26 Years Ago, Comics’ Most Controversial Writer Became a Superstar with the Superhero Team the DCU Can’t Handle

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The Authority first appeared as a spin-off of Stormwatch by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch. There was a splash of the Justice League to the team, mixed in with a more modern sensibility of “proactive” superheroes. Ellis and Hitch’s 12-issues were amazing but they’d both leave the book in the year 2000, when they were replaced by one of the most controversial writers currently working in comics: Mark Millar. Millar’s run on The Authority made him in to the hottest writer of the ’00s, with his work on the book forming the basis of what made him so popular and what has made him so controversial.

Millar’s Time on The Authority Changed Comics Forever

The Authority brought together Apollo and Midnighter (the gay Superman/Batman pastiche couple), the Doctor (drug-using shaman reality warper), the Engineer (woman with nanotech skin she can mold into anything), Jack Hawksmoor (a man with powers command cities), Swift (Hawkgirl but somehow more violent), and Jenny Sparks, the spirit of the 20th century. They watched the planet in a universe traveling ship they called the Carrier, and would right any wrongs they noticed with extreme prejudice. Jenny ended up dying fighting a massive organism out to destroy the world on January 1st, 2000, which would lead to Millar taking over the book.

Millar slotted into the team right away. Ellis had been pushing the envelope with The Authority, telling a new kind of superhero story and Millar was able to take this idea and run with it. In fact, the writer took that approach much further. Millar was a student of legendary DC Comics scribe Grant Morrison in the late ’90s, and he learned his lessons well. He was able to hit the right kind of vibe with the team, making them irreverent, violent people trying to do the best things possible for the most people. They drank, they smoked, they did drugs, and they had superpowered orgies. At any other time in comics, they would have been the villains.

Millar’s first story, with artist Frank Quitely, was one of the most unique things ever, as the team is targeted by the military’s superpowered industrial complex. An Avengers homage team is thrown at the Authority with bloody results, and the team hunts down a Jack Kirby homage character Jacob Krigstein, who created superhumans for the government. It was everything that fans could have wanted in the year 2000: edgy, irreverently hilarious, and inventive. Millar wrote the book for two more story arcs, facing the team off against an older Doctor, and the government again in a violent superhero epic that ended with the first gay marriage in mainstream comics.

Millar has written some beloved books, and all of them owe a huge debt of gratitude to The Authority. His run on that book was groundbreaking, but longtime readers of his work will notice that he hasn’t changed as a writer at all. Millar characters were always offensive and irreverent and always used more violence than they needed to. His work on The Ultimates, with original Authority co-creator Bryan Hitch, ended up repeating a lot of the same ideas that he had revolutionized on The Authority. There are some good ideas in his work, but most of them are just pushing old ideas into new territory by making them more “mature”. In the year 2000, all of this was groundbreaking, but it would be a trick that Millar repeated so many times that most readers who used to love him have stopped reading his work.

Much Like Millar, the Authority Is a Relic of Another Time

The Authority was one of the biggest books of 1999, thanks to Ellis and Hitch. They took the widescreen action of Morrison’s JLA, combined it with a more modern superhero aesthetic, and made something special. Millar felt like the right person to take over the story, and no one can deny how popular and influential his work on the book was. Since Millar left the Authority, the team’s been a very tough sell, something that DC Studios is realizing.

While it’s not his most popular comic, I feel like it’s safe to say that Millar peaked creatively with The Authority. Everything he did after the series felt like things he’d already done on it — violent, mouthy heroes willing to break the system to do the right thing. It’ll be interesting to see if DC Studios can do what Millar was able to do with the team a quarter-century ago, modernizing them for a new world of superhero fans.

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