Bow down to The Authority

As I may have mentioned a few hundred times already, I bought an iPad recently, and the newfound capacity to download comics has reinvigorated my love for the genre (though it has also seriously depleted my wallet – being able to merrily download things at any time of the day or night has some fairly damaging financial repercussions). Now, being a creature of habit on the comics front, I have mostly played it safe – there are a lot of X-Men titles saved in my library – but it has also given me the chance to investigate some new titles. And I have fallen a little bit in love with one of them – namely, Warren Ellis’ The Authority.


I came across The Authority in the course of some research I was doing into gay superheroes (don’t you really want my job?) because two of the central figures in the Authority team are gay. Apollo and the Midnighter are basically Superman/Batman analogues (though Ellis, who created the team, as described Midnighter as ‘the Shadow by the way of John Woo’), but having really enjoyed Ellis’ work on the Astonishing X-Men – he writes with a dry, barbed wit that I love – I knew to expect more than simply slash fiction. I wasn’t disappointed – the Authority is the most fun book I’ve read in ages.

The book is part of DC’s more ‘adult’ Wildstorm universe – and it shows. It’s really quite exceptionally violent (Midnighter makes Batman look like a bleeding heart liberal, the body count is phenomenal and one of the storylines is about the team combating an alien race intent on turning the earth into a giant rape camp – you won’t get that in a Superman book), but it’s all done with such aplomb I couldn’t help but be swept along. The head of the team is the supremely take-no-prisoners English gal Jenny Sparks (at one stage she volunteers Apollo for a life-threatening mission – when the usually stoical Midnighter protests that he might die, Apollo dryly notes ‘if I did Jenny would just bring me back to life and put me back to work – how can you not like her?) She has now joined Agent Abigail Brand as my favourite kick ass gal of the moment. (I am totally loving Brand in the Astonishing X-Men series – both for her kinkalicious relationship with Beast, which brings out his playful – dare I say kittenish?* – side, and her willingness to blow the shit out of anything that gets in her way).

Do not mess with this woman. She will blow up your planet.

I also cannot tell you how much I am liking Midnighter and Apollo. I’m still in the early stages of the book (so I’m basically 10 years behind the curve!), so not much of their relationship has been revealed, yet - it’s only in issue 8 that you realise they even have a relationship, and it’s subtly and beautifully played, but I know what’s coming and I approve, and I also think they work enormously well as characters, both separately and together. Midnighter’s approach to violence is half Batman, half Wolverine: given to statements like ‘I won this fight before I even showed up’, he is always the one keen to just get in there and hit things, and I must admit I like that in my superheroes. Apollo is much less homicidal, though not above bringing major pain to the deserving, and though I like him a bit less than I do his (at this stage, future) husband, he’s made more interesting by being in love with a man whose philosophy is so much more extreme than his own. It helps that, in Ellis’ hands, the pair have a real chemistry: I’ve always thought Ellis is a great writer at capturing that interesting mix of a relationship within a team (his take on the Emma Frost/Cyclops pairing is second only to Whedon’s, in my opinion) and this comes through here. (A favourite moment so far was the reunion of Midnighter and Apollo after the aforementioned near-death mission – a wordless and subtle embrace that happens in the background of a scene, only to be punctured by the casual, ‘get a room, you two’ from one of the other characters).




"You'll die." [Blub!]


So far I’m only 8 issues in, but I’m smitten: and the best thing about discovering a comic that has already been going for years? A whole lotta backlist. Suddenly I have the urge to do some downloading...

*you totally won't get that unless you read the X-Men.

How cute is it that Midnighter gets married in a white version of his costume?