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Casting the Gauntlet: Action Comics and The Authority

Roger Ebert released a set of movie reviews under the title I Hated Hated Hated This Movie! With such a moniker on a piece, one knows, with little uncertainty, how the author must feel about his subject matter.

And, in the case of a recent Superman comic, Action Comics #775, several key figures in the franchise let the reader know, with a great deal of clarity, how they feel about ABC/Wildstorm's The Authority.

The love, incidentally, does not fill the room. Joe Kelly, in this piece, intended without a trace of plausible deniability to demonstrate his view of the ethical premises of The Authority as rotten from root to leaf.

The Originals

Having followed the Authority through the issues surrounding the change from the Ellis / Hitch team to the Millar / Quitely combination, I can't currently identify who constitutes the team after the lineup changes that occurred in turn-of-2001 issues. However, the somewhat more stable team that came before this period included Apollo, a character who seems to have powers somewhere between those of the Ray and Superman; the Midnighter, who originated as some kind of Batman analog in Image comics; Jack Hawksmoor, who came to lead the Authority after the demise of Jenny Sparks (who would reappear shortly as Jenny Quantum in the next story arc); and a few others with a bizarre set of visual treatments and powers that definitely owed to the early-nineties vision of the superhero.

Though inclined by self-congratulation to cast themselves as superpowered "hippies" - whatever that term means thirty years and more after the Summer of Love - one might describe the Authority much better as object examples of what can occur when the Will to Power and great power collide in persons of dubious moral underpinnings.

Devoid of a moral compass, yet having the kind of power in general typical of a group of walking atomic bombs, the Authority cut swaths through opposition (the word "evil" doesn't seem to work here) and leave behind piles of shredded bodies and broken masonry, where anything remains that suggests original shapes.

The Premise

This story begins with Superman encountering a ravaged district of Tripoli, on which rest the mortal remains of a thousand-foot-tall cybernetic gorilla (a strange fusion of the Giant-Man analog destroyed in one issue of the Authority, plus a typically biotechnical post-Image goon, plus, evidently, the Standard Issue 1960s DC Gorilla). This corpse and the ravaged real estate and residents beneath it represent the handiwork of the Elite, a body of bizarre metahumans led by Manchester Black in an ultra-violent jihad against other ultra-violence.

From their first press release - and, in spite of the cultivated aloofness Manchester and his goons try so hard to project, they do care about their media image - the Elite seem to divide the world into irreconcilable camps of those who think that the Elite have what it takes, and those who see them as fundamentally incomplete in that they forgot to dress in the appropriate SS uniforms.

Superman, having grown through the years into a kind of messianic moral avatar, recoils at their deeds, their personalities, and their rhetoric from their first encounter, and becomes less and less amused as he realizes that the Elite intend to pre-empt him public function of Protector of Humanity, and, as much as possible, discredit him in the process.

Where the two factions meet, conflict invariably arises about methods and goals, with Superman arguing for the preservation of life (even among enemies) as a goal and Manchester arguing for a kind of triage. However, if medical triage divides subjects into those you don't treat because they will survive, those you don't treat because they will die anyway, and those you do treat because they will die if you don't, Manchester's vigilante triage works a different way. He divides enemies into those you kill because you have to, those you kill because you want to, and those you don't kill because you haven't gotten around to it yet.

Superman, witnessing their methods, wincing at the corrupting influence Manchester and the Elite have on the broader culture, and regretting the pointlessly high body count all of their operations produce, challenges them to a rumble over this great character divide, in spite of an (evident) lack of support from any of his peers and an (evident) mismatch in levels of power that has not, throughout this tale, worked in his favor.

A Far Cry from Tribute

When comics get self-referent, we generally witness one of two approaches: tribute and parody. Only in very rarified company do we find pieces that attempt to impugn - using defamation via definition - the entire ethos behind another comics concept.

Here, though, a reader would require exceptional impenetrability to miss the polemical aspect of this piece. DC Comics could have intended this story as very little less than a swift kick to the gonads of another comics concept - and, much more startlingly, a piece that ABC/Wildstorm, another imprint distributed by AOL/Time Warner, publishes. And, furthermore, a much-acclaimed piece served as target. DC, therefore, by publishing Action Comics #775 much played the role of a house divided against itself.

Indifference does not inspire such action. This attack owes to passion, not to the simple impulse to strike at the self-importance of other concepts that burst upon the scene a bit too quickly and seem to inspire more enthusiasm than old-timers can explain.

Steering around Straw Men

Straw man attacks attempt to substitute a doctored duplicate for a real target, investing this duplicate - the "straw man" - with less defensible characteristics in order to make the attack-by-fictional proxy more easy to win, even at the cost of sacrificing one's credibility in a rather dishonest bait-and-switch strategy.

This piece does not do this. It leaves its targets unchanged in the ethical aspects that actually matter and only varies unimportant details of nomenclature and dress.

The differences one can perceive in portrayals represent no real shift in character, but instead the normal rigging of odds one sees where writers favor the protagonists (sometimes, but not always, heroes); and, for once, someone with some boundaries wins the day. However, someone looking for the Authority in a police lineup would have a fair chance of picking the Elite instead, and, behind each group, find a similar rap sheet.

The Insufferably Hip Nihilism of the Authority

While the unexamined life might represent something of dubious value, how should we value a life from which all virtues, values, principals, and icons of substance have fled, driven under a blistering cynicism that has moved to the next logical phase - nihilism?

Nihilism - in essence, the logical and emotional notion that nothing matters - becomes increasingly dangerous with the amount of power attached to those who suffer from it. For a normal man, it might express itself in self-destructive behavior. For a defeated Furher hiding out in a bunker in Berlin, it might express itself in the intention to bring down Germany to celebrate his own undoing. In a superhero with powers on a cosmic scale, it might express itself in the desire simply to level a corrupt world, ridding it of evil in a single blow (and, in the process, destroying everything else, but nihilism generally does not permit the recognition of value in people or things, so treating wheat and chaff the same way seems perfectly sensible).

The Authority, through the adventures of the original team in the two dozen or so issues of the book by the same name, seemed much to represent a kind of insufferably hip nihilism. Follow a bloodbath with a convenient alliance with the evil overlord who just attempted to take over the world and murdered thousands in the process, and it all works out, just so long as one makes the proper nods to the (unacknowledged) icons of the Cult of Cool. Therefore, the Authority could offer an alliance with the captor of Jenny Quantum, since he did express the proper (or fashionable) attitude, expressing no more than a desire to protect the world from George W. Bush (one might note that, in the months since this story, this protection seems to have succeeded less than these characters would have liked).

How, in such a context, can we gauge "heroes" and "villains?" Perhaps, if you even ask such a question, you don't really get it - the Authority might tell you as much before they collapsed a building on you - but perhaps the question hits a fundamental truth that Superman recognizes from the earliest pages of this unusual story. Perhaps the Elite have simply abandoned those traits that distinguish them from their enemies and have proclaimed themselves heroes because they have the power, rather than the moral authority, to do so.

Lapels versus Virtues

To the extent that Black Manchester stands in all the right post-modern poses, wears the oh-so-hip black overcoat, and effects the insufferably suave cigarette moves doubtless born from many, many hours practicing in front of a mirror in order to appear unselfconscious, we may observe that, in spite all of his protestations about the phoniness of Superman and his ilk, he lives for a pose and an image. He may impugn Superman for the silliness of following the conventions of a forties-model costumed hero, but this attack dishonestly attempts to nail Superman for posturing rather than for striking an unhip posture.

This reflects one of the disturbing aspects of the Authority. Although their stories seem more like training films for a kind of cosmic abbatoir and their program reflects a kind of self-assured semifascism, they characterize themselves as "hippies." They base this, it would seem, more on superficial things - perhaps a tendency to dabble in sex and intoxicants, to dress a certain way, and a desire to attach themselves to a borrowed hipness through claiming membership in a body that has a considerable image credential that belies the its original diversity. However, the methods of the Authority implicate them not as the kind of folk who eschew the rat race and decide to spend their life selling friendship bracelets at folk art fairs, but instead of the principal figures in conspiracy theories.

And, somehow, they manage to misidentify the "bad guys" on a sociopolitical axis by incredibly superficial traits, like the tendency to wear suits or the tendency to vote for politicians that their own incredibly hip cynical worldviews would never allow them to consider (indeed, the notion of something so bourgeois as voting must send their kind into uncontrolled spasms of laughter).

In essence, they use style as a mask for a polluted substance.

Deeds versus Slogans

In some ways, the culture of the west has allowed a great deal of latitude to those who mouth the appropriate slogans rather than those who practice exemplary principles or lead exemplary lives. Probably we could consider this a consequence of indulging a tendency to self-serving distortion, where wishful thinking inclines us to believe that we can assume a moral high ground without actually doing any work or making sacrifices. We could also consider this a consequence of a pandemic kind of political dogmatism which arbitrarily assigns people a role as "good guys" or "bad guys" based on triviata, then declares as "moral" those folks who repeat the correct political sound bytes at the proper stimuli.

Thus, without irony, Black Manchester could condemn Superman as some kind of dupe, stooge, puppet, or punk of the right-wing military industrial complex (the more qualifiers you string on, the less the term seems to mean) even as he practiced precisely the vices critics of just such a nebulous body accuse them of. Wanton violence, shameless self-promotion, tremendous arrogation to self of a completely unwarranted moral authority, contempt for the weak, a vacuity of compassion for one's fellow man - one sees more of this in Manchester and his body of goons than in even the average war criminal drawn from the establishment military.

However, since Manchester wears the black overcoat, smokes the filterless Camels, strikes the aloof and ironic poses, and recites American atrocities (real and imagined) on cue, we can see how he places himself among the good guys. Image means all here. Take a Lieutenant Calley - the infamous architect of the My Lai massacre - and we easily recognize him as monstrous, based on his deeds; but to assign a similar moral disopprobrium to someone who wears the right clothes, reflects the right tastes, and comes from a hipper country requires more insight, since his ornamentation has yet to fall into the same kind of disrepute as the garments of a soldier who mistakes his uniform for a kind of ethical blank check.

The Revenge of the Post-Ironical Age

The second half of the twentieth century could, if one chose to observe it closely, serve as a textbook about the origins, development, and ultimate dead end represented by cynicism. Cynicism either meets frontiers it dare not cross - such as non-negotiable moral underpinnings or deeply-seated taboos that even a rather vehement version of the product dare not cross - or it continues to engulf the whole of a world-view, spawning descendant tendencies like nihilism.

On the other hand, cynicism can resolve itself much the same way that Dante's hell resolved. One can enter it, move through it, and come out the other side after cynicism becomes truly all-encompassing. Many cynics never reach the final sacred cow that this kind of ill-will disguised as world-weary wisdom generally fears to confront. Yet cynicism, taken to its logical conclusion, stops believing in itself, as cynicism disillusions about cynicism itself.

To some extent, portions of western culture have entered a period that much represents this process of abandonment of snide contempt for the ordinary, elitism disguised as skepticism, and irony as a fashion statement. So we might, with some stretch (and perhaps optimism) characterize the present or near future as the Post-Ironical Age, and see in this story something like Mahomet battering down the ironic idols of the generation that came before (in spite of the relative newness of the Authority which the Elite parody).

In this sense, Superman, although now in his sixty-fourth year of publication (as I count it), nonetheless represents the future as opposed to the past, not suffering from an increasingly trite and cliched mind-set that stinks of despair, but instead availing himself of a forward-looking and optimistic kind of vision that, though aware of the black depths to which free will allows men to plumb, does not devise methods based on the notion that hope has died (or never existed).

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 221. Completed 10-FEB-2001.