Planetary Loves The Authority: Ruling the World #1 (August 2000)

Why is the only thing I can remember about Swift is that she spent twenty grand on a boob job?

Planetary/The Authority: Ruling the World #1 (August 2000)
By Warren Ellis, Phil Jimenez, Andy Lanning, Laura Depuy Martin, and Ryan Cline
Cover by Phil Jimenez and David Baron
Edited by John Layman

I forgot I had this book while I was reading through The Authority. It was released between Planetary #10 and Planetary #11 (or close enough, anyway). It came out after Warren Ellis had ended his run on The Authority and Mark Millar (or whoever!) took over. Hopefully I'll be able to ferret out the reason Ellis wanted to dip back into The Authority enough to bring them to the page one more time. It's definitely a crossover that I think everybody wanted (if not expected) at the time. I actually can't remember anything about it and have no idea where it might lead. So that's the preamble. I know usually my preamble is all, "I wrote a song about a raccoon and possum having a Romeo and Juliet-esque romance but it didn't end in their suicide; it ended in all the cats in the neighborhood pregnant." My brain decided to be more aware of my tone this time and thought, "Let's class this shit up, motherfucker! Reviews are usually boring! Go for boring, butthead!" And then I was all, "But what about my epic nocturnal vermin love song?!" Then I felt a sharp pain in my right temple and decided maybe my brain wasn't fucking around. So boring it is!

This issue begins like Watchmen ended (or, at least, thirty-five minutes before the part I'm thinking about?) with a massive octopus creating havoc in an urban center. Although this octopus has attacked Rhode Island and I'm not sure how many urban centers exist in Rhode Island so maybe it's attacking a seaside town. Also, it probably didn't teleport in out of nowhere. I bet it was summoned up from the depths by the oddly fishy residents of the town. It doesn't have long to live because Jenny Sparks and The Authority have already arrived to turn it into deep fried calamari.

The attack takes place in Judgement, Rhode Island, even though it's an American town so you'd expect it to be Judgment, Rhode Island. Stupid Warren Ellis! What a stupid! Maybe I should blame editor John Layman for not catching this. Or, being that Rhode Island is part of New England, it's just one of those olde time leftovers from when they were a colony. Maybe I shouldn't have even noticed it? Especially when Angie's tits are right there for me to notice. What happened, testosterone? Why did you abandon me in my old age?! Is this why old men become so overly concerned with kids walking on their grass? Because they've stopped enjoying tits?!

Sorry, my gay friends, I don't mean to erase your experiences! I'm just speaking from the perspective of a long time tit lover. Although, really, butts are much better. I should have just stuck with butts so we could all be nodding along while also shaking our fists at those damn kids.

Planetary is also here "helping" out.

Halfway through the battle with the massive octopus and its flying piranha army, the narrative takes a quick trip back to Judgement, Rhode Island, in 1931 when Elijah Snow met with H.P. Lovecraft about a strange vision H. (can I call him H?) had while writing. A snowflake-shaped portal opened before him and he saw the terrible rectum of the universe. When it finally disappeared, he was left with a present from the abyss.

Um. Wut?¹

These eggs were why Elijah Snow was kicking the shit out of The Drummer seventy years later. He warned The Drummer not to touch them and The Drummer went ahead and touched them. That probably means they were full of flying piranha and not, um, you know. That other thing.

Planetary seems like maybe they're keeping a low profile. Or maybe they're just trying to avoid getting decapitated by The Authority's use of extreme violence. Either way, I suddenly can't remember what was annoying me.

And everything's suddenly right with the world.

I think it's okay for artists to portray Angie's nipples because they're actually mini gun barrels and it would be un-American to censor guns. I would love to say it's un-American to censor titties but our leaders have all the ethics and morality of a Reverend Dimmesdale: nipples for me but not for thee. That was his philosophy, right? It's been over thirty years since I saw the movie. I mean read the book. I mean saw the movie with my lesbian college professor while we were reading the book. I'm pretty sure she only wanted to see it for Demi's tits².

Angie breaks through Cthulhu's reinforced brain case with her tit bazookas so that Apollo can slam into the Elder God's brain with his entire body. The Authority loves to kill things in exactly two ways: decapitation and blasting themselves through their enemies. Even Swift does it! I think maybe that's all Swift can actually do though.

Planetary watches the battle from a basement stairwell because they're a secret organization, remember?

Seventy years ago? That's when H. to the P. found his alien space eggs!

Planetary decides they want to infiltrate The Carrier because it's sure to have loads of lovely information for them to steal. The Authority picked up on signals at the fight similar to those they found in the Adirondack Mountains a few years ago. So both teams are beginning to focus on the other team although The Authority don't quite know what they're investigating. They've witnessed unmarked helicopters all over the world in places nobody should be and they have some pictures of people Angie took when the Adirondacks first became a focal point for those unmarked helicopters. Those people are Elijah Snow and Jakita Wagner. Jenny Storm recognizes Elijah from somewhere but she can't quite place him.

Fucking another Century Baby must be like fucking a sibling. It's hot right up until the moment you come.

Meanwhile some serial killer has infiltrated Planetary working on as one of their information analysts while waiting for an opportunity to open a portal like the one that opened on H.P. Lovecraft's basement. He finally found one in Doc Brass's team's secret base in the Adirondacks where the multiversal computer is housed. He plans on destroying the world with it because world-ending threats are the only things The Authority bother with. If this guy were going to just kill a few more scientists (which he just did and The Authority didn't notice at all), The Authority wouldn't notice at all. But killing the entire world?! That's what they do! I mean, that's the kind of thing the thing they do is meant to stop other people from doing. And when the serial killer initiates the multiversal computer so he can kill the world, they notice immediately! As does Planetary.

All that is to say that "the most powerful heroes" and "the world's smartest"³ are about to have one of those good guy misunderstandings that lead to them punching each other in the baggage. Plus a serial killer will wind up without his head. Although Mark Millar isn't writing The Authority here so maybe they'll think of a different way to end the maniac's existence. Something way more creative. And sexual.

Both teams use The Carrier's junction room teleporter to arrive at the site but because Planetary knows exactly where the multiversal computer is, they wind up inside the mountain while The Authority wind up outside. The Authority is greeted with scads and scads of maxi-nano-machines⁴ while Planetary find . . . um, I'm not sure what Planetary finds.

A dead serial killer and, I think, the womb that gave birth to the maxi-nano-machines?

Angie calls the maxi-nano-machines "self-replicating war robots" so disregard the footnote where I said, "Fuck you!", to any readers who thought "maxi-nano-machines" might have been a stupid term. I want to to change it to "super fuck you" because I was proven correct. The original "fuck you" was just me being defensive because I figured I was being ignorant and dumb. But now I'm confident and smart because the comic book agreed with me!

While The Authority tries to decapitate the extradimensional invasion's ass, Planetary tries to cut the invasion off from its head. They figure the war machines are still connected to from wherever they came from via the multiversal computer's snowflake portal and The Bleed. But before Drummer can cut the connection, the womb decides it wasn't done being pregnant.

If this is a literal depiction of a baby being born, birthing babies should be outlawed.

I know that's not a literal depiction of a baby being born because one of my ex-girlfriends when I was about 21 showed me her mother's birth video of her youngest sister. Or at least tried to show me. Maybe halfway showed me? It's not a memory the brain is conditioned to retain. The depiction of birth in that panel is more like if your nose had diarrhea.

Angie connects to one of the maxi-nano-machines and realizes it's called a Worldruler. It was designed to simply destroy every world in every parallel dimension it could find. And it was created by her. Or a version of her, I mean.

This Authority comes from a parallel dimension where the only difference is that everybody's nipples are inverted.

Jakita Wagner dropkicks the womb back into the snowflake where it takes off inverted-nipple Jenny Spark's head. I should probably add that to The Authority Decapitation Counter, right?! It basically counts even though it was Jenny who lost her head and Jakita who did the losing.

Outside the mountain, The Authority finish off the maxi-nano-machines. They then rush in to destroy the Worldruler to find it already gone. As is Planetary. The world is safe again. At least until the next womb slips into their reality and begins laying fish eggs or self-replicating war robots or, I don't know, sentient penis whips covered in barbs?

The Ranking!
At the end of this issue, Elijah Snow recalls when Alex Brass told him that "if you save the world, it will repay you every second of every day." We see the seed planted by Brass begin to grow as Elijah Snow get his first taste of being an active participant in moving the Earth toward a better future. Planetary will not long remain in the shadows doing nothing but collecting knowledge and dust. I mean, sure, they'll continue to remain in the shadows! But now they'll be fucking useful for once.


__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Like, um, seriously. Wut?!
² See? It all comes back to tits! And negro eggs!
³ I put these descriptions of the two teams in quotes because that's how the back cover refers to them.
⁴ Fuck you. It's my blog and I'll use language however the fuck I want!

The Authority: Scorched Earth #1 (February 2003)

This cover looks like it was drawn by Simon Bisley and inked by that Spanish woman who restored the Jesus painting.

Some might think I was being overly critical with that caption but that's me saying I fucking love it! This cover is strange and odd and has The Penguin on it for some reason. I'm super into that! Plus Swift looks super sad which makes me laugh uproariously. Ha ha! You're sad, you useless loser! Get fucked!

Why am I so mean to Swift? Should I look deep within myself, searching my feelings until I find the source of my Swift hatred, boiling and viscous and rank and terrible? Don't answer yes to that because searching my feelings will send me into a spiral which might wind up in a leap from the Hawthorne bridge except I'll be so down on myself, having seen my life through my criticism of Swift as useless and disregarded by her peers, that I won't have the energy to walk to the bridge thus saving my miserable and unimportant life. Fuck. Look at what you made me do!

This issue begins with space sex.

Look at his right arm. He's definitely got a finger or two up his own asshole.

I should probably clarify since I didn't scan the credits: the "Morrison" on the cover is some guy named Robbie Morrison. I wonder how lucrative his career has been because people accidentally buy his comic books thinking they're by Grant? I know I was physically aroused right up until I turned to the page with the space sex. Not because I don't find space sex hot (although it's probably frigid). It's because somebody stuck the name "Robbie" onto my "Morrison"!

The two people having space sex are actually aboard The Carrier on the observation deck. They are Jack Hawksmoor and Angela Spica. When they come, the sun comes as well. I think it's some kind of visual metaphor. But it's also literal because after the fucking is over, The Engineer gets "dressed" and goes to investigate something amiss with the universe. That something turns out to be the sun's massive load which it ejaculated directly at the Earth. Has Jack Hawksmoor become so powerful that his body treats the solar system as a city and now he can't have consequence free space sex anymore?

Turns out the sun's about to go supernova in five days because, according to Angie, "some bastard dropped the biggest bomb in the universe in our laps." Does she mean Jack Hawksmoor spooging into her crotch? Because I saw the way the panels were drawn and I'm pretty sure Morrison and Irving were implying that Jack and Angie's sex caused this. Angie probably knows that too which is why she's using coded language that isn't a lie. A bomb was dropped in her lap. Jack Hawksmoor is a bastard.

Several cities on Earth are immediately annihilated by fireballs from the sun but The Doctor saves Amsterdam because it has loads of good drugs in it. Also maybe he's from there; I'm terrible at keeping lore inside my noggin. It's also possible, because of the way comic books are drawn, that he merely saved one sex worker and a building full of hash.

The Doctor does realize he has the power to save everybody, right? And I don't mean everybody just in Amsterdam. He can literally turn the fireballs ejected from the sun into Skittles.

I suppose Skittles raining down on the Earth might be a great day in marketing for the Wrigley Company, and probably a bit of fun for slightly clever people who think to shout, "Taste the Rainbow!", before their skulls are crushed in by sweets, but it's still probably an apocalypse. I guess I'd make a terrible Doctor. Except for the part of his job where he does loads of psychedelic drugs. I'd totally ace that shit.

Apollo saves a crashing airline full of people over the Atlantic. But then Midnighter fails to save a child in New York.

"I'm sorry. The fire somehow decapitated your child. Gotta go!"

When I went to see The Matrix in Lincoln, Nebraska, I was sitting next to a woman who suddenly broke down into tears at the scene where Neo assaults an office building by spraying automatic gun fire everywhere while wearing a black trench coat. She muttered something like, "Is this why they did Colombine like that?!" I'm telling that moment out of my life so you can understand why I just burst into tears and began rending my garments.

"Is this why that assassin killed that health insurance CEO?!"

The comic book adverts around the turn of the century go fucking hard, man. In an earlier issue of The Authority, there was an advert for a racing game that was meant to have realistic crashes. The scene in the advert was a live photoshoot of a guy with a clipboard standing over a twisted body on the pavement with a rolled over car nearby and another car nearby with two dead people in it. The guy was asking some question to the injured person on the street about how high their body bounced or something like that. Fucking crazy shit! What a wild time to be making comic book advertisements!

In Miami, Swift saves one child's life as he nearly falls from a burning building. I love to make fun of Swift but at least she fucking saved one person! Midnighter blew it because he entered a dangerous scene all tensed up and some kid ran at him from the flames scared for their life and he probably got startled and instantly chopped her in the throat. But then maybe he looked into his computer brain and was all, "I've been over this one million different ways and it always results in my reflexes acting before I can think and you winding up dead. I'm sorry. Gotta go!"

Angie does the best work by creating massive shields in orbit around the Earth which block the harmful rays and destroy the fireballs before they can penetrate the atmosphere. But then one fireball starts acting oddly and she notices there's something alive in it! Oh no! Did Angie and Jack somehow fuck so hard the sun got pregnant?

Angie gets hit and falls back into the Earth's atmosphere where Jack manages to catch her and uses the city to catch him safely.

I'm surprised The City listened to him, calling it "Frisco."

Jack explains that San Francisco is one of the few lady cities and it might get jealous if Angie gets all turned on by Jack holding her close. I want to know which other cities are ladies! Probably Paris, right? But not Rome. Definitely not Glasgow. Maybe Madrid? Oh, definitely Miami!

The Sun's baby boy winds up in St. Petersburg looking like a flaming man. Weird. I'd expect it to look more circular and globe-ish.

The Doctor tries to stop the flaming man by blowing cold air on it. But he's stopped by Mr. Ancestral Grumpypants, the guy who lives in the Garden of Ancestral Memory. He's all, "You can't harm it! It's the living embodiment of the sun! Which shouldn't be a thing but it now is for some reason. And since you're powered by the Earth and the Earth is powered by the sun, you're going to need to talk it down and find out what it wants." Hopefully the humanoid avatar of everything the sun is speaks English.

Midnighter stupidly attacks the living flame when he couldn't even defeat non-living flames in New York. He almost burns alive before Apollo finally thinks, "Wait! I'm solar powered! I should be the one fighting it!"

Plot twist: the sun is gay.

That might not have been the biggest plot twist if you're familiar with Hedwig and the Angry Inch (or, you know, Aristophanes) where we learned that the Children of the Sun were like two men glued up back to back (which doesn't sound hot at all).

Having discovered that the sun has delivered a petulant child unto Earth, The Authority decide to visit the sun and have a word with it.

The issue with The Authority plots seems to be escalation. Warren Ellis set them on the path of not only wanting to actually change the world in a way other heroes didn't. But he never really got around to that in the three stories he told. His initial run was about proving how bad-ass they were by having them fight a global terrorist then ramped that up to an invasion of Earth by a secret alternate Earth, and finally to battling God (in a way). Millar decided, "Okay. We've seen the kinds of threats they can face so we know they're as close to all-powerful as any heroes can get. Their next threat should be the governments of the world they're saving who feel threatened by their power." So The Authority depose the leader of a Southeast Asian nation causing world leaders and other secret powers to shit their pants because they all do so many corrupt things, which corrupt thing will eventually attract The Authority's attention? The first of those people was a Jack Kirby insert who the United States Government abandoned and who was eventually going to rule the world after it collapsed under the bloated weight of capitalism. The Authority forced him to move up his plans and he attempted to kill and/or kidnap Jenny Quantum. The Authority had to face super heroes of nearly their quality (unless it was just the vast quantities they had to fight?). Then they battled the Earth itself (unless it was a past Doctor? It became muddled and unclear by the end. This was when Millar was already getting bored). Finally, The Authority just fought a Hillbilly superhero who could not be defeated because the top seven nations on Earth had spent so much money on him, how could he be? Money equals power!

What I'm saying is that where do you go after you have The Authority kill God? Ellis decided nowhere and walked away. Millar sort of went sideways with it but then escalated things himself via superhero parodies. And now Robbie Morrison has decided, "What's the most powerful thing in the solar system? The sun! It's like the God of the Earth!" And here we are.

Did The Authority ever battle Santa Claus?

See? The Carrier continues the clues about the "bastard" who dropped the "bomb" in Angela Spica's "lap"!

The Earth's child/avatar realizes The Authority have left off battling it to go speak with its father/mother so it pursues them. It arrives just as they arrive at the sun. It re-enters the sun which manifests a gigantic head whose mouth engulfs The Carrier. This is probably what The Carrier wasn't happy about. It's a pretty powerful ship/creature but who wants to test their limits inside of a star? The only way it survives the ordeal is to stay partially in The Bleed while also partially in the sun.

The plan works (as far as I can tell) by luring the sun child away from Earth and back into the sun. After that, it forces it's way into and out of Apollo so it can battle the team on The Carrier. Turns out it isn't actually the sun's child. Nor it's avatar. Nor the product of Jack and Angie space fucking. It's some guy named Winter.

This revelation would have been way more exciting if I knew anything about the history of Stormwatch.

So this hero Winter sacrificed himself to save the Earth only to come back who knows how many years later to devastate Earth himself? Way to go, dumb-dumb.

Winter didn't actually survive his encounter with the sun. His transformation was more like Alec Holland's after Alan Moore got his hands on him. Winter is not Winter having becoming the sun; it's the sun having gained sentience via Winter's powers. It's less an existential crisis than Swamp Thing's though because this "Winter" never fooled itself into thinking it was a human turned into a sun avatar. But some of Winter does still exist in the mess of a creature it's become. And that part of it, the Winter part of it, is in a constant state of torture. It just wants to die and thought, "Hey! The Authority killed God. They can probably kill me too!"

Well, he's convinced me! Is there a bridge in our solar system big enough for the Earth to jump from?

Jenny Quantum saved this crew in the last story arc of theirs I read. I hope she's not going to do it again by being all, "Humanity has hope! Also I'm powerful enough to stop your pain by releasing you while leaving the sun intact. Also can somebody clean my diaper?"

Thankfully, The Engineer decides to save the day. She encases Winter in something similar to the thing encasing the caged baby universe. She describes caging him as "basically turning the sun into a gigantic reactor that'll power the solar system — under The Authority's control." So the important new thing is that The Authority now have control over not just Earth but the entire solar system because the sun was already a gigantic reactor that was powering the solar system. She's proud but Jack Hawksmoor's depressed. Because they've just condemned a hero to spend a billion years in constant burning pain so that Earth can live. They've basically just sent an actual hero to Hell for the sins of the Earth. Cool.

The Authority: Scorched Earth Rating: C+. It wasn't bad but it just felt like an annual and I'm even more biased when rating Annuals (which I don't rate, no matter what you've seen) than regular issues. It probably would have been a better story if I'd known anything at all about Wildstorm continuity. Sure, that's my ignorance and my fault which just lowered the grade of the comic. But what can I do?! I can only experience things through the lens of the knowledge of my past! My hands are tied! This was a mediocre story because who the fuck is Winter?! At least it had some space sex.

The Authority #29 (July 2002)

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.

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.

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.

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!

The Authority #28 (April 2002)

You're not allowed to show one naked penis on a comic book cover. But if it's a bundle of three or four dozen? No problem!

I'm beginning to think that Frank Quitely quitting this comic over a better job offer wasn't the reason the comic book was delayed for four months. Once Tom Peyer and Dustin Nguyen took over, it came out every month for four months straight. But then when Millar came back? It was two months before the 2nd part of "Brave New World" (nine full months after Part One!) was published. And now the 3rd part just took 3 more months after that. It's been a full year and Millar has only put out three issues of his four issue story arc. I think I might know why this comic book was cancelled after part four! Garth Ennis was scheduled to take over after Millar's run but he probably got sick of waiting and moved on to other comics.

Last issue, we got a glimpse of Rush's ass. This issue, I'm hoping for half a labia!

This issue begins with The Surgeon putting all of the world's Gods to the firing squad while introducing a new God for the pop culture oriented man: Religimon.

These are the Gods after editorial got through with them: Gandalf, Mr. Spock, Doctor Who, and, um, Scarlet Witch?

The main feature of Religimon is that the G7 nations of the world own the rights to the new religious imagery (which, I'm assuming, is composed of hundreds of cute and various other Gods. Gotta worship 'em all!) so I can seen how it wouldn't seem weird to have them killing the other pop culture heroes which Religimon will replace. But apparently the soldiers were supposed to be killing Jesus and Mohammad and Buddha and Yahweh which makes more sense, especially considering this soldier that interrupts The Surgeon during his introduction of Religimon.

I think to fully kill Jesus, you have to consume him before he resurrects. Like a troll in Nethack.

Back on The Carrier, the readers learn that Colonel not only has a shit fetish but he's a rapist as well. It's not surprising being that Mark Millar hadn't explored every corner of degeneracy yet.

Um, no?

Turned on by all the megalosalmon shit splashing across The Carrier's windshield, Colonel does a sex attack on Rush. By that I mean he throws a soccer ball at her face and then threatens to electrocute her when she calls him a lunatic. If he's this out of his mind from horniness by seeing some fish shit, what happens when the Colonel lifts the lid on an unflushed toilet? Does he instantly jizz himself? Does he fuck whatever's nearby, like the drain in the sink or a toilet roll tube? Does it matter since he's going to be dead by the end of next issue, if not this one?

The Surgeon interrupts to let Colonel know that something terrible has happened on the ship: Street has been run over by a pizza delivery motorcycle.

I should stop reading so I always remember Rush like this, adorable with everything still intact.

I don't know how Street was killed by being run over by a motorbike that's mostly moped. I guess if Midnighter is riding it, it becomes more deadly than usual.

Last Call checks on The Carrier's caged baby universe in the Engine Room because Machine felt a disturbance in the whatever. He doesn't notice Jenny Quantum sitting beneath it manipulating it to her will. I guess that means Jenny Quantum can render herself invisible to homophobes.

If at any time during the year long wait for this story to continue, readers were thinking, "I hope when the story comes back, it'll have more attempted rape than normal," they were in luck! Because the next scene has Teuton telling Apollo he was always interested in fucking guys but didn't want word getting around. So now he's got a gay guy tied up and helpless who will be dead soon and so won't tell anybody that Teuton fucked him!

Luckily for Teuton, the good guys don't fuck the holes they make in the bad guys' heads. Even with Millar writing.

The rest of New Authority hold a meeting to figure out who's going to battle Midnighter. If I were them, I'd lock myself in some out of the way storage closet and just wait for Seth to beam aboard and take care of him.

Seth appears before any of them can find a closet to hide in which saves some of their dignity. Luckily, they don't have to pretend they want to fight Midnighter because Seth has four dozen raging hard-ons throbbing at the prospect of finally killing Midnighter. Too bad Midnighter finds them before Seth finds him.

Noooooo! RUSH! Um, I think?

I think the lone feather and possibly some blood stains indicate that Rush was strung up by Midnighter when the lights went out the first time. Then The Surgeon was shot and/or stabbed through the chest. Elsewhere on The Carrier, Apollo blew Last Call's head off. So now it's just Machine, Colonel, and Seth left to fight.

Colonel gets taken out in two panels just like everybody else. New Authority put up nearly zero fight, as expected. Hopefully Seth will put up more of a fight.

Why's the focal point always gotta be Seth's multiple dicks?

Apollo kills Machine while Seth tears out one of Midnighter's hearts (yeah, yeah. Apparently he has a back-up). Now it's just Apollo, Jenny, and Seth facing off at the end of reality (because The Bleed is hemorrhaging).

The bigwigs have a meeting while Swift waits on them in her underwear. They discuss how Seth needs to be terminated now that he's taken care of The Authority (um, what? He hasn't even!) and, right there in front of Swift, they mention how Seth has a kill switch! That makes sense because Swift always has to prove her worth in the smallest way possible every story arc. In this one, she gets to find out the means to kill Seth! Unless the means to kill Seth will just be Seth finding out the government's going to terminate him and Swift asking Seth to join them like she asked Doctor Krigstein. That would be really fucking disappointing though.

The Authority #28 Rating: B. Too many New Authority members died too quickly. It wasn't any fun! Now I suspect the battle against Seth next issue will be just as anti-climactic. I think maybe Millar was either getting bored by this point or super annoyed at editorial putting a stop to his super edgelord shit. Whatever the case, Arthur Adams doesn't even make it to next issue! They laid part of the blame for the delay on waiting for Arthur Adams to finish a job and catch up on the script and then he only hangs around for two issues anyway! Christ, what the fuck was going on at Wildstrom in 2001?!

The Authority #27 (January 2002)

Millar's note to Arthur Adams on this issue's cover: "Have you ever heard the term 'gay-bashing'?"

Don't accuse me of being the insensitive one! Wait until you see why Apollo's had the shit beaten out of him here! Just you wait! Remember, Mark Millar wrote the script, not me! Stop telling the messenger to KYS already! It's really taking a toll on my psyche and my ability to keep writing edgelord blog entries!

This issue begins by asking the question, "Is it possible to crush on Rush even harder than you already are?"

The answer, according to the noise that came out of my body when I turned to the first page, is, "Unnhhhohohunh."

New Authority are flying into Qatar where a huge post-human battle rages. It might be the first double-page splash in the history of this series that warranted a double page splash. Usually it's just a large picture of The Carrier, or a bunch of ships zipping across the page. But this splash reminds me of the best of Sergio Aragonés' work. I'm not going to scan the entire thing but I should probably scan my favorite bits of it. Starting with this surprise pick:

My girlfriend!


Gigantitty-fuck!


The Engulfer!


The Bizarro Twins!


Punisherine? The Wolfisher?

I almost just scanned Rush and then a bunch of close-ups of Rush's body. I mean I did do that but then I saved them to my secret folder and scanned these other weird heroes to cover my tracks.

The characters attacking Qatar are Wildstorm's version of the Team Titans. They're from the 27th Century and they've come back to punch the people in the face responsible for their ecological apocalypse. Ha ha! That's pretty funny. Millar thought it would take 600 years for an ecological apocalypse to take place? Ha ha ha!

New Authority murders the future teens in the amount of panels it takes to give a short description of every member of New Authority. What did the future teens think they were going to accomplish? Since the ecological disaster in the 27th Century happened, they obviously didn't complete their mission back in time. Fucking idiots! Don't they get how time works?!

I would love to be dropped into helicopter rotors by Rush.

Why is Rush so adorable and I find Swift as appealing as a blank white sheet of A1? I bet it's because she's Canadian! One of my first huge celebrity crushes was Stacy Mistysyn, Caitlin Ryan from Degrassi Junior High. It can't possibly just be the overalls as I surmised before, can it? Am I actually just in love with overalls?

Oh shit! I almost forgot Millar was back! Decapitation Count: 13!

I just spent the last four issues complaining that I was never going to get a shot of Rush coming out of the shower because this comic book wasn't being drawn by David Finch or Tony Daniels. Well, it seems I can add Arthur Adams to the list of artists who mandate at least one coming out of the shower scene in every comic book they draw.

At least I can rule out that it's only about the overalls now.

New Authority throw a quick meeting to analyze the state of the world. Everything's cool except that Midnighter tore a hole in The Bleed when he flew a plane into some critical part of The Carrier and crashed it. Machine says something about every other reality in existence (so infinite alternate realities?) are coming for their Earth. It's not explained better than that and I don't have the brain power to spend on it because Rush decides to disrobe in the middle of the Map Room.

What the fuck is she doing? Not that I'm displeased!

This issue, Mark Millar gave a little bit of background to the various members of New Authority. We found out Rush is a Canadian singer/songwriter. And Colonel is a football star from the United Kingdom. He may, in fact, be a quite famous footballer.

I know I usually scan these for the half-naked women but pay attention to their convo! Colonel is David Beckham!

Meanwhile, Last Call works out by using Apollo as a living body bag. Yes, Seth failed to kill Apollo! I imagine he failed to kill every single member of The Authority who he was rewarded for killing a few issues ago. I feel like treating Apollo this way will be bad for Last Call's health in the long run. But he doesn't think that because he's a fucking idiot. Last Call blabs to Apollo that the other members of The Authority, except Midnighter, are not dead and they were never meant to be killed. You know Apollo's not sad about hearing that. Of course Midnighter would want them to think he was dead! That's how he's going to save the day!

Swift's mind has been wiped and she's now living a domestic life as the wife of a gigantic asshole. The Doctor's powers were stolen by The Surgeon who keeps The Doctor in his pocket as a little action figure. The Engineer's also going to have her mind wiped soon so that she thinks she's the mother of a bunch of shitty children with an abusive husband.

This is the trouble with evil villains. They always need to keep the heroes alive to satisfy the sadist inside of them.

Oh but wait! There's somebody in the organization who thinks differently! This guy and Seth watch footage of Jack Hawksmoor whose mental capacity has been diminished so that he can't access his super powers. He now begs on the streets for beer money. And this guy is disturbed by the way management didn't just kill The Authority.

I don't give a shit about this guy but at least he understands what would have kept them from all being killed in two issues.

Meanwhile in the sewers of New York, Midnighter and Jenny Quantum plan to murder one fucking hillbilly with six hundred dicks. No, seriously. He's got like six hundred dicks.

The Authority #27 Rating: A. The build up is fantastic! I can't wait for Midnighter to murder them all in terribly gruesome and visually horrific ways! Also Rush got fucking naked in this issue! She was all, "Hey, Machine, now that the guys are leaving, will you look at my vulva?" And Machine was all, "Wa-OOOOOOGA!" I don't know what happened after that. At least not in canon. I know what happened in head canon though and it's incredible! But if you think I'm going to describe it to you, then, like the Japanese bouncer told me after inviting me into an ichya-kyabakura and he asking me if I speak Japanese which I said no to, "Too bad for you!" Man, that was simile was a fucking mess!

The Authority #26 (November 2001)

If I were afraid of being seen as gay, I wouldn't use a double-sided ribbed dildo as my weapon of choice, Last Call.

I might use a regular dildo with only one head because then people wouldn't think, "Why's it gotta have two heads unless you're shoving one side up yourself as you forcibly penetrate your opponent?" I'd also like to clarify that I wouldn't shove anything up the asshole of an opponent that I'm battling because I'm better than that (unless I knew for certain they had just gotten out of the shower and they were dropping flirty hints during the battle that they were kind of into it). Should I also clarify that I wouldn't beat anybody to death at all (unless they were freshly out of the shower and they had threatened one of my cats)?

Now I wish I was fighting Rush, freshly out of the shower, with a double-sided dildo and she was all, "Oops! my overalls just fell down!", as she bent over bearing her ass with a pinky up to her mouth and a sly wink.

Dinh, the leader of the Space Asians, has just resurrected The Authority out of the molecules of New Authority.

Please wish back Rush freshly out of the shower? Please oh please oh please!

David Finch isn't drawing this issue so I'm fairly certain Rush won't suddenly reappear in a towel so short you can see butt cleavage. Hopefully Jenny Sparks will be all, "I wish I was dead! Why'd you have to bring me back?! Didn't you learn anything from Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?!"

The Doctor, who can rewrite reality, doesn't want anybody else to have the opportunity to rewrite reality so he's all, "It's a bad idea, gang! The consequences could be catastrophic!" He then mumbles, "to my ego". Ultimately it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks because Jenny Sparks comes up with the wish almost immediately. Fingers crossed it involves Rush and a towel. No wait! Rush and no towel!

Terrible wish. Even an amateur genie would know how to fuck up that wish!

A smart-ass genie might remove all the limbs of all the creatures on Earth with a wish of "total disarmament." But a professional genie would be all, "Oh? You want every thing that can be used as a weapon to oppress other human beings destroyed? No problem!" Then all the human beings would disappear. Or if the genie didn't want to go that far, he'd at least remove every human's hands, feet, and teeth, and probably all the penises, just to make sure nobody could ever again hurt anybody else. But then Jenny isn't asking this wish of a genie! She's asking it of a dream machine that seems to understand the subtleties of her wish.

Gun nuts are going to go crazy on Jenny for this wish. They'll be all, "Now how will women in abusive relationships protect themselves? Are you anti-women?" But they'll quickly be chased away by a goose honking, "Protect them from whom? Who did they need protecting from?!" So fuck the gun nuts. They're nuts for a reason!

In celebration of Earth suddenly having no weapons which automatically means no conflict, I guess?, the team celebrates with lots of hugs. Apollo tries to hug Midnighter and Midnighter freezes up and then headbutts him in the face. Whoops! I guess homophobia is stronger than genie wishes!

I mean, I like women but I think maybe that's just semantics? I hope?

See? For Jenny's wish to truly have worked, everybody would have had to lose their heads as well as their fists and feet and teeth! The genie who just made all humans disappear would have been the only genie expressing the wish correctly.

After murdering Dinh, the Space Asian city in Re-Space begins to collapse around them. New Authority Door back to The Carrier but not before Colonel makes one last wish on the wishing lantern. He's probably wishing for lower taxes on cartons of cigarettes.

Just in case anybody too dense to understand what just happened didn't get it.

They're all so proud of Last Call's homophobia! Look at their cute little faces beaming down on him! What a joyous moment of hate and joy!

I've mentioned my Catholic, Republican friend from high school, Soy Rakelson, on this blog before. He used to get so angry at the term "homophobia" because he insisted he wasn't scared of gay people. Not at all! And yet, he was so fucking scared of gay people! I remember how he was raving about Peter Milligan's comic book, Enigma, right up until it was plainly stated that the main character was gay and wrestling with his sexuality at which point Soy stopped reading the comic, stopped talking about the comic, and just pretended he was never into it. He was always so into broad theories because specifics always fucked him up too much. Like he loved the John Barth short story from Lost in the Funhouse, "Night-sea Journey", when he thought it was just a bunch of non-specific existentialist philosophical thinking by a "swimmer." He brought it up to me once, and I responded, "Oh, the story about the sperm?" And he just looked gobsmacked. You could see his brain clicking away at the ramifications of what the story was about and how it changed everything going from broad philosophical ramblings to the very specific existentialist quandary of a spermatozoa pleading to all other sperm to end procreation. Being John Barth, there's a lot more to it than just that, of course. Like how stories get told, how they're transmitted, how they're created, and how they outlive the creatures that create them. But his Catholic brain just shit itself the moment I pointed out that the story was from the point of view of a sperm wanting to tear it all fucking down.

What I'm saying is that Soy didn't like specifics because often the specifics wound up conflicting with his specific beliefs. Like most Conservatives (and Comicsgaters and Free Speech Enthusiasts and Racists and Homophobes), they want broad stories so they can ignore any details that go against the things they believe. Because if something in a story points even half-heartedly in the direction of accusing them of being a terrible person, they'll firebomb it, claim it's woke bullshit, and go running into their safe space man cave.

Oh shit! It's this fucker that caused things to slide right! I bet he even thought Nigel Farage into existence!

I guess that's the end of "Transfer of Power". There's an epilogue where New Authority go to battle Doctor Krigstein's assassins whom we saw in silhouette an issue or two ago. But I think that's just to tie up that loose end since nothing really came of it. It looks like he created more gender-swapped versions of The Authority with a Jill Hawksmoor and a Woodpecker (male Swift) and an Aphrodite. But that's just a splash page and then the story ends with Colonel all, "I love this job!" I hope he loves it as much when The Authority and/or Seth destroy him next issue.

The Authority #26 Rating: B+. It was fine! Who doesn't want to see the day saved by homophobia?! I mean, in a normal comic book, it would seem weird. But this is the Anti-Authority comic book where the opposite of the usual takes place. Like how Swift is boring and I constantly forget about her in the main book but Rush is exciting and I can't stop picturing her fresh out of the shower in this book! Such opposite dynamics! Also Midnighter loves cock in the regular book but he hates cock so much in this book that Last Call has probably never washed his junk or wiped his ass in thirty-two years. I find it weird when people think touching their own parts is somehow gay. The sexiest thing I can think of is my own penis! If I could only shove it up my own ass, boy oh boy! What a world this would be! And I . . . LIKE . . . WOMEN!!