The Gaming Den

The worst thing about the Marvel Anime Series is still the voice-work <.<

In more news about the Harley Quinn suicide-art submission guidelines, DC offered an "apology".

Please explain The Authority to me in typical TGDian snarky terms, please.

The Justice League, if they had no objection to swearing and/or mass murder.

The Authority is one of the many books that uses "originalized IP" in order to tell Justice League stories that couldn't be published as Justice League stories. However, rather than positing the "what if?" question of "what if the Justice League were all sex perverts?" like The Boys or Top 10, or "What if Superman was really evil?" like Irredeemable, it posits the "what if?" question of "What if the Justice League was extremely callous about killing extremely large numbers of people and justified committing any and all crimes because they were fighting extinction level events?"

-Username17

The Authority is progressive utilitarian propaganda instead of the usual superhero fascist or libertarian propaganda, with a side of slashfic for people who always knew that Batman and Superman wanted to fuck.

So... is it any good? Why or why not?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So... is it any good? Why or why not?

I thought it was contrived tone-deaf shit which completely failed at being progressive utilitarian propaganda, if it ever intended to. Basically, see Elennsar's first and best thread. YMMV, of course.

The first three story arcs are pretty okay. After that, the original author leaves, and no one else has been quite deft enough to manage to do anything but gross-outs and wankery with the concept.

Ellis' run was fine for what it was: the Justice League vs. Fu Manchu, Ming the Merciless, and Cthulhu. Millar fell off the rails when he focused on media-whoredom and a sex-pervert Dr. Who analog. It didn't help that 9/11 and Time Warner's corporate oversight cut bits of his final arc into a nonsensical mess. Brubaker's mini in which the Authority take over running the US after murdering the President had some decent comedic bits.

Overall, the Authority is more miss than hit and is very much a product of the brutal '90s merging with the shiny '00s.

Is it just me or does Superman work better as a foil than as a stand-alone character?

I mean, when I think about all of my favorite Superman stories (Lobo, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Batman, The Elite) he's taking center stage with another character and contrasts them in some way.

I've enjoyed the first few arcs of The Authority, but I'd agree that it got very spotty.

Mostly, I enjoyed the ambition of it all. A set of super-heroes that nominally are progressives and who act like real people with power and not just comic heroes is incredibly refreshing, but the comic often falls into parody where the utilitarianism is just code for "do some brutal shit" loosely justified by good intentions.

The soul of the comic can be summed up in some of the lines from it:

"Why don't superheroes ever go after the real bastards?"
or
"Fuck that. I want a better world."

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Is it just me or does Superman work better as a foil than as a stand-alone character?

I mean, when I think about all of my favorite Superman stories (Lobo, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Batman, The Elite) he's taking center stage with another character and contrasts them in some way.

Grant Morrison's All Star Superman was glorious. Kurt Busiek and Geoff Johns and James Robinson's runs which ended with the "War of the Supermen" arc was great. Jeph Loeb's "For All Seasons" mini from the mid-'90s was a Norman Rockwell pastiche but it was good too.

But if you're holding Joe Kelly's "The Authority" critique as a good story we're probably coming from different perspectives.

So. Thinking back to One More Day and just the whole general issue of folk heroes getting a story consolidation/reboot...

What exactly makes a story development valid for folk heroes? When exactly is it appropriate to cut off the branches and reformulate the characters in the tale?

Like, Batman has been distilled and rebooted so many times that it's not even funny. And with the exception of the 3rd and 4th Schumacher movies and with some interpretation the Superfriends cartoon, people have been by and large okay with the general direction and many of the plot points. And Batman has gone in some very divergent directions.

Yet I'm not exactly sure what makes One More Day so irksome above and beyond the Makes a Deal With The Devil plot point. I know I harp on the 'OMFG deal with the devil blah de blah' aspect a lot, but it just seems so wrong and fanboyish for reasons I can't put my finger on. The best I can come up with is that Peter Parker + Mary Jane 4EVAH! has just been so ongoing that it's as part of his mythos as Batman not having any superpowers or starting his career off in a non-supercriminal Gotham. But even so, I can't think of any particular objections on my end to a Spider-Man reboot where he divorces Mary Jane or she gets killed in a tragic story or they just plain do not get married. Hell, if Peter Parker married, say, a mutant or Black Cat or Johnny Storm or whoever, I think there's a possibility that it could become part of his core mythos.

I think the offensiveness of it is that it was just a big reboot button. Blatantly, in-narrative and everything...but it was rebooting to a status that no one under forty remembered. Spider-Man hasn't been single for decades. Of all the ways they could have handled making him single again, choosing "A Deal with the Literal Devil" is just the weakest, least interesting, arguably most offensive choice they could have gone with. Killing MJ would have been less offensive; at least it doesn't involve a deal with Mephisto.

And the whole benefit of it? Keeping Aunt May alive. Who was established as being old as fuck and ready to die and even Dr. Strange said "Dude, it's just her time." Really, he might have gotten Reed Richards and Tony Stark to turn her into a cyborg or something, but...Mephisto? Really? Spider-Man even had a fucking talk with god, or a crappy stand-in, and still went through with the deal.

I really don't understand why comic authors seem compelled to give in-universe justifications at all for big changes like that. If they wanted to write stories about a younger single Peter Parker, they could've just announced "Hey, we're now writing stories set earlier, when Parker was single". They didn't have to find an in-universe justification for the new young-Parker stories to come "after" the old-Parker stories. Batman Begins didn't feel compelled to give George Clooney a time machine and plastic surgery so they could explain why they were telling a new story about a different Batman.

But then yes, there's the abject stupidity of the particular in-universe explanation they cooked up in One More Day being infinitely stupid.

Lago, this might help you put you finger on what is bothering you about OMD.
They were written by SFDebris.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

John Magnum wrote:I really don't understand why comic authors seem compelled to give in-universe justifications at all for big changes like that.

It's frequently about maintaining continuity of the product and the project, not the canon. You have an established team working on an established project with an established fanbase and those are all fantastic things. But hey, you've written yourself into a corner and there's no where to go from here but down so you go to your editor or whoever feeds you your dictates from high command and tell him the project needs to wrap up and either reboot or move on and he looks at you like you've sprouted tentacles out of all your orifices and started speaking in tongues. And while he doesn't understand your heathen-speak, he has to try and indulge you, so he counters with "can we do the reboot in-series?" and while that sounds like a question it really isn't and then you go and write something immensely unsatisfying and deeply insulting to your fans because it's a blatant and uninteresting fucking reboot button disguised as an honest continuation.

@Leress
Thank you for these links, that was a very educating read.

I really don't understand why comic authors seem compelled to give in-universe justifications at all for big changes like that. If they wanted to write stories about a younger single Peter Parker, they could've just announced "Hey, we're now writing stories set earlier, when Parker was single". They didn't have to find an in-universe justification for the new young-Parker stories to come "after" the old-Parker stories. Batman Begins didn't feel compelled to give George Clooney a time machine and plastic surgery so they could explain why they were telling a new story about a different Batman.

Would such a thing even be possible in the Marvel Universe short of starting a new line and ending the 'main' universe? I mean, you can't really just reset a character in a shared universe back to day zero after consolidating their mythology without either splitting off the universe or resetting everyone else back to day zero. Seriously, try to imagine Year One Batman with all attendant continuity being transplanted straight into, say, Identity Crisis while only changing things that would result in a plot hole.

This is Marvel. They've probably done that at least a dozen times already, and that's not counting time-travel shenanigans. I know they had some Punisher stuff set when Frank was in Vietnam, for example.

Ancient History wrote:I think the offensiveness of it is that it was just a big reboot button. Blatantly, in-narrative and everything...but it was rebooting to a status that no one under forty remembered. Spider-Man hasn't been single for decades. Of all the ways they could have handled making him single again, choosing "A Deal with the Literal Devil" is just the weakest, least interesting, arguably most offensive choice they could have gone with. Killing MJ would have been less offensive; at least it doesn't involve a deal with Mephisto.

And the whole benefit of it? Keeping Aunt May alive. Who was established as being old as fuck and ready to die and even Dr. Strange said "Dude, it's just her time." Really, he might have gotten Reed Richards and Tony Stark to turn her into a cyborg or something, but...Mephisto? Really? Spider-Man even had a fucking talk with god, or a crappy stand-in, and still went through with the deal.

The fact that they explicitly aborted Peter and MJ's daughter (actually had her future self show up in story and tell them that they just killed her, in fact) was an additional finger to the fans.

I mean, Spider Girl is pretty fucking popular and there was fairly decent fan demand for peter to become a Spiderdad in the main continuity, which had been the logical place to take the character for a long fucking time.

The fact that they explicitly aborted Peter and MJ's daughter (actually had her future self show up in story and tell them that they just killed her, in fact) was an additional finger to the fans.

wha? O.o
source? o.O

Stahlseele wrote:

The fact that they explicitly aborted Peter and MJ's daughter (actually had her future self show up in story and tell them that they just killed her, in fact) was an additional finger to the fans.

wha? O.o
source? o.O

This is the closest I could find:

Was MJ Pregnant in OMD?

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Would such a thing even be possible in the Marvel Universe short of starting a new line and ending the 'main' universe? I mean, you can't really just reset a character in a shared universe back to day zero after consolidating their mythology without either splitting off the universe or resetting everyone else back to day zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_X-Men