A Man Called Kev #3

[history79]

Comments

[janegray]

No copies of the tape, though?

I mean, I get that blackmail is only truly effective if you can actually prevent the info from going public while the people you are blackmailing are granting your demands. The moment the info goes public they have nothing left to lose anymore, and more copies means more potential leaks.

Even so, I would at the very least make a couple of copies: keep the original on myself at all times, and put the two copies in safes in two hidden remote locations.

[stolisomancer]

Saddam Hussein was well-known for his paranoia. The "potential leaks" aspect would trump everything else, particularly for something that would be embarrassing rather than devastating for the blackmailed parties in question.

[thatnickguy]

I swear, Kev got a longer run than The Authority ever did. How many frigging mini-series did he get? Because from what I remember, the only two significant or memorable Authority runs were Ellis' and Millar.

[stolisomancer]

Millar's went for three or four major arcs. After him, in no particular order, you get a few one-shots, Robbie Morrison, Ed Brubaker, the two issues Grant Morrison got out before he had to abandon ship, the twelve issues Keith Giffen did to finish up for Morrison, and the post-apocalyptic book, which I want to say was an Abnett/Lanning joint. I'm probably forgetting a few things.

The problem with The Authority, to my mind, is that it peaked with Ellis. There are occasional good ideas strewn throughout the rest of its various runs, but nobody really used the basic concept as well as Ellis did. I'd put that down to Millar, who introduced the idea of the characters as superstar celebrities and after-hours rock stars, and which never really fit any of them. Swift in particular comes out of Millar's run looking really awful, and that's the characterization that stuck.

[thatnickguy]

I feel really guilty for admitting I enjoyed PARTS of Millar's run. I still agree with you that the series peaked with Ellis.

It's so strange that the book had so many great creators on it but none of it is really all that memorable. I remember Brubaker and Morrison both having a go, but I don't recall them being very noteworthy.

[stolisomancer]

Apparently there was some pushback against the series by DC in the wake of 9/11, which got a theoretical volume 2 by Brian Azzarello and Glenn Fabry scrapped, and then Robbie Morrison had to come in and basically bat cleanup. It's possible we can blame the loss of the book's identity, for want of a better term, on that; I can see how DC would get shy about publishing a comic that destroyed one major urban center every couple of issues.

Plus, looking at it on Google, there's just that whole general malaise at Wildstorm in the mid-2000s, where pretty much every book they published was circling the drain.

[halloweenjack]

It's the law of diminishing returns. Ellis recognized Bryan Hitch's then-largely-untapped capacity for depicting panoramic action, and delivered twelve solid issues of widescreen kicksplode. It's hard to go anywhere from killing "God"--Steve Gerber identified this problem way back in the seventies with a Howard the Duck story titled "Where Do You Go – What Do You Do – The Night After You Save The Universe"--and Mark Millar responded with a series of increasingly lowball, grindhouse arcs that in retrospect come off as a dress rehearsal for his creator-owned stuff. Brubaker's arc wasn't the worst thing in the world, but all I really remember from it is that he aged Jenny Quantum into a teenager and came up with a new Doctor.