The Crusades #3 (July 2001)

From morality tale to Lovecraftian horror.

The first page lyrics have been pretty philosophical up until now so Seagle wanted to throw a little spanner in the machine that doesn't like spanners being thrown into it. A toaster, I guess? For this issue, we begin with a diss track from Lord Capulet. It's a pretty simple diss but still hard enough to win a beef against Drake.

I don't know why the image is of Sumerian bowling champion, Enkidu.

Last issue, Detective Petronas arrested Anton Marx for unknown reasons. Was he the knight? Was he behind the gangland murders happening across the city? Did Venus press charges against him for being a terrible lay? Not knowing was the best way to keep the reader's interest because if Seagle had added one more panel where Detective Petronas explained why he was being arrested, every reader would have made a wet fart noise with their mouth and an extended jerk-off motion with their non-dominant hand. Petronas has arrested Anton Marx because he wrote an article entitled, "The Knight: I Know Who He Is." Seems like Anton Marx might be bringing a lawsuit against the city for the most egregious case of unlawful arrest ever perpetrated against a white heterosexual male! If the noun ("male") or either of the adjectives ("white," "hetero") were different, no lawyer would touch the case. Cops have that bullshit immunity thing, remember? Unless they harass a white heterosexual male! Because white heterosexual males who run the country know laws don't apply to them so if a cop tried anything with one of them, it's going to blow up in their faces. It's why white heterosexual males, even the least powerful among them, rarely get harassed by cops (unless they have serious poverty and/or class markers that scream, "I have no power to sue your stupid violent ass!"). You ever see any video where a white heterosexual male screams at a cop who's ticketing or questioning him? If the cop has a tail, it tucks right up between his legs and instantly gets soaked from the piss pouring out of the cop's crotch. And if the white heterosexual male winds up being a judge or politician? That cop fucking quakes right out of his boots, which is lucky for him because of all the shit that instantly flowed down his pant legs and into them.

What seems to have happened is that Detective Petronas brought Anton in for questioning about a case they're currently working on. That's why last issue ended with Petronas showing his badge to Anton and saying, "I'll have to ask you to come with me." He didn't arrest him at all! It was all sleight of hand by Steven T. Seagle to let the reader assume an arrest was being made! And that the arrest was for sexual assault because you know Anton's done a few of them, right? He practically eye-fucks his lesbian coworker on the daily which has to be, at the very least, a misdemeanor in San Francisco, right?

While Venus's rivals for her sexual attentions cockfight (metaphorically) in a police station, she's out chasing down eyewitness accounts of the knight.

I saw Neil Gaiman give a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts many years ago. He did not try to fuck me.

For a city with such a bustling night life, it's strange that only unhoused men and Venus have laid eyes on the knight. I have a feeing he's being seen by far more people than are admitting to it because they're also not admitting to seeing the naked guys roller skating down Castro with their dicks tied together or the little lady herding goats through heavy traffic by the 101 onramp or three-headed dwarf that escaped the backroom of the Ripley's Believe-it-not Museum. There's some weird shit going down in that town; a guy in full armor on a horse ain't so strange. Everybody who's seen him so far has probably shrugged and thought, "This that time of the year those rich assholes go fuck that owl up in the Grove?"

Venus looks like she was modelled after Johnette Napolitano.

The man Venus interviews is one of the houseless guys Anton disrespected on his show a couple of issues ago. He tells Venus about the second time he saw the night.

This story has a lot of justice applied via butthole.


The knight is like Columbo but instead of asking one last question, he always jams his lance up the suspect's butthole one more time.

Remember, this isn't necessarily what happened! The guy telling Venus this account might just like to sauce up his stories with nonconsensual anal penetration.

The houseless guy overheard the guy being skewered by the knight say that The Pope ordered a couple of hits on kids from the New Jerusalem School. Man. A ghost knight riding about the city seeking justice. A criminal overlord trying to scare people away from a piece of real estate he wants to buy. A woman with an ass that doesn't quit and great boobs trying to solve the mystery. This is one of them Scooby Doo cartoons, isn't it?

Yes, the woman with the ass that doesn't quit and the great boobs from the Scooby cartoon is Velma. Daphne can go suck one of Shaggy's heroes.

This is an advert for a video game. I do not understand it.

Does research show that if somebody jerks off to an advertisement, the product somehow burns itself into their mind and they're more likely to buy it? If that works, don't you at least need to know what the fucking product is? Is this for a videogame where you fuck people in the spa at a party? Is the mascot of that website a little sperm guy?

Sorry I got distracted by that advertisement. The image you were probably waiting for was the one from the end of the guy's story about the knight.

Remember how earlier I couldn't tell if a cross was painted out of shit and blood? Question answered.

If you were wondering which pages were inked by Mark Buckingham, they were the four pages with the knight shoving his lance up the guy's asshole.

We learn a little bit about Anton's set up at the coffee shop. He writes his columns there. The people who hang out with him claim they're his friends. He claims they hang out there because they want to be his friends. And since Anton Marx is never wrong, I guess they're a bunch of hangers on. Except none of them seem to like him particularly. That would indicate they're his friends then!

A character I haven't mentioned because it didn't seem too pressing the few times he's shown up is Father Trinidad. He's the priest at a local gay friendly church with a drag choir who's been roped into The Pope's criminal business dealings through threat of violence and large sums of cash (not a threat; actual sums!). He's become The Pope's spiritual advisor because The Pope still wants to believe he's absolved for his sins for some reason. I guess because the good guy would be concerned with that kind of thing? And if he's concerned with his immortal soul, he must be good! When he asks for pre-forgiveness for the people he's going to have murdered, that means he's pre-remorseful and pre-repenting! Father Trinidad helps him with those things.

Later that night, Venus goes to investigate the piece of land where the casino is going to be built (which is right next to the New Jerusalem school). She climbs through a hole in the chain link fence and then the issue ends on a panel that made absolutely sure that I was going to buy the next issue.

Even if it's just in a comic book, I've never seen a horse do oral!

The Crusades #3 Rating: B+. Fairly certain the only comic book I'd read by Steven T. Seagle prior to this was House of Secrets. It's almost certainly why I purchased this book, House of Secrets being one of my all-time top comic books. This series I don't remember quite as well. It could be because of the time of my life I was reading House of Secrets and how it seemed to speak directly to things I was going through. I identified with Rain far more than Venus. This series has all the same hallmarks of House of Secrets: a woman at a crossroads in her life feeling lost but able to set some personal things aside as she investigates some paranormal mystery. Plus it revolves around the characters and their motivations more than the mystery of the knight. Just as Rain's story was more about her relationships than whatever the fuck was going on in the house and her job to witness the trials. I feel kind of bad that I forgot so much of this series when it's really pulling me in. I blame my having been older (30!) at the time of reading this and beginning to have trouble fully remembering the stories from month to month. It's one of the main reasons I quit reading comic books the first time! And it's the reason for this blog! So that I could refresh my memory of every issue of The New 52 a month after having read the last part! But now comic books just cost too much so I'm re-reading all of my old books instead of reading new books at like $5.00 a pop. Yeesh!

The Crusades #2 (June 2001)

This ain't weird for San Francisco.

The only real question when seeing a knight in armor standing on top of a taxi in San Francisco is this: is he part of Pride, part of the drug scene, or is it Renaissance Festival season across the Golden Gate in Marin County? It's also possible Gwar is playing at the Cow Palace but the odds on that are pretty low compared to the others.

Man, I just made myself so sad and nostalgic for the Bay Area. If I had to guess, I'd say at least half the concerts I've been to in my life time were at the Cow Palace.

For those curious about the lyrics that begin this issue: Missy George Eliot!

It's been so long since I've read Middlemarch, I doubt I'd be able to pick it out of a line-up if it stood on stage in front of me next to Vanity Fair, Bleak House, and Jude the Obscure. It's weird knowing you've lived life and done things during that life but have no memory of them whatsoever anymore. Am I still responsible for everything the me did when I was reading Middlemarch if I can't even remember the fucking plot? I think every terrible thing I did around the time should be attributed to a me that isn't me anymore at all. Um, not that I did anything terrible around that time! I don't think this was terrible but one time, I told this gay guy Michael once that I wasn't interested in having sex with him and then lay on the couch in the dark with him on the floor nearby thinking, "Do I want to have sex with him? My penis seems to want to!" But I didn't have the nerve to wake him up and say, "You know what? Let's do this! Please go easy on me, sir!" Man, if that had been the plot of Middlemarch, I bet I'd remember it then!

Holy Crusades! This issue begins in the past. It's only the second (third!) issue and we're actually going to get some back story?! Will there be a worm hole? A Legion teleportation accident? A holy fucking miracle?!

Content Warning: The Crusades were 98% racist.

The Crusades were probably 100% racist but I'm going to allow for a slight margin of error due to so many poor and uneducated people being swept up in the fervor who maybe just thought they were joining a parade of racists.

Check out the side-eye on his Jew. He's all, "Fucking this shit again?"

I was first introduced to The Fiddler on the Roof in middle elementary school due to the way television worked in the '70s. That is, there were like nine channels worth watching (if you don't count that one channel on UHF that showed the scrambled porn station, Private Screenings. Seriously. Look it up!). Three of those channels were network affiliates. Two were PBS stations. And four were local channels that showed a bunch of syndicated stuff (two on VHF (channels 2-13) and two on UHF (all the other numbers!)). In the San Francisco Bay Area, channels 2, 12, 20, and 36 were the main local stations. Channel 4 was NBC, 6 was CBS, and 7 was ABC. Channels 9 and 54 were PBS stations. I don't remember what channel Private Screenings was on but I tried to watch it on occasion!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, on the weekends, you had those channels to choose from. As a kid, I didn't like sports, so that cut down on some choices. Movies and musicals were big fare during the day on Saturdays and Sundays. It's where I first saw The Fiddler on the Roof and I mostly remember loving the first half and being bored to death by the second half. I definitely didn't understand the context of the movies and I certainly didn't learn and retain the word "pogrom" for at least a decade later. I just knew the first half of the movie was fun and the second half of the movie was a huge downer! Oh, I bring it up because that side-eye Jewish fellow made me think of the word "pogrom" because he definitely can tell it's, once again, fucking pogrom time!

Oh sure. Sign me up. You look like you're having a fucking blast.

One guy answers this fanatical crusader with some smart words and the crusader isn't happy about it.

Oh, by "smart words," I just mean they were all, "No thanks, sir! I'm just going to keep doing Jewish stuff!"

Judging by the snake-horned helmet, the crusader questioning Christo-fascist angry dude is our Knight of San Francisco. We're learning either he has a different moral code than your typical crusading Christian or he's just lazy. I'm not sure if his problem is with killing Jewish people or killing 600 Jewish people.

Back in San Francisco, we learn the scene wasn't technically a flashback although it probably was anyway. What it was was Venus reading a book entitled Crusades and Crusaders which apparently is a history book and not a role-playing game. She's learning about how ruthless and terrible and racist the crusaders were because she's curious as to how racist her soon-to-be new boyfriend might wind up being. You know she's gonna fuck the knight! This is a Vertigo title!

Last issue ended with Venus stumbling upon another gangland hit. This issue begins with Venus reading more about crusaders and waiting in the office of her therapist because she's convinced she's hallucinating the entire thing. In the middle of the issue, as she's talking to her therapist, she recounts what happened just after last issue ended and the gang members saw her seeing them doing their killing. And while the reader gets the story in visuals, the dialogue that goes along with it belong to Anton Marx and his co-host, April the Lesbian, as they discuss Anton's theories of the knight.

As a white male, Anton Marx doesn't worry if this guy's agenda is his own because he's probably racist. He's only worried if he's working for somebody else that might have a beef with mouthy radio personalities.

In the middle of the fight scene where the knight chops off the hand of one of the Pope's men, DC has purchased a double page advert for 7th Edition Magic the Gathering. It's not that I find it weird that Magic the Gathering took out such a large advertisement. It's the tagline they use that begins, "Back in Black," on the left page, and then finishes with this on the right.

Um, whut?

True story: one time at a Magic the Gathering tournament in San Jose, I used my Maze of Ith ("Target attacking creature becomes untapped. This creature neither deals nor receives damage as a result of combat.") against an attacking Serra Angel. This must have been in '95 or '96. The kid across from me was all, "You can't do that because Serra Angel doesn't tap." And I was all, "Excuse me? What kind of nonsense is that, you stupid mother fucker? Don't make me get up and shove the rest of your deck up your virgin asshole!" Okay, maybe I wasn't that angry. But I was confused. I was all, "The maze targets an attacking creature. The angel is attacking. Therefore it does no damage. The tapped or untapped bit doesn't matter." But he was a stupid motherfucker and could not be swayed by my ability to read a fucking Magic card. So he called a judge over and the judge was all, "Oh yeah. That's a new ruling. The Maze works on the angel." And since the judge ruled for me, I did not flip the table over out of irrational anger at the thought that somebody had previously ruled that the maze couldn't work against the angel?! What kind of shit stupid ignorant motherfucking motherfuckers live in this world with me?! READ THE FUCKING CARDS, YOU MORONS! Anyway, I lost in the next round because a guy who was about to be decked played Feldon's Cane which I'd never seen and didn't know what it did and by the time I'd read the card, he'd already shuffled his library back into his deck and I decided I didn't want to have to shove his deck up his virgin asshole as well and just decided not to argue that I Counterspelled it and just decided, "Fuck Magic the Gathering tournaments and the fucking bullshit cheating stupid motherfuckers who play in them."

What I'm saying is, "Yeah, yeah. I can see the stupid jerks I played with and traded cards with loving the shit out of a 'the Serra Angel is old enough to be fucked now' advertisement.

Vertigo-mandated tits and ass.

Earlier, Venus had an issue with getting lost in thought while doing research. Now it's becoming worse as she's daydreaming (or hallucinating) random events. It's probably brought on by the stress of seeing a knight hack off the hand of another human being. Or because she became super aroused after seeing it. Or maybe she just finds therapy super horny.

Later, Venus heads over to the New Jerusalem School to ask the priest who ran out to stop the criminals if he'd seen the knight as well. When she gets there, she's turned away because Pope's men are already in the building using violence to get the priest to sign the school over to The Pope. I guess so they can sell the land to the casino? Or build there own? Or something.

The issue ends with Venus ambushing Anton Marx at his coffee joint. He seems super embarrassed to be seen with her for some reason. Is she hideous? Are Anton and I looking at different women?! Why wouldn't he want everybody to know he's having sex with Venus?! Before she can tell him that she was the knight, Detective Petronas shows up to arrest Anton. He doesn't say why because it's the last panel and it's like a big twist to get the reader to buy the next issue. "Why was Anton arrested?! You'll have to spend another $2.50 next month to find out why! What's that? You were already going to buy next month's issue because you love seeing Venus naked? Oh, okay. Maybe we should have ended with her slipping off her underwear!"

The Crusades #2 Rating: A. It's like the knight's just a big, weird, interesting red herring to get eyes on this comic book. Readers curious to see why a knight crusades around San Francisco pick up the comic book. Then they get interested in the characters and the mystery and the mob violence and the boobies and mostly forget about the knight. The knight's just flavor text on a Summon Boobies and Mystery Magic the Gathering card of a comic book.

The Crusades #1 (May 2001)

San Francisco must be so soaked in LSD-tainted piss that The City itself might be hallucinating the knight.

This issue is labeled #1 but it's not the first issue. In the first issue, Urban Decree, we met a guy with a big mouth named Anton, a woman with big nipples named Venus, a crime lord with big aspirations named The Pope, a medieval knight with a big lance, and two twin brothers who fuck each other on stage for money. I'm assuming they have big pricks but it wasn't revealed so I didn't want to assume it by mentioning them in a statement that was just pure fact. Now I'm wondering if the preponderance of male twins compare their penises? You'd have to, right? Also, I'd be all, "I wonder what my butthole looks like? Get over here, bro!" Except I'd say it in our secret language and be all, "Chicka, chickabee, tay an may sees feliss, no tata!"

I forgot to introduce Anton Marx's Robin to his Howard Stern, April. She's a smart-ass lesbian who's contractually obligated to tell Marx, "You're never wrong," at least five times an hour. I almost introduced her last issue when she grabbed her tits and licked her lips but I thought, "It would be disrespectful to the lesbian community to rub my male gaze all over their bodies." You're welcome, lesbian community! I'm such a staunch ally!

If I don't get a GLAAD award for my self-control, I'll probably turn into a right-wing Nazi Comicsgater making YouTube videos where I interview Ethan Van Sciver about his stupid frog comic book that I have to love because it's the only comic book left that allows boobs. I mean, it doesn't but if my brain has gone right-wing, I'm going believe a lot of really stupid and untrue things.

Which Santana song was this lyric from?

According to last issue and this issue, the first page will always contain a song lyric. Urban Decree's lyric was from some band named Goethe. I didn't think it was important because I'm reading a comic book and large chunks of text without colorful images surrounding them barely register on my brain anymore.

The issue really begins on the next page where hyper-violence occurs amid brightly colored panels full of exaggerated physiques. You know, nobody likes to admit it but Fredric Wertham was right. Comic books are totally full of all the horrible shit he said they were full of. But he was wrong in thinking it causes children to become juvenile delinquents. It caused them to love comic books and get lost in stories and feel the kinds of feelings a kid can only feel when reading horror stories and romance stories because life is mostly fucking boring. But who knew that Fredric Wertham would be right about comic book readers becoming scourges on society in the modern era when they began to realize that they were the baddies that super heroes were battling against. Instead of thinking, "Shit. Superman would totally lecture me about the way I'm behaving! Maybe I should look inward and change myself?", they responded by saying, "Hitler was right! How quickly can I order a Klan hood on Amazon?!"

Let me guess! The knight is going to say, "Pisser sur celui qui fait pisser," before stabbing him in the kidneys!

The knight cuts the man's arm off and that's the grisly end of the scene because the boy telling the story to Detective Petronas (I forgot to mention meeting him! He's a detective with a big fat Greek toxic masculinity!) ran away at that point and doesn't know what happened. Detective Petronas, having heard so many stories about the knight lately, and investigated so many crime scenes where people were cut up by a sword, argues that because he's seen and heard so much evidence and eye witness testimony, the stories must be false. Yeah, that checks out. That sounds like typical police work.

Scene cuts to Venus at work telling coworker Patsy or Patty or something, one of the few people in her life who knows Venus is dating Anton Marx, about her wonderful relationship with the biggest creep in the city (after Detective Petronas and maybe The Pope and probably the Knight). It seems Anton is not good at conversation, not good at making her feel welcome in his home, not good at sex, and not good at sharing the covers. Either he's good at some secret something or I'm suspecting that Venus kind of hates herself.

Hey! I used to watch Creatures Features on KTVU channel 2 growing up! Which isn't cable, by the way. And I thought Venus was good at researching things!

Venus learns from coworker What's-her-name that their newspaper's going all-in on the Knight of San Francisco story. They're apparently just learning what the Weekly World News knew for years before anybody: clickbait sells like heroin-flavored hotcakes! Venus's coworker needs help researching orders of knights to fact check all the editorials being sent in by crackpots and people who think their views of reality are somehow better than other peoples when they're almost blatantly the opposite (which is why they drive so much traffic to the papers because people love to call other people stupid! Especially when the editorial writers really are as stupid as the people calling them stupid say they are). Apparently Venus has plenty of time to do research for Patsty because Venus's only job is researching Anton Marx's column which she won't get from him until the end of the day.

Over his radio show that morning, Anton Marx reveals that Tony Quetone (now Tony Cutone for some reason) was gunned down by The Pope's men. But then the Pope's men were killed by somebody with hand-to-hand weapons. But he won't reveal what he thinks that means because saying it over the radio doesn't earn him any extra cash. He's going to write his theories in his column for the masses high on knightmania to read. Detective Petronas calls into the radio show for some reason, acting concerned that Anton is revealing things to the public that the cops didn't want revealed without realizing that calling in to argue with Anton simply confirms what Anton's saying. As we've seen, he's not a great detective. Another thing Anton doesn't reveal: who gave him this information. Venus was a witness to the whole thing but I don't think she told him.

Meanwhile The Pope does more killing and crime while ignoring the possibility of the knight's actual existence.

Oh, Anton's circle jerk of friends meetings are to bounce ideas off of each other and get their critiques of his columns.

Anton believes the knight is bullshit. But Anton strikes me as the sort of blowhard who thinks believing the opposite of what the masses thinks constitutes intelligence. If the city wasn't so excited about the possibility of some vigilante knight roaming the streets at night butchering evaduhs (sorry! my twin language sometimes comes back to haunt me) and they thought it was all nonsense, he'd be proclaiming the knight was real and declaring he lives in the sewers! In other words, he'd be spot on.

Anton doesn't respect the opinions of any of his artist buddies. But some normie named Jasper also hangs out at the coffee shop so he asks his opinion.

I know after that lead in that I should have just scanned the last three panels but then nobody would see the glory of the twin fuck brothers.

Anton couldn't see what Jasper easily noticed about him because Anton jerks off over his own opinions. Changing his opinion to be more popular rather than screaming his opinion so loudly that his rabid listeners believe it wholeheartedly? What a concept!

Being that this series is called The Crusades, and Venus is a researcher, it's inevitable that Venus will let us, the ignorant readers, in on some history of them good ol' crusades.

The problem with conservatives and the religious is that they never have interesting enough lives to not do whatever stupid shit the leaders of their ideologies suggest.

Anton titles his column, "The Knight: I Know Who He Is!" He explains his plan to Venus before boring her, watching television she hates, fucks her selfishly, and steals the blankets.

What?! I have to let my male gaze off its leash occasionally!

Walking off her frustration, Venus winds up, yet again, stumbling onto a gangland murder. Oh that crazy woman! How does she do it?! The Pope's men have strung up some kid and are gutting him on the site of an indigenous casino's construction site. That's where the comic book ends because it would be too exciting to get the knight twice in one issue! He'll kill those men in front of her next issue. Maybe he'll start following her around the city seeing as how she's so good at stumbling upon murders?

The Crusades #1 Rating: B. It's keeping my interest! So some of the characters might be shallow archetypes. And some of the characters might simply exist for the shock level to rise to Vertigo standards. But there's a medieval knight murdering people around San Francisco and nobody knows why or how?! So exciting! Maybe we'll eventually learn who he is and why he's doing it in issue #14!

The Crusades: Urban Decree (April 2001)

Hopefully I don't have to read several non-fiction books about The Crusades to understand this comic book.

I don't remember a lot about this book. I think some modern cop begins investigating some vigilante in armor or begins working with one. I picked it up because I absolutely adored Steven T. Seagle's House of Secrets. The only comic book "art" I own was from that series and it's not original art thus the quotes. They're photocopied pages of the black and white line art that the colorist painted with water colors for the color separation stage. They're basically watercolor coloring in by the colorist, Bjarne Hansen.

This isn't my favorite but the whereabouts of the one I had hanging on my wall for years are currently unknown.

My favorite shows Rain with Traci and Ben in the convertible on their road trip from Seattle to San Francisco. At the time I read it, I was on my own road trip making the exact opposite journey in my 1971 Volkswagen bus. I bought the watercolors at Comicon in either 1997, 1999, or 2000 from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for a twenty dollar donation. So the only actual comic book art pieces I have are watercolors from colorist Bjarne Hansen and yet I never credit the colorists when I label these blog posts! I'm a fucking jerk.

The story begins with a witness to a drive-by jousting giving his report to some radio show host.

His description was, "Imagine a horse drawn by Kelley Jones ridden by a man in armor with so many frilly details that he made Magic the Gathering cards look realistic."

The man describing the knight isn't the only one who saw it; the second witness disagrees with a lot of the details. The two witnesses are houseless guys living in Golden Gate Park. They're telling their stories to a Howard Sternesque radio show host named Anton Marx. The first witness described the knight as having a lance and glowing red eyes. The second witness says the man's eyes were normal and he carried the sword, Excalibur.

His description was, "The knight wore a suit of armor more realistic than what you'd see on a Magic the Gathering card and wielded a +5 Vorpal Sword vs. Asians."

The first story had the knight running down some punk shooting off a pistol wildly, striking but not hurting the knight, before being flung into the bay off the end of a lance. The second story had the knight killing Asian gang members in order to save a woman from being raped.

Did I scan this for the man ass, the side boob, or the severed head? It's a mystery to discover! (side boob)

The studio contains one more houseless guy. His story will probably be the most believable of all, if any of them are supposed to be truly believable. Mostly Anton's just bringing them on to sensationalize a growing urban legend about a knight serving up some old school justice on the streets of San Francisco. The third witness, however, refuses to speak. But we, the readers, get to see what he saw.

This story is true because I saw the cover and the helmet is exactly the same.

"Honi soit qui mal y pense" is the motto of the British "Order of the Garter" and translates to "Shame on anyone who thinks evil of it." The motto wasn't just a flash in the pan saying thought up by King Edward III in the 14th Century. It's plastered all over loads and loads of royal uniforms and badges and heraldries, not just in the United Kingdom but in its offshoots of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The craziest place in the list of places where the motto appears, according to the Wikipedia entry where I discovered all of this information, was on the entry gates to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. I never really thought Michael Jackson was guilty of pedophilia until this fucking bomb dropped in my lap from a pretty obscure Wikipedia entry! I suppose I'm reading into the motto too cynically. Jackson probably just meant to say, "Shame on anybody who thinks I'm evilly diddling kids when we're just having a grand old time playing and having sleepovers!" You're right, Michael! Shame on me for thinking there was anything more, even if just briefly when I misunderstood why you would have such a strange, archaic saying on the gates to your pedophile villa. I mean suspected pedophile villa!

Anton Marx has decided the whispered legends of a knight roaming San Francisco have become popular enough to interest his audience which is why he's brought in the houseless to share stories. So far, they're the only ones who have supposedly seen the knight. But the mainstream papers have finally begun to take notice as well and the legend of the knight has knocked news stories about organized crime in the area out of the headlines. Anton probably mentions Tony Quetone and "the Pope," local crime leaders, because they're going to be important to the story soon!

During the station break, Anton deals with a shit and his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend.

I scanned this for the inclusion of two important plot elements!

Anton's ex's name is Venus and she storms off to think about the history of toilets. Being a fact checker, her mind often races with the facts of things which she's recently been in the vicinity of while highly stressed. So Anton sitting on a toilet and being a large piece of human waste gets her thinking about the history of what people did with their piss and excrement. I mention this because it feels like it'll be a regular feature in the series, Venus suddenly info-dumping on various items. One of those will probably be about 14th Century knights, crusades, and medieval weapons.

On her way home, Venus notices a Detective Addas Petronas she knows investigating a taped off gory crime scene. Of course he lets her walk all over the crime scene simply because she's curious about what happened and maybe also because they're both Greek? Maybe they've known each other since they were kids and also Detective Petronas loves Venus's plot elements.

Jones and Moore are doing exceptional work on this series.

I'm twenty pages into this comic book and I realize I never discuss the art. I just take it for granted and scan the most obvious shots of nice boobs, asses, and peckers. But I'd like to point out that Kelley Jones has been creating panels from genius camera angles, allowing the series to feel like its in constant frenetic motion. Even that scene I just scanned, where two characters casually hang out amid a bunch of chopped up corpses, speaks volumes about the characters and their comfort level. That middle panel where Addas's gun becomes casually exposed from his jacket at the same eye level as Venus's casually exposed nipples communicates something about these characters that I'm too stupid to truly comment on. Something about their closeness and friendly intimacy (since Addas even uses that word, I think I'm on the right track!). Family friends thrown into a complex relationship with each other due to parents pressuring their kids to marry, especially within their native nationality. These two understand each other and work in professions where sharing information can help both. As opposed to Anton and Venus where the information and sharing really only flows one way: to bolster Anton's career.

Venus notices the massacre happened in an alleyway across from New Jerusalem Church School and somebody left a bloody cross smeared near the sign. It could be a clue! It could also be a cross smeared with shit by a schizophrenic, seeing as how the cross was portrayed with black ink and not red. It's San Francisco! It's hard to tell shit on the walls from blood on the walls.

I should also note that this is a Vertigo imprint so there are way more nipples and asses than I can spend time scanning in the pages of the comic. Sure, Vertigo was meant to tell "adult stories" in the sense of stories for audiences not just mature in the pants but mature in the brains. But often it screamed its maturity by showing loads of asses and tits. Sometimes it might show a pecker but I think that was super rare. Alan Moore may have been the only one to easily get away with plastering peckers in every other panel (maybe because it was super flaccid and blue?).

There's also loads of racist slurs when the scene shifts to the criminals.

That's Tony Quetone with the cigar in his mouth and not the bathing suit up her ass. He's the head of a criminal organization currently battling against the guy on the phone, "The Pope." He said some racist slurs against Asians earlier which is how I learned he was Tony Quetone! I don't know the name of the woman in the bathing suit. Probably Charlotte.

The Pope called Tony to call off their turf war. A bunch of The Pope's men were slaughtered by the Knight and The Pope thinks Tony's the brains behind the killings. Tony isn't but he doesn't mind The Pope giving up on account of some random ass medieval bastard Soit Qui Mal y Pensing up the city. They're to meet each other at the New Jerusalem School to work out the new arrangement, just Tony, The Pope, and their right-hand men. I'm sure nothing sword-like or lance-y will happen at the meeting.

While the various characters go about their business in the City, Anton Marx's radio show constantly plays. By the time Venus gets back to work and the crime bosses have set their meeting, Anton Marx begins speculating on how the knight could exist in The City. Where does he keep his horse? How do neighbors not notice a bloody man in armor? Where the hell could a medieval murderer live?

I don't know. I think San Francisco might be the greatest city for a knight to hide in plain sight. He probably goes to every Pride parade.

After the show, Anton Marx meets up with, um, fellow "artists" at a nearby coffee shop to discuss things. I say "things" because I don't really know what they're there to discuss. I don't know why a lesbian erotic novel writer meets with a Howard Stern wannabe and a couple of male twins who perform live sex acts with each other on stage and an artist who doesn't want to be famous but every shocking painting he does just makes him a bigger success and a man who makes short "films" or something. Maybe they all went to college together. Maybe they all have some sort of murder/suicide pact. Maybe they were all members of a séance gone wrong which ended in them all fucking and murdering another person with a curse that they must all meet once a month or their private parts will fall off.

The meeting goes as usual, they all state the most obvious things that they've been doing which don't seem to be anything which needs a regular update. Until the guy who makes short films for the Internet rushes in with proof of the knight! Somebody caught him on film, a silhouette in a horned helmet in the dark saying, "Soit qui mal y pense." Nobody knows what that means and maybe the entry on that saying wasn't up on Wikipedia yet in 2003. So Anton, knowing somebody with incredible plot elements who can speak French, tells everybody he'll investigate!

Addas proves to be just as terrible a person as you'd expect a cop to be so Venus tells him to fuck off when they meet up later. She heads off to see Anton even though she thought she was done with him too. But on the way to his place, she stops off at the Jerusalem School because she sees a new cross made of blood and/or shit. That's when she stumbles on the meeting between The Pope and Tony Quetone, just in time to see Tony and his right-hand man gunned down by The Pope's assassins. Venus runs but they hear her and turn to shoot her. That's when she's knocked down by a horse, turns to see what happened, and witnesses her first somebody going medieval on somebody else's ass moment.

Venus is in shock. She seems to think you say, "Thank you for saving my life," by stuttering, "Wh...why...why?"

Venus gets to Anton's apartment but he's too excited about his French saying to listen to why she's so distraught. So she tells him the French means, roughly, "Evil to him who evil does." Sure, okay, why not?

The Crusades: Urban Decree Rating: A. So the Knight goes around saying, "Evil to him who evil does." That's what it means for this comic book, at least, even though what it really meant was something like, "Shame on the idiots who think this thing I, the king, am doing is evil. Who the fuck cares? Who are they? Nobodies, that's who! I'll conquer as much of Normandy as I want!" This knight can't just be killing people because they think something the knight is doing is evil so we'll go with Venus's translation. He's a vigilante! He's going to make people in San Francisco behave! But behave according to whose ethics and morals? That could be dangerous. Is this why this comic book was in the same short box as The Authority? They share the theme that people with the power to commit whatever violence they want can make the rules for everybody else? Boy, I hope The Order of the Garter was okay with homosexuality or this book is going to take quite the fucking turn. I mean, judging by the name, they're definitely cool with drag so it shouldn't be a problem, right?

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!