The Authority: The Nativity - Part 3

[history79]

"I love superheroes like I love crunchy-nut Cheerios, but they all seem to talk with the same voice these days. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could be cranky sometimes? Petty sometimes? Lecherous sometimes? Or just plain decent, forgiving, pleasant, witty? All the things people are every day."

- Mark Millar




8 pages of 24

Comments

[reveen]

How the fuck do you have a "shadow arms race" with people can fly and shoot lightning out of their eyeballs?

Also, I really don't trust Millar enough to think Midnighter's comment about the refugees is intended to be evidence of a character flaw.

[sagrada]

Well, we had one with weapons that burn about as hot as the Sun. The submarines helped, but for a while it was just the missiles and bombs. The people involved on either side knew what was going down, but the public is largely in the dark, and it'd have been a lot easier to hide with small people rather than huge ICBMs. Feeding them? Plenty of food goes to military bases. Controlling them? The Wildstorm universe keeps going back and forth, but generally large powers have a firm hand on their creatures.

No need to dig pits, no need for complex machinery or electronics that might leave a paper trail. And only people who have shown they can keep their heads down and mouths shut are allowed into the know.

EDIT: And testing! Way simpler and quieter in a facility than detonating a nuke off a Pacific island or in a desert.

[sagrada]

Good God, Swift found a unique way to be useful to the team! What is this mad-cappery? How long until she just flies around on her FUCKING wings again? When will Sagrada get over those WINGS ARE YOU FOR REAL?

Also, making a thin caricature of Jacob Kurtzberg, aka Jack Kirby, the arch-foe behind a story about the Authority fighting the Avengers is weirdly a simultaneous mix of flagrant idiocy and profound respect. But it's still Jack Kirby as a supervillain who wants his creations to rule the world because he loves the American status quo, which...that's like a Tolkien reference who hates nature or a Lovecraft riff who thinks black people are human.

[starwolf_oakley]

Jack Kirby as a supervillain who wants his creations to rule the world because he loves the American status quo

Really? The Internet says Jack Kirby thought Stan Lee was too conservative.
I don't know that much about Kirby's personality and what he thought about the American status quo.

[sagrada]

He was very sympathetic to progressive causes throughout his life(especially the hippie counterculture movement in the 60's), and his experience in the second World War turned him pretty sour to the mindsets and state philosophies that had caused it, including America's.

On 11 November 2015 at 18:18, starwolf_oakley - DW Comment < dw_null@dreamwidth.org> wrote:

[cainofdreaming]

They were kinda obsessed with weaponizing superhumans in Wildstorm. This, Craven's Number of the Beast, Kaizen Gamorra, all the Teams, DV8, etc...

[citygod]

so many reason to hate Millar. Making Jack Kirby - a genius who was screwed over by everyone who ever employed him, and was never properly rewarded for his work - a grotesquely evil, grotesquely ugly villain is very close to the top of the list.

[halloweenjack]

As usual, we're seeing here Millar's tendency to never take his ideas any further than the half-baked mark. The concept of a superhuman arms race dates back to Marvelman/Miracleman (especially with the mad genius supervillain who's actually the creator), if not Captain American himself, and the list of riffs that could be done by using Kirby's career as a template are almost limitless. Where are the New Gods expies? The Eternals? Fuck me, why not Captain Victory or Silver Star? But no, he basically does evil Avengers and X-Men and a few others as marginalia and considers it a job well done, or done well enough for his purposes.