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THE AUTHORITY #28
"Brave New World Part Four of Four"
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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DC Comics/Wildstorm Productions
Writer: Mark Millar
Pencils: Arthur Adams
Inks: Tim Townshend & Trevor Scott
Colors: David Baron
Letters: Bill O'Neil
Editor: John Layman
Price: $2.50 US/$4.25 CAN |
On top of
being good ultra-violent fun, there's a subversive tone to this issue and the
neutering of The Authority that resonates with events surrounding the book, and
despite thinking my interest in the book had faded, I find that I'm still
enjoying each new issue as much as the last. There's a certain joy in seeing The
Authority, or at least some of them, strike back at their replacements, each in
their own fashion, and I remain stunned by how well Art Adams's art style is
fitting in with the book.
The degradation of everything The Authority stood for was spelled out pretty clearly in the last issue, but Millar and Adams open the book with the same sort of thing. The tour through the dreamtime, complete with one of the funnier religious/pop culture gags I've seen in some time, is a hideous example of the amount of power that should not belong to the people who currently have it. And I'm not sure if the dig was intentional or just coincidence, but the "We really have turned this whole Authority franchise around in short time" line was hysterically funny given the turnaround in The Authority comic lately.
Where Peyer and Nguyen took
four issues to flesh out the "New Authority," Millar and Adams do it better in
just a few panels, sometimes contradicting what happened in the four-issue
fill-in arc. The blatant sexual harassment going on between the Colonel and Rush
was a pretty good insight into how each of those characters thinks and acts, and
Teuton's final moments with Apollo showed him to be as much a bastard as the
rest of them, not the whiny crybaby that he had been portrayed as in the
fill-in.
Whenever you're getting a lot
of development of the bastards, as well as degradation of the team, there's
bound to be payback coming, and this issue it starts to hit. The result of all
this rotten behavior is that the payback feels sweeter, and Midnighter's return
is fantastic. It's played up a bit like a horror movie, as he and Jenny Quantum
lurk about the Carrier and do horrid things to the New Authority, while these
supposed badass heroes wet their pants waiting to see what happened. And though
it seems like the kind of thing that was an edit rather than the original
intention, I thought having the disabling of Rush and the Surgeon take place
entirely off-panel, and in the space of a single panel, effectively showed
Midnighter's abilities. Then there are the hints, simply through subtle art from
Adams, that maybe Shen isn't quite so brainwashed as she seems, which has
interesting implications for the seemingly unbeatable Seth.
When I think of The Authority these days, my thoughts are largely of regret. Regret that we didn't get to see Millar and Quitely finish this out in a more timely manner, regret that a four-issue fill-in lowered my overall opinion of the series, regret that we won't see the Azzarello/Dillon take on the characters and just a general sense of regret that if The Authority does return, it will probably be in a neutered form that has none of the charm of the original. However, whenever I read an issue of The Authority, I'm reminded of why
I loved it so much in the first place, and that's something that an early
cancellation can't really take away.
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