The Authority Collected Works 1 and 2 from DC Comics: Review

For those of you familiar with super-hero comics may notice that super-heroes will fight for truth and justice, provided it generally doesn't interfere with the real world. In other words, Superman may battle Lex Luthor or Bizarro, but will do nothing to stop a war in the Middle East.

The Authority is a comic book that takes that logical fallacy and totally runs with it. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to get there. Thank God for comic-book collections

In The Authority, Vol. 1, we are introduced to the group itself. They are formed together to fight a menace, and there is plenty of alluding to older supergroups that have existed in this super-hero universe. The leader is named Jenny Sparks and she shows up and assembles the team and fights against this menace. I will have to say this about the series: big, big, big. There are scenes with so much detail and so many elements, it is completely epic in its scale. This is what comic fans are looking for: an epic in every issue, and The Authority has become the authority of that, most definitely.

Their second adventure in Volume 1 has to deal with an alien menace from an alternate Earth, and the story at the beginning of Volume 2 deals with an alien organism about the size of the Earth's moon. They have to take their headquarters, a huge ship into the midst of it.

Like I said earlier: big. The problem is that these adventures, neat as they are, are very run-of-the-mill for super groups. Except for the aforementioned epic scale, there is very little that separates The Authority from the Justice League, X-men, or Fantastic Four.

The turning point comes in the middle of Volume Two, when the group decides to go in a new direction after the death of their leader. They decide to stop being the ones who only deal with supernatural crises and move toward being a world police force. There is a great scene when one of the team members discusses their actions with the president and really tells him off. One of the most memorable lines is: "We're not some comic book super-team who participate in pointless fights with pointless super-criminals every month to preserve the status quo'.

I have no idea if this is what was intended from the very beginning of the book, but the Authority is not your typical super-team. They seem to acknowledge the fact that they don't intend to save the world from disaster, but from itself. This leads to an attack from a huge group of super-villains, with a resolution that I won't reveal but is completely unexpected.

Another way The Authority breaks tradition is that their members seem to have no qualms about breaking the superhero credo of killing. In fact, this might turn off some readers, as one character Jack Hawksmoor has a really bad habit of punching someone until their cranium becomes a salad of entrails.

In fact, most of these characters are really anti-heroes at the core, which would probably really occur if superheroes exist. One of the characters, Midnighter, who is like a gay Batman (this is assuming the real Batman isn't), has this line. "The Day I can't mutilate thirty radioactive teenagers is the day I hang up my coat for good".

Unfortunately, what The Authority sacrifices for the sake of realism, it lacks in characters. Many of these characters are very undeveloped, almost on purpose. None of them have a complete "origin story", so we know very little about them. I suppose this mystery heightens the story, but not by much.