The Ignoble Rorschach, That Fascist Authority,The Adolescent Mr Terrific: How Childish & Anti-Democratic Are Our Super-Heroes? Part 2 of 2

Continued From Yesterday;

6. "Clark Decided He Must Turn His Titanic Strength Into Channels That Would Benefit Mankind"

I. What's most remarkable about the persistent attempts to ascribe "pop-fascist" meaning to the superhero is how the pro-democratic narrative traditions of the genre are so readily ignored. It's as if the simple fact that superheroes tend to close their conflicts with violent punch-ups, combined with their habit of paradoxically breaking the law in order to maintain it, must mean that an authoritarian message is encoded within their adventures. This is such an odd position to take, rooted as it is in a puritanical left-wing ideology that perceives both the expression of power and the belief in the virtue of individual action as being by their very nature against the interests of the "people". (It's as if a perfect world would be by definition one in which conflict never had to be closed by coercion, and in which individuals would only take action when sanctioned and directed by the collective, and it's as idiotic a philosophy as that of its opposing political fairy story, Libertarianism.) Particularly perplexing is how "theorists" from Wertham onwards have abstracted the superheroes' typical methods and considered them in isolation from their typical ends, as if the very fact of punch-ups and law-bending is of itself proto-fascist regardless of why it occurs. Now, putting to one side the fact that this all places practically every adventure story that hasn't been deliberately written to extreme-left-of-centre principles in history into the camp of the fascist, wouldn't it surely be sensible to take into account whatever it is that the superhero wants, sacrifices for, and, perhaps, even sanctifies by all that effort and spandex? Isn't it important to consider why the superhero fights as well as how all that aggressive fighting gets done?


II. There is in fact an entire long-standing sub-genre of superhero tales where the cape'n'spandex brigade seek to overthrow constitutional government and impose "order" on the world. By casting an eye over these stories, the reader can quickly be disabused of the notion that the meaning of the superhero is to be found solely in his or her violent methods. For though much of the M.O. of the superheroes presented in the pages of, for example, the"Squadron Supreme" and the "Watchmen", is as violent and illicit as any other costumed adventure tale, the meaning ascribed to the punch-ups and energy-blasting is quite different. Put simply, the fact that the superhero hits things and breaks the law doesn't determine the purpose of the text: what determines that is the end that the superhero is fighting for. And in the case of the above-mentioned books, and in all those of the "superhero-gone-wrong" sub-genre, the closure of these tales is always the same; the citizenry themselves have been fundamentally damaged by the superheroes' attempts to accrue political power to themselves, for whatever apparently good reason, and society can only be saved by some kind of action to remove the super-folks from their abuse of due process. (*4)

In "Watchmen", for example, the consequence of the costumed heroes helping to suppress human rights at home and abroad is in part the strengthening of the perpetual Nixonian dictatorship. (From what we can tell, Nixon has fixed the system so he's in place for pretty much forever. It may look like a democratic society, but the sense is that the system is neither legal nor benign, as we'd expect from an America so ruled by the trickiest of Dickies.) And none of the "Watchmen" survive that process without becoming either disconnected or emasculated individuals. They certainly don't continue as superheroes. Regardless of what Mr Moore and Mr Gibbons meant the meaning of their text to be, the fact is that fighting for the wrong side precedes the emasculation and enforced retirement of their "heroes". And however cynically the reader might approach "Watchmen", it's hard not to see the suppression of the prison riot by three of the superheroes later in the text as marking a point where the narrative gathers the force and power generated by the "democratic" metaphor underlying the appeal of the super-hero. By shifting from suppressing the freedoms of both Vietnam and America to taking on the Nixonian corruption of the prison where Rorscach is incarcerated, Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre become impressive and superheroic figures again, rather than sad purposeless individuals in daft costumes. Yet it's not the fact that they're suddenly acting violently that re-creates them as superheroes, for if they were attacking a meeting of civil rights protesters, we'd not be engaged on their side, though we might enjoy the detail of the incident. No, we fall into line behind them during their attempt to free Rorscach, despite the distrust and even contempt in places for the idea of superheroes in Alan Moore's script, because they're taking on the corruption of an undemocratic state. And in doing so, characters which at first seemed daft and rather pathetic become impressive and admirable. It's not being a violent superhero that does that, but rather being a violent superhero in the right cause.

Democracy doesn't just make every man a king. It makes most every well-intentioned costumed oddity a superhero too.


III. All of which raises the odd prospect that perhaps Rorscach's worrying appeal lies not in his violent psychopathy, but rather in the reader's understanding on the level of symbols that his single-mindedness and, yes, madness, is what's required for a superhero to persevere all alone in a world that's stranded as far from hopeful democratic principles as the one in "Watchmen" is.

Just a thought, of course. Perhaps the conclusion drawn from "The Dark Knight" and "Watchman" by so many editorial staff and creators - that brutal violence appeals of itself to the audience - utterly missed the point. It would at least explain why the overwhelming majority of nasty little brutish superheroes which have followed in the wake of Rorshach and the Dark Knight have failed to resonate lastingly with the mass audience at all. Perhaps its the symbolic relationship between the level of violence expressed by a particular superhero and the absence of democratic principle and freedom present in the state they operate within that counts in winning audiences over. If so, Rorshach "works" in part because of the squalid, hopeless, and democratically-constrained circumstances Mr Moore and Mr Gibbons place him in.

But drop Walter Kovacs into a typical summer's day street scene in Action Comics or Spider-Man and he'll be just another pathetic, loony, self-deluding public menace, and no one will care for him except at best to laugh at him and pass onwards, no matter how nifty the shifting designs on his mask might be.

IV. The fact that the superhero tale simply will not work if the protagonists are fascist in their intent can even be illustrated with reference to Mark Millar's "The Authority", where a team of superheroes are shown to be effectively taking over the world in a laudable defiance of apparently unfreely-elected governments. Yet Mr Millar's narrative has had to significantly twist the traditional components of the superhero tale in order to help the reader swallow such a story. Or, to put it another way, a standard-model superfolks story wouldn't permit a fascist meaning to be sympathetically presented to the audience, and so Mr Millar has to have it that the governments of the Authority's Earth are all utterly un-democratic and unworthy of our support. Consequently, the Authority by contrast can be represented as standing for the best intentions of right-on Hampstead socialism. Of course, this re-weighting of the elements of the familiar superhero plot in order to make the reader associate with the frankly anti-democratic Authority does rather weaken the book's satirical intent. For Mr Millar has so loaded the dice that there's no point in the satirical game, though the tales are in parts still fun to read. Yet if Mr Millar really wanted to discuss the elements of the superhero tale which were apparently "pop-fascist", he ought to have had at least depicted recognisably real-world Western governments facing down his super-characters. But then, for all their weaknesses, stupidity and partial allegiance to sectional interests, having a believable US or UK Government in "The Authority" would immediately have revealed how Jenny Sparks and her super-powered troops were in truth the tale's fascists, puncturing the meaning and intent of the book at birth.

You just can't mess with that anti-pop-fascist metaphor, regardless of what the experts tell us, for the superhero doesn't exist as a character in isolation from the traditions of the society that it was born in. And even in its most emasculated form, even in the depths of the frightened fifties when the Comics Code and low ambitions led to every superhero being an accredited boy scout or girl guide serving their local city, the underlying truth was there: the superhero only acts when the system fails to prevent citizens from being preyed on by more powerful interests. And so, up pops the superhero, not solving the problem, because the same fights will have to be fought tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that, but by their presence pointing out that the state isn't either, though it surely could.

Helping out the powers-that-be to do their job better, rather than replacing them, is the only way that the superhero tale as traditionally constituted can work. The superhero helps individuals against the over-powerful, and thereby saves the democratic state. There is, after all, a word for a costumed character who takes power away from the people and the state and rules instead for themselves, no matter how sympathetically they're portrayed, and that word is "super-villain".


7. "You, Who Sacrificed Your Life To Save Mine, Have Been Avenged"

I. The superhero, therefore, operates in that conceptual space between the ideals which the state preaches to its citizens and the deeds that occur in a democratic society. And the superhero is a symbol of the desire for people to live in a society where everyone does what they say they will, and where those stated intentions are founded on constitutional principles. All of which explains why the mask is so important in the superhero tale, since the superhero traditionally doesn't act for themselves, but for the community. The superhero isn't seeking to lead the people, or even to suggest that someone such as themselves does, but rather demands by their very existence that anybody who assumes responsibility plays by the rules of the game. The business of restoring the game to its default "fair" setting is of course naive, but it's exactly the same kind of naivety which initially powered the civil rights movement, and feminism, and worker's rights, and so on, the so-called "naivety" which suggests that our common values ought to underpin our common social existence. And so the superhero, in their bright colours or their dark threatening uniforms, are there to close that space between rhetoric and practise. The mask protects them while they do so, and also protects the very thing they're fighting for, namely their everyday lives, for the superhero is fighting to have a normal existence where the costume is unnecessary. The superhero doesn't seek to be a superhero, but a redundant superhero, and not a leader, but a citizen.

II. And I'd suggest that most attempts to mess with this formula where the superhero tale is concerned miss the point that readers in the West have a tremendous, albeit it naive, wellspring of emotional affection for the vague principles of fairness which the state and its media constantly trumpet. Readers of superheroes don't want radical changes to society, and that's just as well, because the superhero hasn't been by intention and chance designed to deliver that. Superheroes, like Cincinnatus, disappear back to their equivalent of the farm when the need for the fighting is over. All of which, I'd suggest, is why radical theorists have usually either ignored the superhero or held it in contempt. (Gloria Steinem's understanding of Wonder Woman as an enabling force for women of all ages is one noble exception to the rule.) Somewhere in the revolutionary mind is the awareness that the superhero is never going to be with the programme that advocates the barricades going up and the fundamental structures of society being redrawn. For if and when that happens, the same conceptual purpose that has Batman pursue the Joker and Captain America track down the Secret Empires' President Nixon will, in the reader's imagination, also see Superman taking on the new fascist or communist vanguard. For if the superhero is disappointed by democracy in practise but not theory, the superhero is appalled and disgusted by authoritarianism.


III. The superhero, therefore, likes the West pretty much as it as, albeit with the radical proviso that bullied children should have the protection of supportive teachers, that scared citizens should be able to look to the guardianship of the state, and that disadvantaged stratas should be able to look to the government for support rather than oppression. And oddly enough, wherever the superhero is placed, in whatever culture they're positioned, they have the same fondness for what the West regards as fundamental political and social rights. And if a "foreign" superhero should be portrayed as serving, or even ruling, an undemocratic state, then they'll stand revealed as being no superhero at all. At best, they'll be portrayed as an untrustworthy anti-hero, but mostly, they'll be super-villains.

Mom's apple pie. Baseball. Squirrel Girl.

It's not the violence and the illegality that counts, it's the purpose.

IV. And so the superhero is only adolescent if we believe that the world is fair and consider that a citizen in the West has nothing to be scared of where the powers-that-be in our nations are concerned, and only fascist if the esteemed cultural commentator making such a point ignores what fascism actually is and how the superhero works in the context of the very society that created it.


8. "And I Shall Shed My Light Over Dark Evil ... "

I. It's noticeable that where there are examples of superheroes acting in an extreme way to undermine democracy through their actions rather than their intent, the narrative nearly always draws attention to the fact. When, for example, the current "X-Force" ignores due process to such a degree that assassination becomes a commonplace practise, the immorality of this is regularly referred to and debated by those X-men who know of the whole murderous business. To say that this debate in "X-Force" has been presented in a sophisticated, balanced or convincing manner wouldn't be possible, I'm afraid. (What's more, the appeal of Wolverine alone depends on Marvel turning a blind eye in part to that character being regularly used in often unnecessarily unsavoury ways.) But even at the worst extremes of such tales, superheroes who kill independent of legal sanction are typically enmeshed in a debate where the main assumptions of the text are that such extraordinary and illegal acts must be at the very least justified and never committed on a whim. And so even when the laws of a democracy are being broken by superheroes to a deeply worrying degree, the representation of this tends to take place within the terms of a democratic argument. So, no matter how certain strips try to normalise the business of extreme immorality and illegality, the context of the superhero narrative still as a whole strains to control the profoundly anti-democratic nature of such stories. (The audience know this is happening too, and so the likes of Arsenal and his dealer-beating dead cat are held in contempt not just for how his actions are portrayed, but for what those actions are and mean.) And in most cases, the law in its broadest sense still triumphs most every time, even though the superhero itself rarely suffers the punishment under the law which their actions often justify. (But we've discussed that elsewhere too, so I'll not repeat myself here.)


Yet should the bleakest excesses of authoritarian vigilantism become the norm, and debate about such behaviour simply disappear from the pages of the superhero's tale, the genre will, I believe, undoubtedly simply shrivel and die too. Because the readership will not be being presented with a narrative about how to question while serving the democratic state, but instead be being encouraged in effect to contemptuously overthrow it, and the whole symbolic purpose and power of the superhero tale will have been quite sullied and dissipated.


II. This is not to say, of course, that careless writing and inattentive editing haven't created a host of superhero tales which can be read to support vigilantism in its least pleasant symbolic form. But that unpleasantness isn't a fundamental property of the superhero figure, anymore than all pop music influences listeners to take drugs just because some songs encourage tuning in and dropping out. There is undoubtedly a degree of small-minded vindictiveness as well as ideological ignorance amongst some comic book creators, and their work has sadly produced a great deal of worryingly vile comic books. And yet the majority of superhero books operate just as they always have, placing their superhero leads within the broad framework of the law, arguing not that the system is fundamentally broken so much as it needs to live up to its own ideals.

III. In the last analysis, if the superhero, in all its forms and across all the mediums it appears in, is indeed an evil fascist-inspiring "monomyth", as argued by Lawrence and Jewett, well, it's not a very powerful one, is it? All of the hundreds of millions of Americans who've been exposed to this supposed conceptual carrier of ideological degeneration over the decades and there's still not a single academic study that can link the superhero to any form of fascism, or even simple delinquency, at all. (It's not that I'm saying that we should measure a pernicious text solely in terms of its real-world influence, but rather that there's no perceivable influence to be seen here at all.) And even if the superhero is presumed to be carrying such an anti-democratic contagion, how much more time and energy is going to have to be unknowingly invested into the enterprise before we can see the slightest influence of "pop-fascism" which can be traced back to it? For though I wouldn't deny that there's a worrying development, particularly in America, as regards an apparent decline in respect for the due process of law, it's telling that most of those folks who seem keen to so subvert the rule of law don't seem to come from the superhero-reading, or even watching, classes at all. In fact, the irony must surely be that many of the most fervent proponents of the need for an unconstitutional form of government in America today draw their strength off the myths of a quite different and yet far more popular form of fiction than superhero comic books, namely the Old Testament.

But there's a row for someone else to pick up and run with. Superman versus God. Let's hope that if someone does run with that one, they do a better job with the concept than Star Trek V did.


9. "Henceforth, It Shall Be Your Sacred Duty To Defend The Poor And Helpless..."

To say that showing a "superheroic" character breaking the law creates in the real-world some unmeasurable degree of fascism is to show a profound ignorance of how adventure heroes have been perceived throughout time. The existence of ballads concerning thieving bands of robbers in the woods, or fearsome pirates, or laughing throat-slitting highwaymen, throughout England's past, for example, never meant that the Monarchy itself was under threat of being ideologically or practically undermined. These tales of fearsome outsiders, all far less law-abiding and respectable than the standard-model superhero, were nearly always perceived - as far as we can tell - as being directed not against the system, but against its representatives. (The King was just, but some of his men were cruel, for example, and patently needed replacing.) Similarly, superheroes aren't perceived, I believe, to stand against democracy, or for the right of violent and adolescent-like individuals to impose their will savagely upon others. Or, to put it in comic-book terms, super-hero readers tend to be against Norman Osbourn, but not the concept of the President's right to appoint certain senior public servants, and though they oppose the Sons Of The Serpent, they're not against pressure groups advocating unpopular concepts in a constitutional fashion.


10. "Dad, Wherever You Are ... I Kinda Hope You're Resting Easier Now"

Of course, I can't prove any of the above. It's as much supposition as any theory of "pop-fascism" or "adolescent power fantasies" is, though I hope I've managed to show a few flaws in the basic principles underlying those arguments. For in the last regard, what a superhero is or isn't can't ever be objectively established. We know this. The superhero is whatever somebody says it is, as long as they don't get their first principles scrambled before they come to argue their piece. For me, however, I did just want to make sure that I could gather together a semi-coherent response whenever those "adolescent power fantasies" and that "fascism" was mentioned. After all, a fine protection against being annoyed by ill-considered arguments is to have an argument, ill-thought through or not, of one's own.

But for me, I am convinced, for today at least, that the superhero's meaning can be found in that distance between what we say we believe and what we actually do in today's West. And given that that space between principle and action will always be there, accepting that Heaven-On-Earth is a contradiction for all but the most religious of us, so too then will the superhero, or some such figure, advertising the fact that at least some folks feel that the powers-that-be, right down to you and I, aren't living up to what they promised they'd do.

Which means, thankfully where my taste is concerned, that as long as liberal-democracy lasts, so will the superhero. But, if democracy should fail, and it can on occasion look quite likely these days, to be replaced by a system which doesn't believe in some significant measure of free speech, then the superhero will probably disappear too, or at least be symbolically and therefore functionally emasculated. For no authoritarian state, and especially no fascist one, would countenance stories of anonymous private citizens trying to help the law put the world back into kilter, because no autocracy would accept that private citizens should be even thinking of anything so liberal and inclusive.

Superheroes: another name for what we all know we should be doing if only we weren't so bloody selfish, and human. Not jumping off roofs and flying though the air, because that's the language of symbols, silly. But being true to what we believe where these strange democratic societies that we've been born into are concerned.

Not the worst of us, therefore, these superheroes, but the best, and the most ridiculous too.


11. "We'll Fight Together Or Separately, If Need Be."

When the distance between a symbol and its meaning is too close, the literalism of the whole enterprise discourages the reader from caring. It all becomes too obvious. Place "Democracy Girl" before an audience in this week's new comic books and it had better be a brilliant satire, or an unexpected work of satire-free genius, for why would anyone care for a character that was hardly a character at all? Similarly, "Adolescent-Boy" would be a non-starter, but "Spider-Man" leaves enough space between concept and practise for the reader to not feel patronised.

Yet there is one over-literal, and unsuccessful, superhero that I sentimentally feel belongs here, at the close of this piece, and that's because he of all costumed adventurers sums up the pro-democratic business that we've been discussing. So, regardless of the fact that Terry Sloane, Mr Terrific, was and remains a daft and ineffective character, he carries with him so much of the decency and self-sacrifice associated with the superhero that I can't help but be tremendously fond of him. A man once so purposeless and depressed that he seriously considered suicide, Mr Terrific put aside his private interests in order to find meaning in serving the needs of his fellow citizens. (He was rich, so he could afford to, though it's noticeable that money alone certainly didn't buy him happiness.) And on his costume, in unadorned letters which weren't even contained within a symbol of some kind beyond a yellow blob that might have been meant to be a bell, were the two words which for me best summon up what the business of the superhero is. No, not "pop-fascism", of course.

But "Fair Play".


Next time:- "Daddy Deadshot", promised but not delivered due to my losing a graphic novel. So, at the cost of £15, including post and packing, there'll be a look at Deadshot's career over a few TPBs, and after that, perhaps something on Alex Harvey's "Vambo", the greatest Scottish superhero of all time! My sincere thanks to all who've made it down to my sincere thanks here! A splendid day is wished for all of you.

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The Challenge Of The Super-Friends: Why Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch's "The Authority" Is One Of The Sweetest Comic Books Of The Modern Era

1. "Oh! You Pretty Things"

For a comic book characterised, according to Wikipedia, by its "... intense graphic violence ..", and designed to be marked by an "... attention to nasty little details, its appalling bad attitude, and the utter carnage the cast are capable of when working together ... ", according to the original series proposal by Warren Ellis (*1), the Authority can read from the perspective of 2010 like a rather sweet and fundamentally traditional superhero book. In truth, I can't help feeling that in some ways "The Authority" is closer in spirit to the likes of E. Nelson Bridwell's "Super-Friends" than it is Brian Bendis's "Siege", and that Mr Ellis's statements such as how his loathing for the superhero genre "...comes out in me as pure, bloody hatred ... " somewhat obscure the truth. (*2) For all its satire, for all the occasional ferocity in some of the fight scenes, for all its non-traditional lifestyle choices, and for all the undeniable scenes of mass murder and wholesale property damage, this is, yes, a profoundly conservative take following the model of an early-Sixties superhero comic book.

And by "profoundly conservative", I do mean closer in spirit and execution to the form and content of the work of Broome and Fox and very-early-1960's Lee than any of the contemporary and dissenting creators usually yoked to The Authority when comparisons are proffered.

Now, it may be that a week spent studying John Forte's work on the Legion Of Superheroes has in some way altered my perceptions, corrupted me with sexless, peaceful innocence, and left me seeing nothing but the beauty of the prom, the good clean fun of the gridiron, and the moral necessity of placing the morning newspaper in the letter box rather than throwing it on the lawn. But I don't think that's so. Rather, I really do believe that "The Authority" is as much the last true heir of the Silver Age as it is one of the radical daddies of the modern-era's obsession with widescreen brutality.

*1 http://wildstormresource.wetpaint.com/page/The+Authority+Proposal+by+Warren+Ellis
*2 from "Writers On Comics Scriptwriting" by Mark Salisbury, (Titan Books, 1999)


2. "Violence. Violence. It's The Only Thing That Will Make You See Sense"

But such is "The Authority"'s association with violence that the issue has to be dealt with first before the occasionally unrecognised sweetness of the book can be engaged with. And, compared even to the most mainstream of books from the Big Two in 2010, there's little of the famed "hyper-violence" commonly associated with "The Authority" on show when re-reading the book today. Jack Hawksmoor literally knocks off an opponent's head with a very swift right hook at 1:22:2, dismembers an alien by leaping right through it at 8:15:4, and there's some alien tentacle-penetration of innocent Japanese citizens on the streets of Tokyo at 10:6/7, but that's about it where the less-typical extremes of force are concerned. And in a mainstream characterised by gods being torn literally in half and Teen Titans high on heroin attacking drug addicts with dead cats (*3), "The Authority" in truth looks rather middle-of-the-road and restrained from the perspective of today.

Yes, Jenny Sparks does indeed electrocute large number of super-powered assassins, and the Authority do indeed commit appalling atrocities on Sliding Albion. But these murders aren't shown in any prurient fashion, and the justification for the acts of terror is at least as good as any presented by the Western Democracies in defence of their 1 000 bomber raids of World War II. (*4) So, though we're told that Gamorra's superhuman clones are being electrocuted, the panel itself only shows a traditionally comic-book energy energy blast hitting some bad-guys. And the complete annihilation of Italy on an alternative earth is seen firstly from orbit, and then as a large panel mainly occupied by a tidal wave. There's none of the kind of graphic horror that even an EC thriller of the early '50's might have indulged in. Even the death of Kaizen Gamorra occurs off-screen; we do get to see the Carrier ripping through the city towards him, but his final end is left to our imagination. If this is excessive violence, then it's remarkably thin on the ground visually, if not in fact. And if these actions are all so morally unacceptable, then the question needs to be asked "What else could be done?". If it were Mr Ellis's intention to portray The Authority as Fascist brutes operating completely beyond the pale, then he ought to have provided scenarios in which other feasible options to "our" superhumans murdering "their" superhumans, and "their" people, were obvious and feasible. As it stands, unless you're with the folks who see the A-Bomb attacks on Japan and the bomber raids on Germany as war crimes themselves, The Authority seem pretty much to be on the side of the angels. (*5) Brutes, mass-murderers, and vigilantes on a global scale, but strangely appropriate in their responses considering the threats they were facing down.

In fact, if we're being honest about the degree of the so-called violence over the twelve issues that make up the Ennis/Hitch run, a quick re-visit to 7.19.3/4 will put any excessively Whitehousian concerns at rest. For there, as the Engineer slaughters large number of alternative-Earth cavalry, you can note how none of the horses are shown being hurt in any noticeable, let alone gruesome, fashion whatever. In fact, this might as well be, where the shooting of horses are concerned, a mid-Sixties, pre-Jonah Hex comic-book Western, where horses get hit, and horses fall over, but horses are never shown shattering limbs and feeling pain in those moments between bullet-penetration and brain-death. (And, in fact, Mr Hitch even avoids showing the terrible force of a charging horse tumbling over here.) And though the fate of these cavalry horses is hardly kind, the reader is spared their mutilation, murder and disposal. This principle of unexpected restraint tends to hold true for all of the Ennis/Hitch issues, and though it's obviously expected that the reader grasps the "collateral damage" the Authority are wracking up, the overwhelming majority of it goes quite unseen.

Yes, the Authority are an arrogant gang of super-human terrorists, redeemed in some small part by the fact that their enemies are so much worse than they are. Yes, they operate according to their own whim and conscience, and yes, they kill a great deal of people. But we don't see most of it, and of that we do see, well; it isn't so different from that on display in the latter-day X-Men, and it's a great deal less morally worrying than recent runs of "Daredevil" and "Justice League; Cry For Justice". In the best traditions of Bomber Harris, the Authority only strike back when war is declared and the end is, or has been, nigh. It's hardly unproblematic, this habit of wiping out millions in the name of survival, but it's presented in such a way as Jenny Sparks and her men have at least a case for the horrors they've been hauled in the direction of perpetrating.

So, the Authority only attack when innocents are slaughtered in great numbers, their opponents are always possessed of such power that nobody else can resist them, and most of the violence they are compelled under terrible pressure to unleash goes unseen by the reader. This isn't the cess-pit of blood and bowels it's been so often sold as, and the truth is surely that the most obvious moral to be drawn from The Authority is not that superhumans would behave without conscience, but rather that a necessary war of self-defence by superhumans attacked by superhumans would be a very bloody business aindeed. That's not a challenge to the values of the superhero genre, it's just a comment on the degree of realism common to cape'n'costume adventures where the consequences of violence are concerned.

Coming a decade and more after Scott McCloud's "Destroy!", in which two supermen destroy an entire city before the victorious protagonist, knee-deep in rubble, declares that it's good how nobody had been hurt, "The Authority" is hardly a radical statement even where super-heroes are concerned. It's exceptionally well-executed fun, but it's neither innovative or revolutionary, and I can't believe that it was ever intended as such. It's in truth a very traditional statement of defiance against the absurdities of the superhero genre, tweaked just a touch, with a splendid tongue in its splendid cheek, for the late 1990's.

* 3 - I know, I know, everybody's referring to that, and I've done so myself, but I think the terrible truth of Speedy the one-armed cat-hammerer really needs to be kept in the forefront of the mind. Otherwise, we'll all simply assume that it was an absurd joke or even that it never happened.
*4 - Neither point in that sentence defends the Authority's acts; they're not intended to. Here I'm just pointing out that their atrocities are neither thrust in our faces or too different from essential components of our National myths concerning the last Moral War.
*5 - I'm not suggesting that such a stance is incorrect. I'm just saying that that seems to me to be the real moral parallel between the Authority and real-world events.


3. " ... The Sounds Of A Switchblade And A Motorbike .. "

But if the scale of the violence, and the presentation of some small portion of it, can be pushed away for the while, the remainder of The Authority is charmingly conservative, if not conventional, fare. It now reads as if Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch had decided to serve up some fiercely traditional and two-dimensional fare sweetened with a few dollops of large-scale mayhem and artistic dynamism, as if the joke was less on the superhero as such and more on the deeply stuck-in-the-mud mainstream consumer of the genre. Consider the villainous Kaizen Gamorra, a blatant Fu Manchu/Ming The Merciless knock-off for whom the term "two-dimensional" would be vastly overstating the case. "But now ...now, HAHAHA, Stormwatch no longer exists. There is no one on this planet who can place shackles on my anger." he declares as part of a three page soliloquy which, for all its endearing play-it-to-the-gallery exuberance, only succeeds in making the early portrayals of Victor Von Doom seem Shakespearean by comparison. It's thin gruel, this business of villains in The Authority. Having the alien warlord Regis heralding the invasion of our planet by an alternative Earth by declaring that "There's a German word I'm fond of. Lebensraum" does show he grasps a concept which many GCSE History students can use with some precision, but beyond that he's completely without a character which couldn't be summed up with a hearty "gggrrrrr". He's a brute, a rapist, an imperialist, a genocidalist, he probably feeds children their own fingers after sawing them off himself, and without anaesthetic too, but he's nothing more, or less, than a very bad boy indeed. And the final great challenge for the Authority after Gamorra and Regis is, tellingly, God's brain travelling in a pyramid-shaped spacecraft, a concept as potentially exciting as Galactus was back in, oh, 1966, Indeed, it's a concept pretty much the same as Galactus except that Ellis's take on the type doesn't talk, or have a herald that talks, or, sadly, possess any purple shorts with a big "G" on his belt-bubble. Ellis's God says nothing at all, which is certainly a metaphorically interesting concept, but pretty uninvolving in a superhero comic, and succeeds in the unlikely business of presenting an antagonist for The Authority that's even less interesting than Gamorra and Regis. As a statement of how ridiculous the anthropomorphic tendency is in superhero-land, this God's an interesting concept, but as a villain, he's only as scary as any really big rock with lots of violent worms in it can be.

But that's all perfectly acceptable, and actually perfectly charming, when taken at face value. This isn't a comic book that's trying to achieve psychological realism, or any cod-approximation of it, not certainly where the villains are concerned. This is a comic-book comic-book. And if the key super-villains of The Authority are without menace because they're of such familiar types and without any involving character, then so too are their henchmen - and they are all men - similarly unengaging. Oh, they're certainly bad guys, and we know this because they all look the same and they all kill people. Indeed, it's the fact that every single one of the antagonists fighting on the various fields of war look the same - clones, cavalrymen, tentacles - that helps to take the Authority clean out of 1999 back to 1960. These opponents of the true and the just aren't real people with individual natures, they're bioreactored clones, all dressed in black, all set in fiendishness, or they're identical horsemen from a perverse Britain. The biggest threat these identical enemies can pose is in their numbers, and we know, as we'll discuss later, that sheer numbers won't hold back The Authority. As far as threats go, they're no threat at all. They're just off-the-assembly-line copies of generic, thinly-constructed, all-purpose opponents, which, as we'll discuss later on, helps to lower the sense of jeopardy even when the punch-ups get a touch explicit and intense.

Nothing can stop The Authority, and we know that because we're never told that anyone who stands against the Authority is of any importance at all; if these enemies were of consequence and dangerous, they'd exist as more than the broadest and tinniest of stereotypes. And so, these huge confrontations against apparently overwhelming odds are actually rather comforting. Good is good, and bad is hardly there on the page at all. It's as if the Justice League were back fighting old toothless Kanjar Ro, long ago in the days when insect eyes and a little wand qualified as markers of evil.


4. ".. Now Hurry Up, He's Scratching At Your Throat .. "

Given that the antagonists don't threaten, and the heroes can't be beaten, "The Authority" is wonderfully free of jeopardy. All the traditions of modern popcorn entertainment, so nefariously encoded in Robert McKee's "Story", all the expectations of three plot reversals and fates more terrible than the expected terrible fates, are out of the window here. There's never any doubt that the Authority will win. In fact, a rule of thumb is that even any secondary character given a speaking role of just a few words will survive without harm too. Only strangers, marked by no individual characteristics, suffer, or the faceless ranks of the protagonist armies. We never need worry who'll live, because we certainly know who'll never die right from the off.

This lack of jeopardy is so untypical in a post-1968 superhero book that it's at first quite confusing. Where are the torture scenes, the separation, the angst? Why, when Apollo falls from the Carrier far above Earth, isn't there some plot confection that pretends that he not might find his solar-powered abilities rekindled on the way down? (Apollo's so apparently confident, and The Midnighter so in love with him, that there's never any doubt he'll survive. We know Mr Ellis wouldn't do such a bad thing to the Authority's Superman, because nowhere else in his scripts is Mr Ellis that cruel. Whedon is cruel, Claremont and Bendis too, but not Mr Ellis. He's untypically, for a superhero writer of the modern era, disinterested in upsetting his audience in The Authority for the emotional sake of it.) And when Apollo is flying at full pelt towards an invisible force field, impact against which will squash him flat, there's no pretense that he may really be squashed against that immovable object; there's no cross-cutting of panels between worried comrades and nonchalant hero until a last minute, quite unbelievable, save arrives. In fact, Apollo is removed quite undramatically to safely by being magiked into a " .. broken universe ... (where) travelling over a hundred miles an hour gets converted into music", without the reader even seeing him closing in on the city and its forcefield.

Indeed, Mr Ellis must have a fierce aversion to permitting his superheroes to suffer the emasculation typical to most acts 2 and 3 of the typical capes'n'costume narrative. The Authority always have a plan, or at least they have a very solid defence while they hold the line and wait for a very big idea to occur. They never loose control. They're never separated, picked off, turned against each other, or even any more hurt than exhausted. Wherever they are is the safest environment that can be imagined, the members of supervillain armies notwithstanding. And even when Jenny Sparks dies, after the very simple matter of electrifying God's brain, she does so without a great deal of telling foreshadowing or indeed any blood or suffering. Not even death's too dangerous in "The Authority", if you're on the right side, and, look!, isn't that Ms Sparks returned immediately to life as a baby, ready to save the 21st century as she did the 20th?

Aaahhh. Isn't she lovely? No, seriously. Isn't she?


5. " ... Sailors Fighting On The Dancefloor ... "

With the exception of the first year or so of Grant Morrison's re-invention of the Justice League in 1997, I can think of no other comic which was so free of character conflict as "The Authority". Since the first appearance of Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four, a fair dose of at least serious irritation between superhero team-members has been the rule; the Thing swipes at the Torch, Hawkeye cusses Cap, Green Arrow loathes Hawkman, Wolverine hates Cyclops, and so on, and on. But nobody even niggles each other to any great degree in "The Authority". Everyone takes orders without questioning the right of Jenny Sparks to tell them what to do, after The Midnighter has a passing rant against her to Apollo in the very first issue. Yes, everyone works together without questioning their fellows, or being any more than passingly irritated by them. And the only dissenting voices, with the exception of a mild exasperation at the Doctor's habit of tuning out and dropping out too, are those of the old moaning lovers, the Midnighter and Apollo, who mostly whinge and carp at each other because it stops them having to worry about anything else.


In fact, "The Authority" is almost a personality-free zone. These are, give or take the odd swear word and expression of physcial desire, standard-model heroes. They're brave, they fight hard, and they make jokes in the face of the return of an unforgiving God. (See above.) Beyond that, there's very little at all going on to seperate one from the other. We learn, for example, little about each character's past as they relate to matters-at-hand. (The Engineer seems to develop the most, embracing her mechanical nature, but it's a restrained step forward for a superhero genre obsessed with devil-fractured marriages and the like.) There is, of course, a default position where The Authority make references to aspects of the '90's counter-culture which might pass as markers of individual difference, but that's not the same as "character". The Doctor takes drugs, yes, but you couldn't picture him as a three-dimensional character without an awful lot of work. Even compared to fiercely one-note figures such as the Batman, most of The Authority seem thin as characters and therefore intially somewhat unimportant as superheroes. (I doubt too many thousands would ever feel motivated to buy into a Swift monthly, or even an Engineer mini-series.) But most surprising of all, for a group composed of such symbols of the '90's counter-culture as a psychedelic explorer, a cyborg, a fags'n'beer anti-establishment curmudgeon, a George'n'Mildred gay couple, and a super-psycho-geographer, the team don't argue at all over principle or speculation. Have you ever seen any two folks interested in, for example, cutting-edge psychedelics or human-cyborg evolution, sit down for three minutes without some point of difference, affable or otherwise, breaking out? Yet these folks in The Authority are strangely uenthusiastic about their interests and beliefs, as if they agree on everything already, which is a profoundly odd stance for a bunch of anti-authoritarian individualists to take. They're the least radical radicals I've ever seen, the world's most compliant, peaceful, do-as-you're told dissidents in history.

And this is again a return to the Silver Age, pegged between the character uniformity of Gardener Fox's Justice League and Stan Lee's "kooky-quartet" Avengers. The foot-soldiers of the Authority are so uncomplicated and accepting of each other that they never seem in danger of falling out and so they entice the reader into never worrying about their fate. As long as The Authority stick together, the message seems to be "everything will be fine", and for them, it is. (Hawksmoor telling The Midnighter and Apollo to ".. get a room .. " when the couple are hugging each other is the closest we get to banter, let alone conflict. And for banter, it's awfully fond and accepting.) It's exceptionally relaxing, and something of a relief and a retreat from the soap-opera high-notes of just about every other superhero team book in the past decade or more, to be watching the adventures of a cast of characters far more similiar in their construction to Hamilton's Legion Of Super-Heroes than to Claremont's X-Men.


6. "Coo, Coo, I Just Want You"

It may not take much to create a convincing superhero love affair, but simple dishes are notorious for being the most difficult to cook successfully. But Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch presented the love-affair between the Midnighter and Apollo in such a fundamentally touching and straight-forward fashion that I never doubted they were lovers, and that indeed they'd always stay so. In fact, I've been rather surprised to learn, while researching this piece, the "fact" that the two of them were effectively outed in "The Authority" # 8: were they ever "in"? Admittedly, I hadn't read "Stormwatch" while reading the first few years of The Authority, so perhaps I'd missed some degree of obscuration there. But from Chapter One of "The Circle", it appeared to be so straight-forward a business that I never thought twice about it, beyond being relieved that this wasn't going to be a love-affair defined by doubt and trauma. Moving on from the tantrums and indulgences that mark the perpetually-adolescence trysts which even now constitute the quorum of superhero affairs, The Midnighter and Apollo were securely placed in a take on an early-middle age marriage. Their relationship's tensions weren't those of the teenager trying to decide between Betty and Veronica, Gwendolyn or Mary-Jane, of the repressed and dissatisfied half-child trying to have their cake and, yes, eat it too. Our gay Batman and our gay Superman were a couple: they struggle to remember the intensity of their feelings amidst the everyday crisis of the four-colour world, they express the normal claustrophobia of a relationship where home and work are the same place through bickering - "Shut Up. You whine like an old woman." - and they're taken by sudden, awkward declarations of absolute commitment when the worst seems about to happen - "You'll die./"I wouldn't dare." It's all absolutely recognisable and rather deeply affecting.


And in taking a step backwards towards those Silver Age relationships where fidelity and honesty were assumed as givens rather than perceived as impediments to drama, Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch created the most fundamentally decent and admirable romantic relationship in superhero comics. Sue Storm and Reed Richards may seem to be constantly fracturing, splitting and reuniting, Peter Parker may conspire with the Devil to end his marriage, and Superman may - apparently - abandon his wife for a year to, er, walk across America, but The Midnighter and Apollo, being grown-ups, simply bicker and fuss over each other as grown-ups do.

This is a sweet, sweet comic book. It may not be the sweetness that some of our Grand-Parents might recognise and support, but it is sweet. And we could still do with as great deal more of that in the universes of the Big Two. After all, there's a fair bit of sweetness out here in the real world too, alongside all that undeniable tragedy and despair. The world of Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch's "The Authority" is actually a world I can happily wander around in my imagination when I can't sleep, secure that it's not so dark a place that I'll trip a few nightmares for when I do slide into slumber. Its horrors are no more hideous than those of most other superhero titles, only "The Authority" never hides the scale of the losses in the fight against really-really bad people. Still, its pleasures are recognisable ones. I may have to admit that I've no idea how the members of The Justice League and The Avengers sit down together, so many and tortuous are the disputes that have divided them in the past. But The Authority? Well, they're as close to grown-ups as you can get when you've got the spandex brigade on patrol, at least where the basic human social skills of getting on and working together are concerned, despite the overall lack of informing detail for most of the team's members.

And so, by subtracting the emotional hullabaloo that passes for character sophistication these days, the lovers and comrades of The Authority strangely become more believable rather than less.

Simple dishes, you see; the hardest to cook properly.

7. "It's Just A Test, A Game For Us To Play"

My favourite radicals are the ones who're so firmly rooted in a clearly defined vision of the past that they're hardly radical at all; they're shocking because they extrapolate from what's known rather than indulging entirely in "what-ifs" and "if-we-all-think-nicelys". It's endearing to find dreamers and doers who've bothered to do their homework rather than rushing full-pelt in the direction of some ill-defined utopia without the slightest sense of the failings and achievements of all the radicals who've come before. And "The Authority" is so full of the tropes of the Silver Age superhero that it's almost a historical textbook on what we used to read; it only looked radical because it's creators had actually looked backwards before stepping forwards, for the modern superhero comic often seems to have slipped the moorings of its roots so long ago that it's forgotten that it had any in the first place. Yet the characters in The Authority were mostly recognisable spins on the basic stoic superhero type, while there were also familiar-feeling and yet uniquely spectacular superhero and supervillian bases,, there was technology at hand which a child of any age could dream of having access to - "door!" - and, as stated, the evil-doers had all the nostalgic and unthreatening depth of an Egghead or Killer Moth. (There's even the teacher-spirits of previous Doctors in their "Garden Of Ancestral Memory", ready to advise through their experience on the best course to take, an utterly ignored trope today when the likes of Professor X or The Ancient One must either be killed off or emasculated so our heroes can't be kept in for the superhero equivalant of detention.)


And what could be more traditional than how our heroes are constantly needed by the not-great and the un-good of the powers-that-be, who'll always need The Authority because the powers-that-be aren't as strong and capable as they'd like to believe. Isn't that the most fundamental superhero fantasy? To be outside the system and yet have the system's survival reliant upon a few outsiders in their very shiny pants? And in the end, when the Authority leaves the Earth to kill God, Jenny Sparks can even tell all six billion humans to "... bloody well be good ... ", indulging in a hitherto hidden level of the ultimate power fantasy of anyone overwhelmed by homework or inflation, diminishing pensions or a party curfew: screw feeding the world, let's just mange to get it to shut-up! Yes, it is indeed an ambition most probably held by those of us who feel quite outside of whatever power elites can be brought to mind, but then, would anyone object if Superman had asked, more modestly, the entire population of the globe to be kind to each other while the JLA was off fighting the sand-giraffes of Red-Mumble-12, or whatever?

Such fidelity to the traditions of the Silver Age comic book even extend to Mr Ellis's love for throwing comic-book spins on contemporary science into his books, just as John Broome, to name but one writer, used to do with his "Flash Facts". (The broken universe which transmutes speed into music in "The Authority" is no more convincing than the 64th century science that changed The Flash into a puppet, but both snippets contain interesting ideas: Broome was introducing his audience to Arthur C Clarke's dictum concerning advanced science being in effect the same as magic, and Ellis the idea of alternative universes where the fundamental laws are quite distinct to ours.) In a similar fashion to how Stan Lee would add a slither of depth into his scripts through the use of untypically demanding words, for a comic book, such as "omnipotent", a challenge to his readers to just trot a little faster to keep up, a gesture of faith that they weren't as stupid as they were often treated, so too would Mr Ellis throw in mention of a " ... mathematical key suitable for late type-zero civilisations ...", far less an example of tech-speak and far more a cheerful wink that we're all smarter than the surface of the comics we're reading might lead others to believe. It shows a fondness for the audience to occasionally wink at them and acknowledge that they too are clever enough to play around with ideas which most folks who sneer at superheroes wouldn't even recognise as anything other than gobbledygook, and it also shows that the writer is having fun too.

8. "Where Do We Go From Here, Which Is The Way That's Clear"

Authority-Fact: for a man who has claimed so often to hate superheroes, I'd be astonished if Mr Ellis doesn't retain a great deal of fondness for The Authority and its members, even if he never feels the slightest need to go anywhere near the characters again. And it's hard, given how The Authority was so very much like the Silver Age comic books of the genre's second childhood, to believe that Mr Ellis hates superheroes at all. Perhaps he does, and perhaps he hates all the ridiculous things that have been done with them as they've risen to swallow up so much of their fellow comic book genres. But there's just too much affection for the traditions of the form and too tender a devotion to his characters for all that grumbling and carping to obscure the truth that The Authority is a far more affectionate and traditional book than so many folks would have it, even today. For if the Authority is a satire, it's only a slight if worthwhile one, poking fun at the superhero fan's belief that their genre has become more mature and meaningful as time has passed. Yet, if "The Authority" is to be trusted, if Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch have told us the truth, and I think they did, dark and gritty doesn't in itself indicate depth, and sweet and traditional doesn't always mean all-mined-out and childish, and the one approach doesn't need to be disconnected from the other at all.


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