Sally Wasn't Shot, But No-One Else Survived: Some Thoughts On "Red" By Warren Ellis & Cully Hamner

1.



Everyone dies in "Red" except for Sally, but then, as Sally reminds Paul Moses at 1:10:4, a few hours before he decides not to kill her, she doesn't work at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.



2.



Everyone who works in Langley dies in "Red", because Langley is the High Capital of Hell, the source of absolute, irredeemable evil. In the Revenge Tragedy that is Mr Ellis and Mr Hamner's graphic novel, it's Langley and not Milton's Pandaemonium that sits at the centre of the utterly corrupted and fundamentally corrupting netherworld, and anyone who works there is by the very fact of their presence on-site a creature of the beast, since they wouldn't be there if they weren't already corrupt to their marrow, and that goes for the canteen staff, presumably, as much as the Deputy Director and his spooks. And when the assassin Paul Moses announces to the venal and doomed Director Beesley at the tale's climax that he's already "killed everyone in this building (3:16:1)", it's as much a marker of their irredeemable sins as his.





3.



Nobody but Sally, the stranger to Langley, survives "Red", but the decision of Paul Moses not to kill her hardly marks him out as a noble if tarnished warrior on an unlikely pilgrimage to redemption, as a worrying number of folks seem to believe. Surely we're not so blinded by Mr Ellis's deliberate placement of Moses into the space traditionally occupied by the role of the protagonist that we've mistaken the assassin for the hero? After all, the key fact is not that Moses spares Sally, but that he fully intended to kill her and had to check and control his own utterly self-interested intentions. For as Sally clutches a pink satchel to herself, as if it might protect her from the killer before her, Moses carefully removes a gun and so obviously intends at that moment to murder this woman who has never been anything but kind to him (2:19:1).





That Moses tells himself "No." and turns away from his intended victim isn't a mark of any great degree of kindness, and it's no great badge of a developing measure of decency either. If it were, he'd have evolved some more significant degree of self-awareness by the conclusion of "Red"'. Instead, despite an excess of self-pity which might be mistaken for genuine contrition, he's still, at his own end, after all that's happened, blaming others for his own corruption;



"... all I do when I'm out in the world is kill. It's what my country taught me." (3:21:1)



In truth, rather than having escaped Langley and its myths, rather than having seen through the rhetoric of the powers than be and that have been, Moses is still beholden to the Imperialist fables of America's past even in the seconds just before his own - apparent - death;



"The things this country's men have turned into make me sick (3:16:2)." he says, as if America has somehow become corrupted within his own lifetime, as if there really had once been an American dream which he might have decently served by murdering the many men and woman he has.





4.



If Moses were the hero of this tale, and if Moses had grasped the truth of the situation he's waded through, he'd have understood that there is no ideology, no patriotic myth or national virtue, that excuses an inhumane act committed under the cloak of the Nation's supposed commission and entirely hidden from the public's view and democracy's oversight.



But Moses doesn't understand that. To him, the problem with today's Agency is that Beesley and his political masters are so self-interested that they can't even remember the moral code of the American Dream. And to Moses, the evidence of the fatal collapse of that base level of American decency seems to be founded in Beesely's revocation of Moses's supposed right, earned through decades of vile service, to be left alone.



As if a man might murder for the nation to such a degree that murder itself would become a thing of the past, as if assassination would be retired as a tool when that man decided to hide himself away;





"All I asked for when I retired was to be left alone, to try and find a way to live with myself. I promised my silence and my retirement, and you promised me peace. (2:11:1)" Moses tells Deputy Director Kane, as if his own victims hadn't wanted to be similarly "left alone", as if those he murdered hadn't been promised peace by the American Government and its constant proclamations that the Home Of The Free would never engage in covert and despicable activities.



Moses wants the very hiding space that he denied his victims. He's not the mythic Cincinnatus, happy to be home on the farm having saved the state, pleased to have laid down his executive powers once the day's been saved. Moses is a brute traumatised by the brutalities of his own actions, and though we might pity anyone who's undergoing a guilty conscience and PTSD, as Moses is shown suffering at 1:6:4, it's not as if he's taken any steps we're told of to make the world any better for his presence following his leave from the Agency. He's not turned on his masters, or revealed their secrets, or offered himself up for judgement.



He's hid away in great luxury, and bemoans the fact that "children" now know much of what he and comrades did, as if the barbarism and the stupidities that he and his cronies practised deserved the patriotic respect of anonymity. (2:17:4)





5.



What kind of world would Moses reinstate if he could? What would this man's America be? One where "men" are "the way we used to recognize men (3:14:2)", where assassins can "stand up to knowledge of themselves" and still murder their victims as Moses and his fellows did? One where killer spooks could be "just ... left alone (3:18:3 & 2:11:1)" upon retirement? An America where, for all of of Moses's belief that he and his fellows "took (their) decisions as men, with full knowledge of what they entailed (2:17:2)", the consequences of their actions should be spared them?



Would that world be any different from the one in which Moses had been "a very quiet, loyal monster ... (2:10:6)"?





For Moses says not a thing in "Red" that indicates that the world he's murdered his way across would be any better for his existence if he survives, and, in truth, his beliefs promise that, sooner or later, somebody else will suffer at his hand. He's psychologically locked into a fantasy of patriotism, nostalgia and denial, his psyche protected by techniques of neutralisation which constantly shift the blame onto others, onto new men and fate and duty and the changing nation, and he never once says;



"I am a beast. I chose to kill. I did nothing to challenge the secret state I'd served so bloody-handedly even when I left it. I was happy to take its money and live in seclusion and luxury in return for my service. My CIA was as corrupt as yours is, if not worse. I don't deserve to live."





Instead, Moses's final passing is preceded by two key statements. First, he announces rather piously that Beesley's wife and children are "quite safe" (3:17:1), as if somehow Moses is a better man than he might be expected to be for not having killed a few more innocent souls. (He's very keen to inform Sally that "I would never touch children, you understand.(2:15:3)", the age-old criminal's plea that they too have morals, as if not killing children is a matter to be proud of rather than a shameful business to have ever considered as an option in the first place.) And, secondly, he bemoans the loss of the better America he at least in part believes that he served in good faith;



"My country is gone." (3:21:1)



But there never was a country worth serving that would make such demands upon its citizens as Paul Moses's "America" did.





6.



Paul Moses wasn't just only following orders. He believed so much in the cause that those orders weren't evils forced upon him. They were virtuous acts of self-sacrifice, and when he recalls them with regret, it's as if he and his own pain is the issue at stake, rather than the fact of the murder of his victims and all the incalculable suffering which that caused;



"I live with everything I did. After a while .... it was important that I suffered too ... (2:16:1)"



Even his remorse is a self-indulgence.





7.



It's of course no accident that "Red" begins with a sunrise over Langley that turns the sky the colour of blood. It's not simply that this foreshadows the murders that will soon occur, or that it signifies all the terror that's originated with Langley's walls. It's also showing that Langley exists under a different sky to us, in a terrible world that co-exists with ours, but which needn't be visited by anyone who knows of the difference between there, with its red skies, and everywhere else.





But the simple fact of its existence is a terrible temptation. Even Sally wishes that she'd "had a job at the Agency (1:10:4)" , just as Moses the assassin once had, though of course she's no idea of what his occupation was. "You saw the world, I see a plotted plant I can't keep alive.(1:10:4)" she says, not realising that a mundane desk-job is no marker of a wasted life when compared to the soul-staining sins of commission that a thrilling career at Langley would have inspired.





8.



When Moses shoots Kane in Langley, he describes him to the despicable Beesely as "a man. The way we used to recognise men, I mean. Resourceful. Quick-thinking, Prepared to gamble his life if he believes it'll get the right result.(3:14:2)"



But Kane finally reveals himself to be as callous and manipulative as Beesley is, as the man who set all this slaughter into motion as part of an immoral curiosity to "just .. see what would happen. (3:20:1)" And though Moses kills Kane for this, he never seems to grasp that there never was a holy America in which men like Kane, or even men unlike him, were good and honourable servants of the state even as they ruined lives both within and without America's borders. Kane was, yes, indeed a man who was "prepared to gamble his life", but that meant he was prepared to gamble the life of Moses too.



Yet Moses goes to his death believing his country has been betrayed by men unworthy of it, rather than understanding that his very concept of what a "man" is inevitably leads to the bloodbaths detailed, and implied, in "Red".



And because of that, Moses never grasps that he had no country as such worth serving in the fashion of killers in the first place, for surely the America he murdered so many for wasn't America?



It was a spook's America, perhaps, but it wasn't America.



Or, at least, it was only one America amongst so many others.





9.



Warren Ellis once described James Bond as being an expression of what Alan Ginsberg had labelled "bleak male energy". Agent 007, according to Mr Ellis, is;



"... England's blunt instrument of international assault - the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it's bloody well told."



It's a quote that returned to me when belatedly reading "Red", because it's impossible not to see Paul Moses, the book's central character, as anything other than in part a retired James Bond, albeit a Bond that's been in the service of the President of the Union rather than the Queen of the Commonwealth. After all, Bond is a ghostly presence in so much of the work of Mr Ellis that it's no surprise to find something of him in "Red" too.





And though Ellis has declared that "... if someone asked me to write a James Bond film, you wouldn't see my arse for dust", his great fondness for 007 has never blinded him to the character's true nature, to the fact of the stone-cold conscienceless killer behind the film-star facade. Certainly, that part of Moses which seems to be something of a retired Bond in "Red" reflects Ellis's belief that;



"It's made stridently obvious that being on the OO detail of the Secret Service fucks you up .. At the conclusion of You Only Live Twice. the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma, and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesic Bond as gentle, open, devoted and almost sweet".





It's something we see in the face of Paul Moses too, as Mr Hamner most effectively and touchingly catches in his Chaykinesque fashion at 2:14:5 and 2:19:1-4, but that doesn't make Moses any more a hero than Bond. The fact that Paul Moses feels a measure of general regret, and that he might have been a better man in kinder circumstances, doesn't mean that's he's a force for good now, no matter how despicable Director Beesley and Deputy Director Kane are. Instead, Moses and all his fellow spooks and intelligence bosses and political apparatchiks are possessed and powered by an excess of that very "bleak male energy", and they're all monsters, and their world long ago passed over the event horizon of immorality, and not a single one of them can ever escape back.



Or: it's not whether these men are old-school warriors of the Star Spangled Banner or from a more pragmatically self-interested breed that tells us who the hero is here.



They're all the bad guys, and though Moses was undoubtedly "fucked up" by his service to the Agency, the myths of one version of "America" that drove his service from beginning to end undoubtedly existed in his heart and mind long before he entered the profession of killing.



It wasn't the CIA that fucked up Moses. The CIA just fucked him up some more.



*1:- all quotes in the above from http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=421





10.



Paul Moses doesn't, of course, see any promised land, let alone enter it. The only promised land he'd be able to conceive of would be one protected by General "Will Bill" Donovan and his truly masculine and decent warrior angels.



Whatever the promised land is that the death of Paul Moses precedes, "Red" tell us nothing of it.



But then, in all probability, the name "Moses" carries as little fixed and absolute meaning as that of "America" in "Red", neither word sacred in itself by the simple fact of its own existence, both so easily vulnerable to abuse, both symbols of fine sentiments and beguiling illusions corrupted by the business of human beings and their tale-telling.





11.



I wonder if there would be any more blood-red skies to be found over that part of Virginia if Mr Ellis and Mr Hamner's Langley had been raised to the ground and its foundations dug out to the last mote of concrete dust and buried far and deep away in the Atlantic?



Well, of course there would be, both in America, and in every other land with a myth of itself that declares how much more precious "we" are than "they" could ever be.





12.



That Moses doesn't kill Sally means a great deal, but it doesn't show his first step towards a moral redemption. Instead, it just shows how how random and capricious fairness and decency is in any world where these manly, just warriors slaughter their way through the affairs of history in the name of a flag. Moses doesn't spare Sally because he's learnt he's got no right to. If he'd have been learning that simple moral truth, he couldn't have massacred everyone at Langley later in the name of his own safety and his own outrage, as if every single person he slaughtered was irredeemably evil and deserving of their fate.



Moses spared Sally not because he understood that people should not be killed. Instead, he thought of of his shame of the many "women" he'd killed before, as if killing women is worse than killing men, and of his lonesome fondness for Sally, and decided that he couldn't bear that sorrow on his over-burdened conscience.



But if he'd have thought she would inform on him, or if he were being pursued more closely, or if, perhaps, he was just that little bit more cranky on that day?





No. Sally was permitted to live because of sentiment and guilt and a misplaced if benevolently-minded sexism. And if we have to rely on our noble government killers sparing us because of that unlikely confluence of chance and prejudice and weariness, then we're all in terrible trouble.



For his restraint isn't the first or the last flowering of decency. It's simply another act by a brutal, morally exhausted man playing God, and it's a mark of the brilliance of the deep structure of "Red" that the reader is carried so far along with the momentum of what appears to be a classical "man-against-the-state" thriller before coming face-to-face with the fact that there are no heroes and very, very little decency on show here at all.



Except for on the part of Sally, of course, who wasn't shot, and so survived.





I really did enjoy "Red", and though I know everyone else apart from me has long since read it, I recommend it heartily. For anyone who might perhaps be interested, there's a piece on Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch's "The Authority" in the June 2010 archives. And I'll be back in a day or two, with perhaps some more moments of unexpected horror in superhero tales, or a piece on the strange choices made in the JMS revamp of Thor beyond the problem we've already discussed, or, er, something else. I do hope you're having the most splendid of days, and that perhaps we might bump into each other over this-way at some time in the future.





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The Challenge Of The Super-Friends: Why Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch's "The Authority" Is One Of The Sweetest Comic Books Of The Modern Era

1. "Oh! You Pretty Things"

For a comic book characterised, according to Wikipedia, by its "... intense graphic violence ..", and designed to be marked by an "... attention to nasty little details, its appalling bad attitude, and the utter carnage the cast are capable of when working together ... ", according to the original series proposal by Warren Ellis (*1), the Authority can read from the perspective of 2010 like a rather sweet and fundamentally traditional superhero book. In truth, I can't help feeling that in some ways "The Authority" is closer in spirit to the likes of E. Nelson Bridwell's "Super-Friends" than it is Brian Bendis's "Siege", and that Mr Ellis's statements such as how his loathing for the superhero genre "...comes out in me as pure, bloody hatred ... " somewhat obscure the truth. (*2) For all its satire, for all the occasional ferocity in some of the fight scenes, for all its non-traditional lifestyle choices, and for all the undeniable scenes of mass murder and wholesale property damage, this is, yes, a profoundly conservative take following the model of an early-Sixties superhero comic book.

And by "profoundly conservative", I do mean closer in spirit and execution to the form and content of the work of Broome and Fox and very-early-1960's Lee than any of the contemporary and dissenting creators usually yoked to The Authority when comparisons are proffered.

Now, it may be that a week spent studying John Forte's work on the Legion Of Superheroes has in some way altered my perceptions, corrupted me with sexless, peaceful innocence, and left me seeing nothing but the beauty of the prom, the good clean fun of the gridiron, and the moral necessity of placing the morning newspaper in the letter box rather than throwing it on the lawn. But I don't think that's so. Rather, I really do believe that "The Authority" is as much the last true heir of the Silver Age as it is one of the radical daddies of the modern-era's obsession with widescreen brutality.

*1 http://wildstormresource.wetpaint.com/page/The+Authority+Proposal+by+Warren+Ellis
*2 from "Writers On Comics Scriptwriting" by Mark Salisbury, (Titan Books, 1999)


2. "Violence. Violence. It's The Only Thing That Will Make You See Sense"

But such is "The Authority"'s association with violence that the issue has to be dealt with first before the occasionally unrecognised sweetness of the book can be engaged with. And, compared even to the most mainstream of books from the Big Two in 2010, there's little of the famed "hyper-violence" commonly associated with "The Authority" on show when re-reading the book today. Jack Hawksmoor literally knocks off an opponent's head with a very swift right hook at 1:22:2, dismembers an alien by leaping right through it at 8:15:4, and there's some alien tentacle-penetration of innocent Japanese citizens on the streets of Tokyo at 10:6/7, but that's about it where the less-typical extremes of force are concerned. And in a mainstream characterised by gods being torn literally in half and Teen Titans high on heroin attacking drug addicts with dead cats (*3), "The Authority" in truth looks rather middle-of-the-road and restrained from the perspective of today.

Yes, Jenny Sparks does indeed electrocute large number of super-powered assassins, and the Authority do indeed commit appalling atrocities on Sliding Albion. But these murders aren't shown in any prurient fashion, and the justification for the acts of terror is at least as good as any presented by the Western Democracies in defence of their 1 000 bomber raids of World War II. (*4) So, though we're told that Gamorra's superhuman clones are being electrocuted, the panel itself only shows a traditionally comic-book energy energy blast hitting some bad-guys. And the complete annihilation of Italy on an alternative earth is seen firstly from orbit, and then as a large panel mainly occupied by a tidal wave. There's none of the kind of graphic horror that even an EC thriller of the early '50's might have indulged in. Even the death of Kaizen Gamorra occurs off-screen; we do get to see the Carrier ripping through the city towards him, but his final end is left to our imagination. If this is excessive violence, then it's remarkably thin on the ground visually, if not in fact. And if these actions are all so morally unacceptable, then the question needs to be asked "What else could be done?". If it were Mr Ellis's intention to portray The Authority as Fascist brutes operating completely beyond the pale, then he ought to have provided scenarios in which other feasible options to "our" superhumans murdering "their" superhumans, and "their" people, were obvious and feasible. As it stands, unless you're with the folks who see the A-Bomb attacks on Japan and the bomber raids on Germany as war crimes themselves, The Authority seem pretty much to be on the side of the angels. (*5) Brutes, mass-murderers, and vigilantes on a global scale, but strangely appropriate in their responses considering the threats they were facing down.

In fact, if we're being honest about the degree of the so-called violence over the twelve issues that make up the Ennis/Hitch run, a quick re-visit to 7.19.3/4 will put any excessively Whitehousian concerns at rest. For there, as the Engineer slaughters large number of alternative-Earth cavalry, you can note how none of the horses are shown being hurt in any noticeable, let alone gruesome, fashion whatever. In fact, this might as well be, where the shooting of horses are concerned, a mid-Sixties, pre-Jonah Hex comic-book Western, where horses get hit, and horses fall over, but horses are never shown shattering limbs and feeling pain in those moments between bullet-penetration and brain-death. (And, in fact, Mr Hitch even avoids showing the terrible force of a charging horse tumbling over here.) And though the fate of these cavalry horses is hardly kind, the reader is spared their mutilation, murder and disposal. This principle of unexpected restraint tends to hold true for all of the Ennis/Hitch issues, and though it's obviously expected that the reader grasps the "collateral damage" the Authority are wracking up, the overwhelming majority of it goes quite unseen.

Yes, the Authority are an arrogant gang of super-human terrorists, redeemed in some small part by the fact that their enemies are so much worse than they are. Yes, they operate according to their own whim and conscience, and yes, they kill a great deal of people. But we don't see most of it, and of that we do see, well; it isn't so different from that on display in the latter-day X-Men, and it's a great deal less morally worrying than recent runs of "Daredevil" and "Justice League; Cry For Justice". In the best traditions of Bomber Harris, the Authority only strike back when war is declared and the end is, or has been, nigh. It's hardly unproblematic, this habit of wiping out millions in the name of survival, but it's presented in such a way as Jenny Sparks and her men have at least a case for the horrors they've been hauled in the direction of perpetrating.

So, the Authority only attack when innocents are slaughtered in great numbers, their opponents are always possessed of such power that nobody else can resist them, and most of the violence they are compelled under terrible pressure to unleash goes unseen by the reader. This isn't the cess-pit of blood and bowels it's been so often sold as, and the truth is surely that the most obvious moral to be drawn from The Authority is not that superhumans would behave without conscience, but rather that a necessary war of self-defence by superhumans attacked by superhumans would be a very bloody business aindeed. That's not a challenge to the values of the superhero genre, it's just a comment on the degree of realism common to cape'n'costume adventures where the consequences of violence are concerned.

Coming a decade and more after Scott McCloud's "Destroy!", in which two supermen destroy an entire city before the victorious protagonist, knee-deep in rubble, declares that it's good how nobody had been hurt, "The Authority" is hardly a radical statement even where super-heroes are concerned. It's exceptionally well-executed fun, but it's neither innovative or revolutionary, and I can't believe that it was ever intended as such. It's in truth a very traditional statement of defiance against the absurdities of the superhero genre, tweaked just a touch, with a splendid tongue in its splendid cheek, for the late 1990's.

* 3 - I know, I know, everybody's referring to that, and I've done so myself, but I think the terrible truth of Speedy the one-armed cat-hammerer really needs to be kept in the forefront of the mind. Otherwise, we'll all simply assume that it was an absurd joke or even that it never happened.
*4 - Neither point in that sentence defends the Authority's acts; they're not intended to. Here I'm just pointing out that their atrocities are neither thrust in our faces or too different from essential components of our National myths concerning the last Moral War.
*5 - I'm not suggesting that such a stance is incorrect. I'm just saying that that seems to me to be the real moral parallel between the Authority and real-world events.


3. " ... The Sounds Of A Switchblade And A Motorbike .. "

But if the scale of the violence, and the presentation of some small portion of it, can be pushed away for the while, the remainder of The Authority is charmingly conservative, if not conventional, fare. It now reads as if Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch had decided to serve up some fiercely traditional and two-dimensional fare sweetened with a few dollops of large-scale mayhem and artistic dynamism, as if the joke was less on the superhero as such and more on the deeply stuck-in-the-mud mainstream consumer of the genre. Consider the villainous Kaizen Gamorra, a blatant Fu Manchu/Ming The Merciless knock-off for whom the term "two-dimensional" would be vastly overstating the case. "But now ...now, HAHAHA, Stormwatch no longer exists. There is no one on this planet who can place shackles on my anger." he declares as part of a three page soliloquy which, for all its endearing play-it-to-the-gallery exuberance, only succeeds in making the early portrayals of Victor Von Doom seem Shakespearean by comparison. It's thin gruel, this business of villains in The Authority. Having the alien warlord Regis heralding the invasion of our planet by an alternative Earth by declaring that "There's a German word I'm fond of. Lebensraum" does show he grasps a concept which many GCSE History students can use with some precision, but beyond that he's completely without a character which couldn't be summed up with a hearty "gggrrrrr". He's a brute, a rapist, an imperialist, a genocidalist, he probably feeds children their own fingers after sawing them off himself, and without anaesthetic too, but he's nothing more, or less, than a very bad boy indeed. And the final great challenge for the Authority after Gamorra and Regis is, tellingly, God's brain travelling in a pyramid-shaped spacecraft, a concept as potentially exciting as Galactus was back in, oh, 1966, Indeed, it's a concept pretty much the same as Galactus except that Ellis's take on the type doesn't talk, or have a herald that talks, or, sadly, possess any purple shorts with a big "G" on his belt-bubble. Ellis's God says nothing at all, which is certainly a metaphorically interesting concept, but pretty uninvolving in a superhero comic, and succeeds in the unlikely business of presenting an antagonist for The Authority that's even less interesting than Gamorra and Regis. As a statement of how ridiculous the anthropomorphic tendency is in superhero-land, this God's an interesting concept, but as a villain, he's only as scary as any really big rock with lots of violent worms in it can be.

But that's all perfectly acceptable, and actually perfectly charming, when taken at face value. This isn't a comic book that's trying to achieve psychological realism, or any cod-approximation of it, not certainly where the villains are concerned. This is a comic-book comic-book. And if the key super-villains of The Authority are without menace because they're of such familiar types and without any involving character, then so too are their henchmen - and they are all men - similarly unengaging. Oh, they're certainly bad guys, and we know this because they all look the same and they all kill people. Indeed, it's the fact that every single one of the antagonists fighting on the various fields of war look the same - clones, cavalrymen, tentacles - that helps to take the Authority clean out of 1999 back to 1960. These opponents of the true and the just aren't real people with individual natures, they're bioreactored clones, all dressed in black, all set in fiendishness, or they're identical horsemen from a perverse Britain. The biggest threat these identical enemies can pose is in their numbers, and we know, as we'll discuss later, that sheer numbers won't hold back The Authority. As far as threats go, they're no threat at all. They're just off-the-assembly-line copies of generic, thinly-constructed, all-purpose opponents, which, as we'll discuss later on, helps to lower the sense of jeopardy even when the punch-ups get a touch explicit and intense.

Nothing can stop The Authority, and we know that because we're never told that anyone who stands against the Authority is of any importance at all; if these enemies were of consequence and dangerous, they'd exist as more than the broadest and tinniest of stereotypes. And so, these huge confrontations against apparently overwhelming odds are actually rather comforting. Good is good, and bad is hardly there on the page at all. It's as if the Justice League were back fighting old toothless Kanjar Ro, long ago in the days when insect eyes and a little wand qualified as markers of evil.


4. ".. Now Hurry Up, He's Scratching At Your Throat .. "

Given that the antagonists don't threaten, and the heroes can't be beaten, "The Authority" is wonderfully free of jeopardy. All the traditions of modern popcorn entertainment, so nefariously encoded in Robert McKee's "Story", all the expectations of three plot reversals and fates more terrible than the expected terrible fates, are out of the window here. There's never any doubt that the Authority will win. In fact, a rule of thumb is that even any secondary character given a speaking role of just a few words will survive without harm too. Only strangers, marked by no individual characteristics, suffer, or the faceless ranks of the protagonist armies. We never need worry who'll live, because we certainly know who'll never die right from the off.

This lack of jeopardy is so untypical in a post-1968 superhero book that it's at first quite confusing. Where are the torture scenes, the separation, the angst? Why, when Apollo falls from the Carrier far above Earth, isn't there some plot confection that pretends that he not might find his solar-powered abilities rekindled on the way down? (Apollo's so apparently confident, and The Midnighter so in love with him, that there's never any doubt he'll survive. We know Mr Ellis wouldn't do such a bad thing to the Authority's Superman, because nowhere else in his scripts is Mr Ellis that cruel. Whedon is cruel, Claremont and Bendis too, but not Mr Ellis. He's untypically, for a superhero writer of the modern era, disinterested in upsetting his audience in The Authority for the emotional sake of it.) And when Apollo is flying at full pelt towards an invisible force field, impact against which will squash him flat, there's no pretense that he may really be squashed against that immovable object; there's no cross-cutting of panels between worried comrades and nonchalant hero until a last minute, quite unbelievable, save arrives. In fact, Apollo is removed quite undramatically to safely by being magiked into a " .. broken universe ... (where) travelling over a hundred miles an hour gets converted into music", without the reader even seeing him closing in on the city and its forcefield.

Indeed, Mr Ellis must have a fierce aversion to permitting his superheroes to suffer the emasculation typical to most acts 2 and 3 of the typical capes'n'costume narrative. The Authority always have a plan, or at least they have a very solid defence while they hold the line and wait for a very big idea to occur. They never loose control. They're never separated, picked off, turned against each other, or even any more hurt than exhausted. Wherever they are is the safest environment that can be imagined, the members of supervillain armies notwithstanding. And even when Jenny Sparks dies, after the very simple matter of electrifying God's brain, she does so without a great deal of telling foreshadowing or indeed any blood or suffering. Not even death's too dangerous in "The Authority", if you're on the right side, and, look!, isn't that Ms Sparks returned immediately to life as a baby, ready to save the 21st century as she did the 20th?

Aaahhh. Isn't she lovely? No, seriously. Isn't she?


5. " ... Sailors Fighting On The Dancefloor ... "

With the exception of the first year or so of Grant Morrison's re-invention of the Justice League in 1997, I can think of no other comic which was so free of character conflict as "The Authority". Since the first appearance of Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four, a fair dose of at least serious irritation between superhero team-members has been the rule; the Thing swipes at the Torch, Hawkeye cusses Cap, Green Arrow loathes Hawkman, Wolverine hates Cyclops, and so on, and on. But nobody even niggles each other to any great degree in "The Authority". Everyone takes orders without questioning the right of Jenny Sparks to tell them what to do, after The Midnighter has a passing rant against her to Apollo in the very first issue. Yes, everyone works together without questioning their fellows, or being any more than passingly irritated by them. And the only dissenting voices, with the exception of a mild exasperation at the Doctor's habit of tuning out and dropping out too, are those of the old moaning lovers, the Midnighter and Apollo, who mostly whinge and carp at each other because it stops them having to worry about anything else.


In fact, "The Authority" is almost a personality-free zone. These are, give or take the odd swear word and expression of physcial desire, standard-model heroes. They're brave, they fight hard, and they make jokes in the face of the return of an unforgiving God. (See above.) Beyond that, there's very little at all going on to seperate one from the other. We learn, for example, little about each character's past as they relate to matters-at-hand. (The Engineer seems to develop the most, embracing her mechanical nature, but it's a restrained step forward for a superhero genre obsessed with devil-fractured marriages and the like.) There is, of course, a default position where The Authority make references to aspects of the '90's counter-culture which might pass as markers of individual difference, but that's not the same as "character". The Doctor takes drugs, yes, but you couldn't picture him as a three-dimensional character without an awful lot of work. Even compared to fiercely one-note figures such as the Batman, most of The Authority seem thin as characters and therefore intially somewhat unimportant as superheroes. (I doubt too many thousands would ever feel motivated to buy into a Swift monthly, or even an Engineer mini-series.) But most surprising of all, for a group composed of such symbols of the '90's counter-culture as a psychedelic explorer, a cyborg, a fags'n'beer anti-establishment curmudgeon, a George'n'Mildred gay couple, and a super-psycho-geographer, the team don't argue at all over principle or speculation. Have you ever seen any two folks interested in, for example, cutting-edge psychedelics or human-cyborg evolution, sit down for three minutes without some point of difference, affable or otherwise, breaking out? Yet these folks in The Authority are strangely uenthusiastic about their interests and beliefs, as if they agree on everything already, which is a profoundly odd stance for a bunch of anti-authoritarian individualists to take. They're the least radical radicals I've ever seen, the world's most compliant, peaceful, do-as-you're told dissidents in history.

And this is again a return to the Silver Age, pegged between the character uniformity of Gardener Fox's Justice League and Stan Lee's "kooky-quartet" Avengers. The foot-soldiers of the Authority are so uncomplicated and accepting of each other that they never seem in danger of falling out and so they entice the reader into never worrying about their fate. As long as The Authority stick together, the message seems to be "everything will be fine", and for them, it is. (Hawksmoor telling The Midnighter and Apollo to ".. get a room .. " when the couple are hugging each other is the closest we get to banter, let alone conflict. And for banter, it's awfully fond and accepting.) It's exceptionally relaxing, and something of a relief and a retreat from the soap-opera high-notes of just about every other superhero team book in the past decade or more, to be watching the adventures of a cast of characters far more similiar in their construction to Hamilton's Legion Of Super-Heroes than to Claremont's X-Men.


6. "Coo, Coo, I Just Want You"

It may not take much to create a convincing superhero love affair, but simple dishes are notorious for being the most difficult to cook successfully. But Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch presented the love-affair between the Midnighter and Apollo in such a fundamentally touching and straight-forward fashion that I never doubted they were lovers, and that indeed they'd always stay so. In fact, I've been rather surprised to learn, while researching this piece, the "fact" that the two of them were effectively outed in "The Authority" # 8: were they ever "in"? Admittedly, I hadn't read "Stormwatch" while reading the first few years of The Authority, so perhaps I'd missed some degree of obscuration there. But from Chapter One of "The Circle", it appeared to be so straight-forward a business that I never thought twice about it, beyond being relieved that this wasn't going to be a love-affair defined by doubt and trauma. Moving on from the tantrums and indulgences that mark the perpetually-adolescence trysts which even now constitute the quorum of superhero affairs, The Midnighter and Apollo were securely placed in a take on an early-middle age marriage. Their relationship's tensions weren't those of the teenager trying to decide between Betty and Veronica, Gwendolyn or Mary-Jane, of the repressed and dissatisfied half-child trying to have their cake and, yes, eat it too. Our gay Batman and our gay Superman were a couple: they struggle to remember the intensity of their feelings amidst the everyday crisis of the four-colour world, they express the normal claustrophobia of a relationship where home and work are the same place through bickering - "Shut Up. You whine like an old woman." - and they're taken by sudden, awkward declarations of absolute commitment when the worst seems about to happen - "You'll die./"I wouldn't dare." It's all absolutely recognisable and rather deeply affecting.


And in taking a step backwards towards those Silver Age relationships where fidelity and honesty were assumed as givens rather than perceived as impediments to drama, Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch created the most fundamentally decent and admirable romantic relationship in superhero comics. Sue Storm and Reed Richards may seem to be constantly fracturing, splitting and reuniting, Peter Parker may conspire with the Devil to end his marriage, and Superman may - apparently - abandon his wife for a year to, er, walk across America, but The Midnighter and Apollo, being grown-ups, simply bicker and fuss over each other as grown-ups do.

This is a sweet, sweet comic book. It may not be the sweetness that some of our Grand-Parents might recognise and support, but it is sweet. And we could still do with as great deal more of that in the universes of the Big Two. After all, there's a fair bit of sweetness out here in the real world too, alongside all that undeniable tragedy and despair. The world of Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch's "The Authority" is actually a world I can happily wander around in my imagination when I can't sleep, secure that it's not so dark a place that I'll trip a few nightmares for when I do slide into slumber. Its horrors are no more hideous than those of most other superhero titles, only "The Authority" never hides the scale of the losses in the fight against really-really bad people. Still, its pleasures are recognisable ones. I may have to admit that I've no idea how the members of The Justice League and The Avengers sit down together, so many and tortuous are the disputes that have divided them in the past. But The Authority? Well, they're as close to grown-ups as you can get when you've got the spandex brigade on patrol, at least where the basic human social skills of getting on and working together are concerned, despite the overall lack of informing detail for most of the team's members.

And so, by subtracting the emotional hullabaloo that passes for character sophistication these days, the lovers and comrades of The Authority strangely become more believable rather than less.

Simple dishes, you see; the hardest to cook properly.

7. "It's Just A Test, A Game For Us To Play"

My favourite radicals are the ones who're so firmly rooted in a clearly defined vision of the past that they're hardly radical at all; they're shocking because they extrapolate from what's known rather than indulging entirely in "what-ifs" and "if-we-all-think-nicelys". It's endearing to find dreamers and doers who've bothered to do their homework rather than rushing full-pelt in the direction of some ill-defined utopia without the slightest sense of the failings and achievements of all the radicals who've come before. And "The Authority" is so full of the tropes of the Silver Age superhero that it's almost a historical textbook on what we used to read; it only looked radical because it's creators had actually looked backwards before stepping forwards, for the modern superhero comic often seems to have slipped the moorings of its roots so long ago that it's forgotten that it had any in the first place. Yet the characters in The Authority were mostly recognisable spins on the basic stoic superhero type, while there were also familiar-feeling and yet uniquely spectacular superhero and supervillian bases,, there was technology at hand which a child of any age could dream of having access to - "door!" - and, as stated, the evil-doers had all the nostalgic and unthreatening depth of an Egghead or Killer Moth. (There's even the teacher-spirits of previous Doctors in their "Garden Of Ancestral Memory", ready to advise through their experience on the best course to take, an utterly ignored trope today when the likes of Professor X or The Ancient One must either be killed off or emasculated so our heroes can't be kept in for the superhero equivalant of detention.)


And what could be more traditional than how our heroes are constantly needed by the not-great and the un-good of the powers-that-be, who'll always need The Authority because the powers-that-be aren't as strong and capable as they'd like to believe. Isn't that the most fundamental superhero fantasy? To be outside the system and yet have the system's survival reliant upon a few outsiders in their very shiny pants? And in the end, when the Authority leaves the Earth to kill God, Jenny Sparks can even tell all six billion humans to "... bloody well be good ... ", indulging in a hitherto hidden level of the ultimate power fantasy of anyone overwhelmed by homework or inflation, diminishing pensions or a party curfew: screw feeding the world, let's just mange to get it to shut-up! Yes, it is indeed an ambition most probably held by those of us who feel quite outside of whatever power elites can be brought to mind, but then, would anyone object if Superman had asked, more modestly, the entire population of the globe to be kind to each other while the JLA was off fighting the sand-giraffes of Red-Mumble-12, or whatever?

Such fidelity to the traditions of the Silver Age comic book even extend to Mr Ellis's love for throwing comic-book spins on contemporary science into his books, just as John Broome, to name but one writer, used to do with his "Flash Facts". (The broken universe which transmutes speed into music in "The Authority" is no more convincing than the 64th century science that changed The Flash into a puppet, but both snippets contain interesting ideas: Broome was introducing his audience to Arthur C Clarke's dictum concerning advanced science being in effect the same as magic, and Ellis the idea of alternative universes where the fundamental laws are quite distinct to ours.) In a similar fashion to how Stan Lee would add a slither of depth into his scripts through the use of untypically demanding words, for a comic book, such as "omnipotent", a challenge to his readers to just trot a little faster to keep up, a gesture of faith that they weren't as stupid as they were often treated, so too would Mr Ellis throw in mention of a " ... mathematical key suitable for late type-zero civilisations ...", far less an example of tech-speak and far more a cheerful wink that we're all smarter than the surface of the comics we're reading might lead others to believe. It shows a fondness for the audience to occasionally wink at them and acknowledge that they too are clever enough to play around with ideas which most folks who sneer at superheroes wouldn't even recognise as anything other than gobbledygook, and it also shows that the writer is having fun too.

8. "Where Do We Go From Here, Which Is The Way That's Clear"

Authority-Fact: for a man who has claimed so often to hate superheroes, I'd be astonished if Mr Ellis doesn't retain a great deal of fondness for The Authority and its members, even if he never feels the slightest need to go anywhere near the characters again. And it's hard, given how The Authority was so very much like the Silver Age comic books of the genre's second childhood, to believe that Mr Ellis hates superheroes at all. Perhaps he does, and perhaps he hates all the ridiculous things that have been done with them as they've risen to swallow up so much of their fellow comic book genres. But there's just too much affection for the traditions of the form and too tender a devotion to his characters for all that grumbling and carping to obscure the truth that The Authority is a far more affectionate and traditional book than so many folks would have it, even today. For if the Authority is a satire, it's only a slight if worthwhile one, poking fun at the superhero fan's belief that their genre has become more mature and meaningful as time has passed. Yet, if "The Authority" is to be trusted, if Mr Ellis and Mr Hitch have told us the truth, and I think they did, dark and gritty doesn't in itself indicate depth, and sweet and traditional doesn't always mean all-mined-out and childish, and the one approach doesn't need to be disconnected from the other at all.


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He Even Took His Socks Off! Why We Long To Be The Hero Revealed, And Yet Not The Hero.

1. I Love You More When You're Undressed

There are moments when I wish to partially undress in front of strangers.

No. Please. Wait a minute!

It isn't quite like that.

Let me explain.

2 The Hero Revealed, Not The Hero.

My wife is convinced that I want to be a super-hero. She's sure that if only I was a little fitter, my ligaments less pingable, my short stubby legs less like two chipolata sausages bent awkwardly in half to approximate knees, that I would have the Lycra and the thigh-high boots dragged on at the drop of a car-alarm.

But I don't think that I want to be a super-hero. At least, I don't think that I do. I've given the matter some considerable thought across a significant portion of my 47 years on Earth, and I think that what I actually want to be is be a super-hero at that moment of the action when the hero's existence is revealed.

I want to be in that moment when my chubby little, not-suitable-for-guitar-playing, fingers rip apart the front of my Premierman extra-large shirt to reveal my identity-defining insignia beneath. (I don't actually know what insignia that would be, actually, but I have no doubt I'll be compelled to give the matter some serious thought now. If anybody might care to design one, I'll wear it in my heart forever.) I want to see fear mixed with significant, almost adulatory, respect on the faces of the people I'm showing my top under-garments to. And then I want whoever it is that's been shown my vest and the symbol scrawled on it to just go away. I'm not too concerned how they do it. Running away in fear and terror swearing never to return would be acceptable, as long as they're not being too loud in their distress, because that always attracts attention. Backing off trying to look undaunted while leaving the neighbourhood with surly expressions would be tolerable: I know some folks have a surfeit of pride. And to tell the truth, I'd even be happy with a nod of the head, a swift non-demonstrative apology, a shake of the hands and a promise on the evil-doers part never to darken my tiny little hometown ever again.


I don't care who they are. Super-villains. Robert Mugabe. Anti-social drunk footballers in early middle age thinking the concrete balls outside the Hawthorn Hotel should be hauled into their deer-killing family tanks and taken home as a trophy of diminishingly-potent masculinity. That bloke at the end of our road who covers his flower beds with tautly-affixed black plastic bags and leaves his garden like that all year round. (I mean, why? Why?) It doesn't matter who they are, all I care about is that they go away.

But actually striping off the rest of the clothes and trading punches with the ne'er-do-wells before me? It's not on, really. The simple logistics are too challenging. I am a man who regularly stumbles and trips his way across the bedroom floor like a one-legged ex-ballet dancer hopping in his sleep simply by trying to take off his socks at night, and who never remembers to make something other than his socks the last thing to be removed. I have actually several times managed to twist my ankle while standing still. This is true. So public undressing while preparing to engage in superhuman - or even standard-issue ordinary human - combat is a bad idea.

But far more importantly, hitting people has consequences. And I suspect that most people who like super-heroes have a profound dislike of consequences, of responsibility beyond the bills and the housework, of the real and threatening world beyond their doorstep.

I mean, if you hit someone, if you really hit someone, it never ends. It has consequences. And comics tell us this. How many times has Batman to capture the Joker again before we all learn that partial disrobery and violence isn't the solution?*

* Though neither is the chosen solution of the testosterone-positive minority of "I've-missed-the-point" fans who feel that Batman ought to just execute his arch-enemy. What is wrong with these people? Have they never heard of the Law Of Character Perpetuation? Kill off one smiling white faced smiling psychopath and pretty soon they'll be another one just like him, but with even less history and questionable charm.

3. Not Thinking About My Superhero Career, Baby

The aching bones, the swollen muscles, the twisted ankles, the wrenched backs, the burnt retinas, the post-traumatic stress disorder, the guilt, the shame, the endless and irreducible responsibility, the anxiety, the constant worry about whether we look good in unforgiving Lycra.

As I have tried to explain to my long-suffering wife, racing the onset of the inevitable "Oh not comics again" cognitive protective process that causes her eyes to glaze over and her left hand to reach out for a gardening magazine, being a superhero is an unbelievably hard job. I don't think we'd want that job.

I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to be hunted down through the gutters of Apokolips, no matter how glorious the cause that brought me there. I wouldn't want to be standing in front of an exasperated Hulk, wondering why until that point I'd never noticed my mutant ability to unconsciously retract my testicles to a quivering point directly behind my lil'man-nipples.

I always imagine that iconic Steve Ditko/Stan Lee sequence where an exhausted Spider-Man, tormented by the certain death of his Aunt May if he allows himself to be trapped, hauls an unbelievable weight of machinery and debris off of himself. It's possibly the most involving, most moving example of action in Spider-Man's almost 50 years of comic-book existence, but as a middle-aged man who struggles to haul himself in and out of a very low-rent gym every day, because I pretty much have no choice in the matter, all I can think of when I review those pages is: "That is going to hurt in the morning. No amount of deep heat and shallow exhausted sleep is going to untweek those biceps. Peter Parker, my young lad, you have got to start taking better care of yourself."

For, yes, I think we'd all like to be the Spider-Man who has just thrown tons of Ditko-debris away and freed himself from certain death, who stands in the moment of triumph, the devil behind him, sweet victory ahead. But the Spider-Man who had to exceed super-hero design specifications to free himself? The Spider-Man who has to try to stand up afterwards and, worse yet, walk forwards while his muscles spasm and his nerves start to send the signal to begin numbing up the surface of his skin?

No. You don't want to be that Spider-Man, not really. At least, I don't think you do. I certainly don't.

4. His Back, His Poor Scarred Back

There's a touching scene in an old Batman story by Alan Brennert and Joe Staton where Catwoman sees the Bruce Wayne's naked back for the first time and flinches because it's a patchwork quilt of scar tissue, impact wounds, and all the other visible manifestations of 40 years of impromptu battlefield surgery. (You'll find it in "The Brave And The Bold" # 197, from 1983) It's a scene which has been "homaged" time and time again over the years since, most notably in an Alex Ross black and white poster page, though Ross chose to graphically show what Brennert and Staton only referred to. It's a mark of Brennert's almost entirely unrecognised brilliance as a comic-book writer that he nailed something which everyone who read it must have immediately recognised as "right" and "true" for the character, and yet pretty much no-one would have thought of it before. For being a superhero, particularly for "normal" folks, as we so often laughably think of The Batman, could only come at the most terrible and traumatic physical cost.

We may be used to the idea now that most sane folks wouldn't want to be the Batman outside of a temporary immersion into a computer game. But I'm not sure that all of us who continue to dabble in this strange little hybrid genre of ours have quite cottoned onto the idea that it isn't simply Batman whose super-hero life would be an unending trauma. It would be all of them. All of them. Physically progressively broken down, mentally scared and with a high probability of early-onset neurological disorders, they would all be, sooner rather than later, hobbling around, confused about who they are and wondering where they were going.

Because that's what happens when people fight all the time, when they're in a consistent state of heightened anxiety and awareness. Alan Brennert opened a right can of worms with that one panel all those years ago. He pointed at something which the genre still hasn't - no matter how many painkillers Daredevil so injudiciously guzzles down - come to terms with, and probably never will. Perhaps it simply can't.

Human beings, and pretty much all of the super-human beings too, weren't made to be in the trenches of a never-ending apocalyptic war. Not whether its a war on super-crime, super-gods, or whatever other overwhelmingly evil opponent you might think of.

But of course I'm telling you something you already know. Doc Samson is the single most over-worked mental health professional on Marvel Earth. Night Nurse? Never gets to sleep, has to drink from a drip while she sets an endless line of broken superhero femurs. Dr Midnight? Is really called that because he never gets out of superhero surgery until the witching hour at least.

And the closer and closer superhero comics get to the event horizon of their spurious if-often-affecting obsession with "realism", the more this central fact of the realities of human anatomy and psychology will loom as the elephant in the room:

These folks should all be dead. 100 times over. Dead, dead, dead. Deader than Deadman.

And he's really dead. As far as dead comic book characters go.

Which isn't very dead, really. But there you go.


5. If We Don't Believe That That's Violence, What's All That Violence For?

The truth of the matter is, of course, that one of the least important ingredients of a superhero comics is the violence. We know this. If it were the violence that sells, then it'd be a simple matter to conquer the Diamond Top 10. Now, this would seem counter-intuitive to many folks who'd never willingly turn the glossy cover of a costume-and-cape book over unless mockery was their mission in mind, but it's so. And I think we can establish this with the simple expedient of looking at the work and extreme popularity of Brian Bendis, who, with the odd visceral dismemberment of Olympic deities aside, actually tends not to push his artists in the direction of mindless, page-after-page violence. Sometime is indeed going on here, Mr and Mrs Jones, but you really don't know what it means. Because there's a secret that superhero fans have keep quietly to themselves, and even from themselves, for decades now. A counter-intuitive truth that anybody contemptuous of the underpants-over-their-tights brigade would never consider.

Whisper it. Superhero comics aren't really about superheroes, or superheroes and supervillians fighting each other, although the colours of the spangly uniforms and the Kirby-krackle spitting off their powers are fascinating and exciting in their own way. Because if Superman belly-pokes the Toyman with his super-strong Kryptonian finger, we superhero fans aren't really that interested in who's going win. We know who's going to win. The children of the 1940s might have been concerned that Captain America or The Red Bee might loose their life in battle. But readers aren't worried now. We're older, more media-savvy and we've been reading these comics for so long now that we can reel off a whole series of case-series where capes have died and returned to life before the hearse was even filled up with petrol and checked for oil.

So what do we want, if we don't want endless scenes of mindless violence?

I mean, what's the point of all that muscle if it isn't driving someones nose into someones brain? (It could be the brain of the person who owned the nose. It could be somebody else's brain. The nose could have been removed from its' owner body. The nose might not have been. But the question remains the same.)


6. Civil War: Civil Disobedience In The Name Of Irresponsibility

When Marvel Comics ran their elephantine cross-over event "Civil War", it was billed as a battle between those who supported the comic book US Government's demand for the super-powered to register their identity with them, and those who refused to do so in the name of individual freedom. And of course most readers were appalled at the idea that the likes of Spider-Man and Squirrel Girl would have to give up their secret identities and possibly go to work for the man.

But I don't believe the popular response had anything to do with a libertarian versus state power conflict. It can't have. Anyone with half a brain in their heads, or at least one without a nose inserted into it, could see that any government would be utterly irresponsible if it allowed masked super-powered vigilantes to roam their streets. Governments protect the rule of law, not Daredevil's right to pop out on a whim and whack anyone he suspects of being really rather bad.

No. The fan's objection to Super-Hero Registration in Civil War was rooted in something far more prosaic. For most fan's like to imagine popping out, bashing a few anti-social louts smoking outside the late-hours supermarket, and then dashing back for a cup of tea and Newsnight. The idea that they might have to clear their lout-bashing with someone, or explain their actions to a professional superhero manager, or put in some mandated community hours patrolling the town's all-day summer music festival while cider-drinking punk rockers shout obscenities at their colourfully-attired backs; that's what the objection was about.

Because there's as many reasons for the popularity of superheroes as there are people reading superhero comics. But certainly one of them is the straight-forward appeal of irresponsibility. We don't want so much to fight crimes or right wrongs as fight some crimes very occasionally when we can be bothered and when it doesn't cause too much fuss and bother.

7. Except For The Real Nutters Of Course

Of course, there are a small number of comic fans who would take whatever super-powers they could get and embark upon a killing spree the likes of which only the Great Dictators of the Twentieth century could match. These are the posters who type in really big capitals GIVE SUPERMAN HIS MASCULINITY BACK, by which they mean "Have him kill lots of people". And if I ever seem a little contemptuous of all those, like myself, whose superheroic dreams only go as far as clipping a few surly teenagers round the ear as they ask for 20p for some ciggies outside the newsagents of a Tuesday night - and without saying 'please' I might add - then don't let me obscure the fact that a healthy society is better served by idle would-be superheroes than potential mass murderers dreaming of proving their manhood by flash-frying all and sundry with their stupid-vision powers.

8. A Return To The Point About Exhibitionism

And that's where my idle daydreams of flashing my fearsome chest-insignia at threatening criminals come into play. Because the insignia of super-heroes have a simple purpose, beyond the cash-raking practises of modern marketing. The insignia is the equivalent of a really big, mean dog's growl. It wins the fight before it's started by letting everyone know exactly what's going to happen before it needs to happen at all. In a world where would-be urban gangsters push strangers into the road to avoid their attack dogs, where roads are a stage to allow scowling louts to wander in front of cars while sneering that "What you gonna do about it?" look that can strip a bonnet of paint and a man's face of a long-cultivated beard, in a world where neighbours come to blows about grass that's too high and borders that are too broad; that colourful symbol of "I'm gonna whoop you sucker" would be worth it's weight in gold.


Until of course that lover of wild flowers and high looping grass rips open her shirt too and reveals her own badge of super-poweredness, because then we'd have to fight. And if we wanted to be fighting, if we really wanted to be fighting, we probably wouldn't have been designing our chest-symbols in the first place. Or dreaming of the deterrent effect of selective super-hero undressing. We'd just be out there punching people.

And I suspect that for alot of us, the slight desire to actively fight the good fight is actually the desire to not have to fight the good fight at all. We don't want to change the world so much as be left alone by it.

Which is quite rightly a sin by the lights of political activism. But not so sinful once the day has already been filled with nappies, the school run, the plumbing, the bills, the cats, the bats, the aspirins to ward off heart attacks, the stumbling across the carpet naked except for two socks and a pair of glasses.

Listen to me, you. Gggggrrrrrrrr.

Good doggie. Doggie go home. Me doggie go home. Work on trouser-and-sock removal 'stead of fighting.

9. Ah. More Socks, And Superhero Socks too


Warren Ellis is a crafty devil. For someone who's public persona would have him spending all his time endorsing deviant sex, psychedelic indulgence and non-conformist anti-state agitation, he really has spent alot of time thinking about what superhero fans want from their comic books. (Perhaps because superhero comics aren't by his own admission anywhere near his favourite kind cup of tea.) Underneath the cutting-edge scientific concepts, the smart "I'm a rebel me" dialogue and the widescreen ultra-violence, there's also some charming staples of superhero convention hiding in plain sight. There's always a secret base, some measure of sentimental team-bonding, and, in "Ultimate Secret", the best superhero-changing-clothes scene in many a long year. The details of why and where aren't relevant to enjoying the moment where Captain Marvel (2005 version) disrobes in preparation for activating his Kree battlesuit. For not only is the scene a collection of snippets evoking most every great "where can I change" scene in superhero history, it's also a significant innovator, for Ellis and Steve McNiven have remembered the importance of socks in this vital moment of transition from mortal to super-mortal. And it's the little touches like this that matter, those previously unthought of moments which tell us so much about the character concerned. Look, he can't even leave his socks on. Captain Marvel has to be naked before he can flash anything at anyone. Which again is counter-intuitive, but, for all of those too sock-challenged to pull something like this off before combat, admirable too.

9. The Hero Revealed
It's when Arthur pulls Excalibur from the stone we love him most. Everyone around him can see that he's the King. He's won the battle without doing any more than waving the sword around. Before him is the slaughter of the children, the fall of Camelot, the betrayal of Guinevere with Lancelot. But in the moment he held that sword, he must have felt that there wasn't a soul in this world or any other that wouldn't back off the moment he lowered Excalibur in their direction.

Safe at last, sword in hand. The worst long before him, a distant future when folks know that he holds Excalibur, and yet don't back off at all.

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