Engineer clears out the bugs and San Francisco is safe! Now to figure out who's behind it all! Maybe The Doctor took some PCP and did all this himself? Or was forced PCP! I'm still voting on The Doctor's new bride as the main culprit.

The Midnighter gets a list of possible culprits from Christine Trelane's files and goes off to interrogate them. Eventually he happens upon an old Doctor from 1967 who began murdering everybody on Earth alphabetically by nation. After three nations, he was captured and put away in a prison complex, Before Christ, LTD, at the beginning of the world. He claims he has nothing to do with these disasters, being that his power was taken from him after he turned out to be a psychopath. But he does claim to know who the enemy is.

Oh, is this where The Authority have to stop saying, "We're saving the Earth," and start saying, "We're saving Mankind!"?

The Authority #18 Rating: B-. Well, this can't end well, can it? The Authority are going to have to kill the Earth to keep the Earth from killing every human but then where will all the humans live when Earth is dead? What a conundrum! Do you think maybe Earth liked being the home of Space Daddy more than humans? Then when The Authority killed Space Daddy God, Earth was all, "Fuck you, assholes! You killed my best tenant! You're evicted!" Does Earth have a spine that Jack Hawksmoor can kick out of it? Does it have a face that Midnighter can punch? How do you calm the Earth when it gets all riled up like this? I'm thinking they need loads and loads of sacrifices. And we already have a really good method of sacrificing the perfect people who don't bring anything but violence and pain to this world! Start building Wicker Men, everybody! Time for the cops to burn to appease Earth!

The Authority #17 (September 2000)

I thought The Authority were making the world a better place to live? Is drowning good?

Speaking of drowning, I was recently wondering why I'm re-reading old comic books instead of attacking my huge pile of unread books and quickly decided I knew what the answer was: comic books are only 20-24 pages and every single book in my stack is like 500 pages plus! What a chore! Also, I waste a lot of time doing things other than reading that amount to basically doing nothing. The things that keep me busy in modern life are equivalent to sitting in a dark room and humming the first stanza of the last song I heard before shutting the door to my dark space. None of it fucking matters: it doesn't better me; I don't learn anything; my body gets no physical benefit from it; and my soul, which I know isn't an actual thing but a metaphor for, I don't know, ambition or achievement or passion, slowly rots. I mean drowns! I already forgot the initial metaphor I was riffing on!

Speaking of drowning as a metaphor for ennui, I just re-watched Ringu. So I was sat watching a video of people watching a video that drastically reduces their finite life and I didn't think, "Too on the nose?" I mean I did think that now, afterward! Having time to think about a movie after I got done watching it is probably why people think watching movies is "less passive" than watching television when actually they're both passive. Writing is active, dumb dumbs! Even reading is passive! But they're different levels of passive. In reading, you control the flow of time which enables you to stop at any moment to think about what you're reading. Thinking is active! So reading contains the illusion of being active because some people actually think about what they're reading and nobody just consumes a book in one sitting and follows it up with another book immediately without ever thinking about the first book. Whereas television is made to watch one thing and then go immediately into the next thing, and the next, and the next. No time to think about any of it! You just consume and forget and consume and forget! But then movies were always things where you had to make an effort. You went out, usually not alone, saw the movie, and then spent time discussing it with the people you saw it with as you spent time changing locations. Seems active because it gives space for thought! Of course now with streaming, who thinks about anything ever? We just sit alone in our dark room, or "well", and consume our "videos" while we seethe with an unconscious inner rage that burns itself into the fabric of space and time such that it curses teenagers to die within a week when they see you and realize just how shit your life is.

But I figured out how to break the curse! I copy down my terrible thoughts onto this blog and other people read them and then I get to live longer than seven days! Yay! Too bad y'all are fucking doomed now. Better paste links to my blog all over the place so you can stay alive and push that one-week-until-death turd off onto somebody else!

Anyway, the next four issues of this series (was there a Wildstorm mandate to make all stories four issues to easily package them as collections later?) contain the story, "Earth Inferno." It's not drawn by Frank Quitely which is a shame because even though I kept saying his characters looked like they had pudding injections, I actually adored his art. This new guy, Chris Weston? Is he an artist or just some intern who could meet a deadline?

Really wishing my father had bashed me over the head and kicked me into a well right about now.

Chris Weston should rest easy knowing that I'm not a good art critic. I'll give you an example: I don't care for Jim Lee's art. I know, right?! I also never liked the wave of artists that led to Image in the '90s. Artists like David Finch and Tony Daniels freak me out because all their men look fifty, covered in lines with weird Innsmouth fish mouths, while their women are clear-skinned angels who never look more than fourteen years old. Although I do appreciate that they always draw at least one scene of a woman coming out of a shower in a towel. Unless they're drawing a fourteen year old coming out of the shower in a towel and now I feel like throwing myself headfirst into a well.

I don't mind oddly drawn comics though! A person's consistent style can often win me over when their aesthetic isn't exactly beautiful. But not always. Take Chris Weston, as an example!

So what I was trying to say before Truth broke in with all her matter-of-fact about terrible art, was that Rome (and Vatican City which is sort of a subset of Rome) has been beset by tornadoes, smashing a bus right through the Pope either proving that God doesn't exist or God hates Catholics. Coin toss, that. The Authority, having made it their mission to make the world a better place, are all, "This is in our purview, right? We should look into this? It's 1999, are we worried about climate change yet? That's something huge we should fix!"

The Authority decide to send Apollo and one of The Engineer's to look into it. Yes, one of several. Angie has begun to duplicate herself to get more done and you also you know what else she's doing with her copies. Exactly what all of us would wind up doing with exact duplicates of ourselves: start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Is one nipple on a horrific skeletal and incomplete torso enough to get me aroused? No comment.

Apollo's look in the above scan makes me think Weston's art is similar to Charlie Adlard's art. If Chris loves Charlie Adlard's art, he should take that as a compliment and then not read this next sentence. It was Charlie Adlard's art that made me stop reading The Walking Dead because everybody looked like everybody else and I couldn't tell who the fuck was doing what or who just died or who was just exploded by a tank while carrying, was that Rick? Or her baby? I know, you'd think I'd have stopped reading The Walking Dead because of every story was basically the same story but with a weirder and more aggro antagonist. No, it was Adlard's art. Which was a shame because I really fucking loved Tony Moore's work on the series. It's why I happened to pick up the first issue and write my first letter to a comic book which, I think, was printed in Issue #7?

The Doctor can't help with this thing happening to the Earth that's totally in his wheelhouse because he's on his honeymoon with his new rock star bride. Uh oh. He already had a predilection for the hard drugs. Now put a hot rock star into the mix? The Doctor's fucking done.

Meanwhile Jack Hawksmoor consults some blond guy in glasses and a white suit about The Authority's business, especially The Doctor.

Am I supposed to know who this asshole is?

Oh, um, that's Midnighter! I'd forgotten he loses about 70% of his sex appeal out of his leather costume. Who even knew he owned any other clothes?

During their conversation, Midnighter hands Jack a piece of paper which Jack reads and hands back to Midnighter. It doesn't seem like their discussion has anything to do with what's on the paper. Something's up! But for now, they need to deal with The Doctor. They crash his hotel pad in Sydney and find him unconscious from an overdose. His wife is nowhere to be seen. But before Midnighter can poke him in the right pressure points to wake him up or Jack can convince the city to grow a drug rehabilitation clinic inside the hotel room, Swift calls the entire team to New York for an emergency.

Tidal wave!

The Authority #17 Rating: C. Hey! Hey! Notice how I didn't make a crass comment about the World Trade Center being destroyed by that terrorist wave? Something like, "The art team on The Authority got used to not having to draw the towers in New York a full year earlier than other artists!" I'm really proud of myself for not saying something like that! Really toning shit down on this blog! No more edgelord shit for me! Oh, and this issue was super average. Errors in the dialogue. Mediocre art. Pretty boring start to a story. It's like a really great series decided, "Sixteen issues of quality is all people need! Now we can just phone this shit in and let the reader's imagination and love of the previous sixteen issues of character development and exciting action make up for our lazy asses! Let's cash those checks, boys!"