The Authority #1-4

The Authority #1-4

Originally released in 1999

Written by Warren Ellis

Art by Bryan Hitch

I knew very little about the Authority going into this, mainly being aware that it inspired Marvel's "The Ultimates" (by Mark Millar) to some degree and that it would be getting a movie in DC's rebooted cinematic universe.  As a result, coming into this series felt like I was watching the third season of a TV show without having seen the first two.  There are mentions of Stormwatch, a team that had mostly been killed with the exceptions of Jenny Sparks (a woman described as "the Spirit of the 20th Century" who controls electricity and is the team's leader), Swift (a woman with hawk wings), and Jack Hawksmoor (who the narration refers to as "the God of Cities", who has some sort of link to whatever city he's in), and the remaining team members either have some connection to the deceased Stormwatch characters or are treated as though they've had their own off-screen adventures.

Falling into the former category are the Doctor, a shaman who has a mystical connection to all previous bearers of that title, and the Engineer, who received a dying message from the former Engineer and used nanomachines in her bloodstream to create just about anything.  The latter category consists of Apollo and Midnighter, who are more or less Superman and Batman, respectively, though they bicker like an old married couple.

While the team seems like an Avengers or Justice League pastiche, with a bunch of heroes with very different powers and backgrounds teaming up to save the world from those who wish to conquer or destroy it, it seems like they have a much darker tone than those teams.  At the end of issue 2, Jenny makes a comment on how "there had to be someone left to save the world. And someone left to change it."  Throughout the next two issues, I was fully expecting there would be a dramatic reveal that Jenny had manipulated the villain of the story, Kaizen Gamorra (a Fu Manchu style terrorist) in order to create a justification for the Authority's existence, or that the Authority planned to take over the world in order to make it a better place, like the Squadron Supreme did in Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme mini-series.  This never happened, but it's not an idea that would have crossed my mind for any storyline of the Avengers or the Justice League.

Going into this series completely blind, I found Midnighter to be the most entertaining character of the group.  I believe there's a Nightwing run where he's a major character, so I might look into that at some point.  However, Jenny Sparks is the one that I'm the most curious about, since I still feel like she has some kind of ulterior motive for forming the team, or some greater goal in mind, but I'm not sure what it would be.

While it inspired The Ultimates to some degree, I prefer this over what I've read of the Ultimates.  With the Ultimates, I struggled to get through the first arc because most of the members of the team were awful, both as individuals and with how they treated each other. (and I hadn't even gotten to the extended domestic abuse scene yet)  Here, the worst that I can say about the team is that some of the members (Swift, Jack Hawksmoor) are forgettable, but the Authority are still intriguing characters that I wouldn't mind reading more about.