The Authority #1

Written by Grant Morrison

Art by Gene Ha

 

This is the fourth volume of the Authority and unlike the other Worldstorm books, appears to be doing a complete reboot along with an original story. What we get is an even odder debut issue than the one Morrison wrote for Wildcats. We awake in the morning, presumably the first day of the reboot, to a man and his wife who obviously have no superpowers. The man works for the government and handles special operations but he doesn’t appear to be a field agent of the James Bond variety.

 

We see him fight with his wife with a horribly melancholy undertone of lost children (or at the very least a heavy dose of ‘empty-nest’ syndrome). He leaves to go to work on his secret operations and we get introduced to two of his coworkers with some well written ‘man banter’ as they discuss the typical crude and pointless shit us men talk about so much including farts, crazy shit on TV, and women.

 

Their mission is to investigate a downed submarine that had a very unusual scene played out as it crashed. The radio controller yelling ‘Mayday!’ over the radio is shot in the head, and then they crash. When we finally do see the downed submarine it has a large hole in it and of the 300 crew members only a few are found, all decapitated as if they died before the crash. Then one of the special ops crews goes missing inside the submarine through what looks like a ‘door’ that the Authority use all the time. To help along this assertion is the penultimate image of what can only be the Carrier (the ship the Authority used that was a sentient being capable of creating portals or ‘doors’).

 

It is a curious approach for a first issue to only hint at the superheroes, and these hints only come from my extensive knowledge of reading every past Authority comic. I almost didn’t get the door reference for instance since you only see about a literal square-inch of panel that has its distinct orange-wavy pattern. For a new reader, it must all be completely baffling and surely can’t recommend itself as a sign of things to come. If every issue was like this then the covers would be highly misleading.

 

Gene Ha’s art is also a bit mysterious here. It is surely beautiful, there can be no doubt about that, but it consists of only extremely tight shots of the actors (only panning out for setting shots with no people in them) and has generally cut off most of the faces. This claustrophobic style creates suspense but is ill-suited to suggest to a new reader that action is surely to come. It is also too dark in some panels, like when we finally see the Carrier. And it has a static nature that I’m interested to see put to the test when we have a real action scene. Ultimately, it may be great once the whole series is collected in a TPB but for a first issue it is dull, so very dull. By next month’s time, I’ll have lost any effect all this build-up will have had on me.

 

The story is very much like Michael Crichton’s Sphere, what with characters investigating an alien ship under the sea and crew members disappearing and all that. I am expecting big things to come of all this suspense and build-up and should find myself irrevocably put off if nothing but more of the same is in store for next issue. Morrison is really testing the credit his name gets with this opening issue. Who knows, Morrison’s name on the Authority just might be all the marketing this book needs.

 

Rating - 5