The Authority: Under New Management (2000)

The second Authority TPB collects the final story by the Ellis/Hitch team and the first story of their successor team Millar/Quitely. The story by Ellis is everything you expect it to be. In its typical larger than life style it depicts the biggest enemy the Authority has faced yet, an alien entity that once created Earth itself and has returned to wipe out humanity.

While humongous, world-sized aliens aren’t very original in superhero comics, the way Ellis sets the story up and slowly amps up the tension really makes you feel the scope of the enemy. The story also features one of the best departure scenes I’ve seen for a superhero character. They way Jenny Sparks goes out is really fitting.

One can’t imagine Millar having an easy task set before him, after Ellis’s tenure featured such a near perfect run. I’m not a big fan of Millar’s stuff, but his Authority stories are the exception. He brought back the political vibe that was part of Ellis’s Stormwatch run but wasn’t present in Ellis’s Authority work. As much as I liked the Ellis run, Millar’s approach really gave meaning to the mission statement of making a better world.

The typical shock tactics by Millar are also present here, but unlike in his many other comics it didn’t faze me much. Maybe because I really liked his character work on the Authority. Millar really got the characters and wrote them as good as Ellis did.

Boot Hill (1969)

This is the third movie in a trilogy that started with God forgives… I don’t and its sequel Ace High. The third movie suffers from the same problem that already plagued the first two movies. There are fun moments that make you think you’re watching a Western comedy and there are parts that remind you of a Spaghetti Western, and both don’t work well together.

This time around the movie seems to fit more the Spaghetti Western genre (meaning it feels harsher and more violent than the two previous movies). A small settlement of gold miners gets terrorized by the agent of a big company. Their aim: the whole land around town. To do that the agent hired some gangsters who threaten anyone into submission. When that doesn’t work, they resort to killing. Like the first two it’s an average movie that’s okay to watch, but doesn’t really rise above similar movies. The only unique element is the inclusion of a circus, but I found that more than annoying, as it doesn’t seem to really fit the western style.

Transcendent (2005)

Wow, what a beast. The three books of the Destiny’s Children series were really something unique. All of them clocking in at around 500 pages, but due to the density of the content it felt like much more. The only thing that remains to be read is Resplendent, the obligatory and probably excellent collection to complement it.

I read a review about the book that complained about the implausibility of the near future scenario, which made me going WTF after reading it. How can you complain about something like that, when there’s the extremely outre idea of temporal finiteness and connectedness, which allows the Transcendence to change history by traveling as far as possible into the future to come out in the past again. Apart from the fact that the manipulation of the timeline and the whole concept of the Transcendence itself is described as vague as possible and feels more like magic than something that should turn up in SF, it makes you wonder why the Transcendence gets all up in a huffy about redemption but does nothing about the Xeelee.

Maybe you have to grow up with a Christian background to really feel the moral conflict that lies at the center of the whole book, the need for redemption, which I found completely grotesque. For me, the whole thing is a non-issue. So the Transcendence through its human origin had blood on its hands. So what, nobody’s perfect. Move on and create a better future, a finer world. That’s how you redeem the past. Instead, no, the Transcendence died off, which actually made it much worse, as the humans in the future could have needed someone who could talk to the Xeelee on the same level, who could have built a bridge to them.

The reason for the death of the Transcendence made as much sense as Padme dying from a broken heart in Return of the Sith. The plot called for it and nothing else. The constraint was always that humanity had to fall in a final conflict with the Xeelee, something that made sense in the context of the early Xeelee-series, as humanity had been described as waging a senseless war over eons. But since that war and that insanity had long been gone at the time of the Transcendence, the whole chronology of the Xeelee-series didn’t seem to make sense anymore. The only way how you could explain that was by letting the Transcendence die and by letting humanity relapse into their old Xeelee-hating pattern. Pretty stupid explanation, but at least the continuity of the series got preserved.

Now, all this might seem like I didn’t enjoy the book, which I did. But after the brilliant first two books in the series, I expected something more from this one, something that truly managed to transcend the whole chronology of the original series by reshaping to timeline to create a finer world. One were humanity and Xeelee managed to communicate. Instead we get an annoying search for redemption plot. Merely writing a good book didn’t cut it in this case, I wanted something better.

Mezzo DSA (2004)

Mezzo DSA is the sequel to the Mezzo Forte OVA, only with a slightly smaller budget for the animation. It’s one of those series that makes you wonder whether it was completely designed by committee and not by people who really cared about doing it. I liked the original OVA because it had slick animation and well paced action sequences, not because of the story, which barely managed to be of average quality. Strip the high quality animation away and the rest doesn’t look that good: a series that doesn’t have a clear basic concept (we never really learn what kinds of Jobs the DSA Agency is looking for), no idea what kind of stories it wants to tell (so it tries everything, from ghosts to aliens) and characters who are nothing more than walking cliches. For example Mikura Suzuki, the fighter of the team. We never learn how she got her seemingly superhuman skills, especially at her young age.

Overall it feels more like the creators of the show threw in all the cool elements they could think of, without any thought for how well they would fit together. There are also androids that always turn up when the show has been written into a corner and a neat deus ex machina is needed to solve a problem. Apart from that one bit of futuristic technology the rest of the world looks very much like the present. Makes you wonder whether having perfect androids would have a bigger impact on society.

Still, despite the braindead approach to setting and plot, the show manages to pass the time, so I shouldn’t be too critical. There are far worse (meaning boring) things out there.

The Authority: Relentless (1999)

If I wasn’t all to happy about the way Ellis kicked out the old Stormwatch team and established his own, new team, at least he managed to create something brilliant. Sure, the Authority completely lacked the political vibe that was prevalent in Stormwatch, but never before and since has a superhero team looked as cool as the Authority.

In a way it’s still the same old: a supervillain who likes to destroy stuff for the fun of it and human-alien hybrids from an alternate Earth. That wasn’t all too different from other superhero conflicts. But what differentiated the Authority from similar groups was their attitude to getting the job done. They were in it for saving as many lives as possible, not to berate some manic about his morals. When they had a chance, they killed the enemy without hesitation. They were dangerous and effective, everything that Stormwatch in its final days lacked.

Another high point was the art done by Bryan Hitch, which was both consistent from issue to issue and of a high caliber, something that was sorely lacking in Stormwatch. Some of the outside views of the carrier were breathtakingly beautiful. And while the overall concept wasn’t too far removed from other, more conventional superhero teams, the way how the team members behaved and spoke felt far more realistic in comparison.

They made stupid jokes, they had sex, the spoke their mind and were allowed to say incredibly stupid things, which made it easy to emphasize with them, despite their powers and appearances.

Ace High (1968)

A sequel to God forgives… I don’t that’s not much better than the original. The movie starts where the other ended. Loaded up with the gold from the dead bandit San Antonio, Cat (Terence Hill) and Hutch (Bud Spencer) bring it back to the bank and get some money as a reward, but then get robbed by Cacopoulos (Eli Walach). Hard on his tails they all end up in a casino where Cacopoulos lost all the money (on purpose).

While a bit better than the first movie, it’s still not all that good. The pacing is off with many boring moments and the whole is still a mixed bag in terms of styles, Bud Spencer’s already playing his later comedic self while Terence Hill still plays a tight-lipped old Spaghetti Western character. And most of the time you feel like nobody knows where the whole thing is going plotwise.

Stormwatch: Final Orbit (1998)

Final Orbit, aka operation clean slate, sees the final stand of Stormwatch in a crossover with the famous aliens from Alien(s). My biggest problem with this one is that I’ve always thought that the outcome of this confrontation was incredibly ridiculous and completely rigged so that Ellis could have a reason for establishing the Authority. It reminds me of a fight between Lobo and Wolverine, which the latter won. Everyone who knows anything about those two knows how preposterous that is.

As dangerous as the aliens are, they should have been no match against the superhumans of the Wildstorm universe. As the parallel Earth Jack Hawksmoor mentioned in the last collection, a few superhumans working together could easily destroy a whole city in under a hour, the whole world given some more time. The aliens should have been like papier mâché to the superhumans, easily beaten and destroyed. I’ve no problem with letting some characters die, but then do it convincingly. This was a farce.

One good thing, we see Jenny Sparks do good on her promise to Henry Bendix. This was later retconned (it was only a double from a parallel universe, which also was the reason for him going mad), but these things happens all so often that I can’t get worked up about the stupidity of that explanation. For me, the real Henry Bendix died here.

Stormwatch: A Finer World (1998)

A Finer World, the second to last Stormwatch collection of Ellis run on the title has two big stories. One is the introduction of The Midnighter and Apollo, which in hindsight makes this one feel like Ellis had the Authority in his mind all along and was setting it up. The other is a parallel Earth story where a much bigger Stormwatch (bigger in terms of manpower) has to face a Kheran invasion force. Both stories are quite good, and yet both made me feel as if Ellis had run out of things to do with Stormwatch.

God forgives… I don’t! (1967)

The first collaboration of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer is a mediocre Spaghetti Western that can’t decide whether it wants to be as harsh and violent as similar Spaghetti Western or whether it merely wants to make some weak jokes. Despite the traces of comedy the slapstick and the humor of the later Hill/Spencer-collaborations is mostly absent. What comes out is an odd mix that never truly works well in either mode.

Also, the actor of the main villain never convincingly pulls of the brilliant, scheming bandits he’s supposed to be, instead he felt like a typical henchman who somehow got promoted to big villain.

Stormwatch: Change or Die (1997)

This third collection of Ellis’s Stormwatch run is the highpoint of the whole run. In here we have a superman-analogue starting to change the world for real, not by beating up some villains, but by giving humans the mental and physical tools to break free of any kind of authority.

Trying to counter this is an ever more unbalanced Henry Bendix, who also wants to change the world, but not by absolute freedom but by absolute control. Obviously, another reason that Bendix is dead set on killing the High (the superman-analogue) and his followers is that if they succeed, the world doesn’t need someone like Bendix anymore.

The goals of the High are admirable, but he fails because he’s far too idealistic and doesn’t account for human nature: that people can only cope with change in small portions, that however positive the change is, if it’s forced people will reject it and furthermore, some people will always be assholes (which is especially bad if those people work for you). A perfect story that balances on the edge between the demands of the conservative superhero genre and the more open genre of science fiction. Since it’s a superhero comic, the first wins out in the end, which means the High gets a tragic ending.

At least, Jenny Sparks sends Henry Bendix packing.