Compare And Contrast, In 500 Words Or More THE AUTHORITY is, basically, a very mean JLA, where PLANETARY is a bitter and jaded CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN. Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis are compatriots, and the similarities in thought are striking. THE AUTHORITY in no way imitates Morrison's Justice League; it's a little more willing to rejoice in its pulpiness then the world-shattering importance of JLA. Archvillain Kaizen Gamorra is perfectly over the top, with a diabolical plan, long Fu-Manchu style moustache, and corporate-raider-meets-Oriental-warlord garb. And speaking of Fu Manchu, one of PLANETARY's nicest moments is its round-table homage to the pulp comics of yesteryear-- the debut issue's plot concerns a supercomputer built by a WWII-era pantheon of archetypical characters, with shades of Doc Savage, Buck Rogers, Fu Manchu, Tarzan and others in the mix. The JLA themself also make an "appearance" in the form of a suspiciously familiar band of heroes from a doomed world within the supercomputer.
Both PLANETARY and AUTHORITY are still relentlessly modern, however. Both share a breed of character that Ellis has a lot of fun with-- the spirit of the twentieth century. AUTHORITY's Jenny Sparks is a "young" British woman, born on the first day of the century, with the power to command electricity (arguably THE driving force of these hundred years). She's been alive, barely aging, simply involving herself with whatever seems important-- as first a member of the covert StormWatch Black team, and then de facto leader of the higher Authority. PLANETARY's Elijah Snow is a little different-- in a sense, he has "haunted" the twentieth century through his ghost-like, flitting manner; however, he's spent the last ten years in a crappy desert diner instead of Fighting The Good Fight and Making A Difference. It takes the wonderfully cocky bluster of Jakita Wagner, the Planetary team's powerhouse, to convince him to hook up with the three-person outfit that peers under the rocks for the missing history of the 1900s.Ellis maintains the same kind of intercharacter relationships with his two new teams that he always has with past projects: very odd people being incredibly gruff to each other, while still seeming to be endearing. It's the sheer oddity of those characters that hooks you right off the bat. AUTHORITY's Engineer doesn't have blood, but her body instead contains nine pints of bacteria-sized nanotechnology; that team's Doctor is the most recent in a line of Doctors who have been a part of humanity for over 20,000 years. Each time a Doctor dies, his knowledge is passed on to the next-- eventually amounting to a cumulative mass of experience that crosses millennia. PLANETARY's Drummer talks to machines through a bizarre rhythmic language, and the team's unseen and inactive Fourth Man quietly bankrolls the project-- for all the three active members know, he could be "Bill Gates or Hitler" (to quote Wagner in the issue).
My Eyes! My Eyes! I saw Bryan Hitch's artwork in an issue of UNCANNY X-MEN shortly after the AGE OF APOCALYPSE, and I hated it. Don't ask me why; I just did. But since I opened the covers of STORMWATCH vol. 2 #4 (His first collaboration with Warren), I fell in love. AUTHORITY in the hands of Hitch and inker Paul Neary is slickly gorgeous and unbelievably rendered; stylistically Hitch is the heir to Alan Davis but he's got all the action of a manga star. John Cassaday and PLANETARY are another fantastic matchup; Cassaday jumps from grit to glitter in no time flat, often combining them into the same illustration. And on a title that will surely span a hundred years and about as many genres before Ellis gets tired of it, that's one hell of a flexibility asset. Just take a look at the cover to the PLANETARY PREVIEW (A flip-book with GEN13 #33 and C-23 #6) and you'll see all the bizarre and wonderful things Cassaday can render (If you've had the privilege of seeing that cover, then you'll be happy to know it's being released as a full-size poster later this month). Both AUTHORITY and PLANETARY are colored by Laura Depuy of WildstormFX (She gets cover credit on THE AUTHORITY) with superb and vivid work that brings out all the best in both pencillers' styles.We've seen glimmerings of these two books in Ellis' work before, but this is the first time that he's truly cut loose and started playing with the toys the way he always wanted to. Ellis often complains that superhero writing is a young man's game and that he's getting too old, but there's a hell of a lot more vigor in these stories then there are in superhero fare written by writers years younger than himself. Simply a great turnout from one of the modern era's finest writers, and a few amazingly talented artists. PLANETARY: 8.3 out of 10, AUTHORITY: 8.0 out of 10. Advisory: PG-13. Both books are recommended if you like: JLA, Wildcats, AMERICA'S BEST COMICS, StormWatch, Danger Girl, X-Men, Alpha Flight, The Invisibles.
PLANETARY: Snow-- "It's a strange world." Wagner-- "Let's keep it that way."AUTHORITY: "You know, I find myself about to say 'How weird is that guy?' Then I look at what I'm wearing and where I'm standing..." -The Engineer
E-mail the reviewerLearn more about PLANETARY and THE AUTHORITY, and check out some promo art, at warrenellis.com or wildstorm.com
Back To ReviewsTRANSMET story arcs start out slow. YEAR OF THE BASTARD may have been rip-roaring at its conclusion, but its opening chapter featured Spider waking up, acting pissy, and talking to someone (He beat up Charlie Brown too, but that's beside the point). The first two chapters of THE NEW SCUM are no different: Spider basically walks around town thinking to himself about how annoying everyone is. This is what he normally does anyway; why are we seeing it for two straight issues while his assistants sit back at the apartment talking about sex? Once that question is asked, however, things heat up. Basically, Spider's just been walking the streets because he refuses to think about the election: Either the despicable, heartless Beast gets re-elected, or the man who had Spider's only friend assassinated grabs the office. However, the election once again jumps up and bites him on the ass when The Beast calls Spider's paper and demands an interview. With Spider.
Issue 21's cover is misleading. Spider, to everyone's surprise, in no way has the Beast whipped; in fact, they fight each other to a standstill. Ellis has the guts to portray his protagonist as a man who has leaped to the wrong conclusions: Spider always assumed that the reason the Beast was so terrible was because he doesn't believe in anything. But Spider was wrong, and now he's faced with the horrible realization that since the Smiler doesn't believe in anything and the Beast actually does, the latter's got an edge.Of course, this arc of TRANSMET is not all pouting and angst. It's still incredibly funny. Issue #21, the most serious of the batch, still ends with the line "Spider Jerusalem: Cheap, but not as cheap as your girlfriend" and the admission that Spider planted a substance on the Beast that causes him to hallucinate about sex with baboons (The latest in a string of offenses by Spider against the president , begun in issue #4 with a shot from a bowel-disruptor gun). And God knows Channon's issue-20 description of her vision of "Bedtime with Spider" is hilarious, if... vivid. And there's not even any need to mention Darick Robertson's artwork; after twenty-one monthly issues he's still chugging out beautiful and often disturbingly funny work every time. TRANSMET is one intelligent and hilarious series, and THE NEW SCUM has the potential to be another of the great story arcs. However, Ellis had better pick up the pace; the story's only six issues long and he's already chewed up three. Average for the three issues: 8.5 out of 10. Advisory: R, Suggested For Mature Readers. R.I.Y.L.: Preacher, Invisibles, The Minx, Hitman, Channel Zero, Hunter S. Thompson.
"Let's get in there and cover the story-- if just to confirm that I'm not having some kind of channeled flashback to eating mushrooms with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee while watching the local lawmen work--" Back To Reviews
Interested in learning more about TRANSMETROPOLITAN? warrenellis.com
UNCANNY X-MEN #368
In the aftermath of the Magneto War, the UN has shocked the world by accepting Dr. Alda Huxley's (The most thinly-veiled literary reference in the history of comics) plan to give Magneto a country of his own to govern: Genosha. When Wolverine-- Magneto's #1 enemy-- first heard the news, Professor X had to knock him out psionically to keep him from killing Magnus right there and then. Now Wolvie's home at the X-Mansion, running simulation after simulation on how to stop the Master Of Magnetism's ticker for good-- teammates be damned. Meanwhile, the X-Men mourn the death of Joseph, the through-the-looking-glass "clone" of Magneto who fought alongside them since "Onslaught".
This issue is a study in contradictions. It's the first X-book in a good long time to not insult the reader's intelligence in its plot and script, but the reader gets insulted anyway by the X-Office's willingness to ignore continuity and to, at issue's end, blow away any hope of artistic merit or serious, involved storytelling. The core plot of the issue is compelling, illustrating the first major rift in ideology to surface amongst the X-Men in a good long time, and Joe Casey scripts it to perfection with darkly introspective thoughts and cuttingly real dialogue. Storm and Wolverine, one of the team's most loyal pairings, snap and bite at each other's throats like dogs when Logan makes up his mind to kill Magneto, whether or not the other X-Men try to stop him. And when Professor Xavier goes to confront Dr. Huxley, she instead throws back into his face the sort of question that should have hit home long ago-- just what was Xavier doing alongside the X-Men in the Arctic? Everyone's talking like human beings at their bitterest, for the first time in months. And it looks like things aren't just gonna take the high, rosy road to happy resolution-- Wolverine coldly refuses to attend Joseph's funeral despite all the entreaties by the ones he loves; and at issue's end, he's screaming into the face of Xavier, the man who rescued him from the abyss. But it's that ending that, paradoxically, absolutely kills the book.You see, just as Logan and Xavier's shouting match reaches a turning point, a... how to put this delicately... ridiculous alien pimp appears out of nowhere and shanghaies the team into space, where they are confronted by massive, freakish aliens with no eyes while fish swim through the void around them. At the whim of the X-Office to do a "nifty space story", the most compelling character development to roll down the path since God only knows when is sacrificed at random. And then it adds insult to injury that this scene is ridiculously scripted. Xavier, responding to Storm's comment that something is amiss with her connection to the Earth's weather patterns, responds "...Impossible as it seems-- we're not on Earth anymore!" 1.): When you're floating through space filled with fish and freakish critters, it's a dead giveaway that you're not in Westchester; and 2.) "Impossible as it may seem"? The X-Men randomly teleport into space with more frequency than most people commute to work. A bizarre and uncharted dimension would, at this point, be "Ho-hum. Untold intergalactic wonders again".
There's one more irksome article of disregard for the reader in the sudden reappearance of the Danger Room. We've seen the DR once since its utter disintegration during OPERATION: ZERO TOLERANCE, and then it was a cobbled-together, non-holographic training room similar to the original pre-Shi'ar DR. But now, it has full holographic capabilities again, for no particular reason. To the best of my knowledge, Rooms To Go does not offer a "multivariate artificially-intelligent training center and war room"; did the X-Men just kinda build it from memory, MacGyver-like, out of a baseball card, stick of gum, and a ballpoint pen?Again, a study in contradictions: Arguably the best-written and best-illustrated X-Men story since Kelly and Seagle's early peak, but everything is thrown out the window by one ridiculous twist that looks to become de rigeur under the new "administration". The ranking I assign to this issue only takes into account the poor technical quality of the last two pages, and not the immense insult it delivers to the reader; otherwise, this ranking would be about 6.9 points lower. 7.0 out of 10. R.I.Y.L.: Cable, Avengers, Generation X, X-Force, Gen13, Wildcats.
"So... can you tell what I'm thinking?" -Alda Huxley, in her first words to Professor Xavier Back To ReviewsARIA #1 (Jeanne/FlameWrait): 9.0
ASTRO CITY vol. 2 #15 (Monte Williams/Curse44): 9.4ASTRO CITY vol. 2 #16 (Monte Williams/Curse44): 9.3
BLACK PANTHER #1-5 (Monte Williams/Curse44): 9.3EARTH X #0 (Leo/DJDespair): 9.0
EARTH X #1 (Monte Williams/Curse44): 7.9GAMBIT #1 (Bryan/GAMBIT350): 9.0
HOURMAN #1 (Chris Conroy/Opal City): 7.7HULK #1 (Chris Conroy/Opal City): 6.9
INHUMANS #5 (Monte Williams/Curse44): 10INVISIBLES vol. 3 #12 (Chris Conroy/Opal City): 8.5
PLANETARY #1/THE AUTHORITY #1 (Chris Conroy/Opal City): 8.3/8.0TRANSMETROPOLITAN #19-21 (Chris Conroy/Opal City): 8.5
UNCANNY X-MEN #368 (Chris Conroy/Opal City): 7.0BACK-ISSUE REVIEWS
ARKHAM ASYLUM (Monte Williams/Curse44): 10KABUKI: SKIN DEEP (Jeanne/FlameWrait): 10
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