Posted in: Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: bryan hitch, dc comics, dc studios, dcstudios, the aiuthority, warren ellis, wildstorm

Bryan Hitch Found Out DC Were Making An Authority Movie When You Did

Co-Creator Of The Authority, Bryan Hitch, just found out that DC Studios were making a movie of The Authority when you did...

DC Studios and James Gunn just announced a brace of projects, intertwined in the same continuity under the new leadership of James Gunn and Zac Safran. One of which was The Authority, based on the comic book by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, published by DC Comics. Oh, and Bryan Hitch found out when you did. He tweeted "The Authority…? I'm glad someone told me…." Well, they have now. I would presume Warren Ellis had a similar experience.

The Authority was created in 1998 for the comic book studio WildStorm, owned by Jim Lee, which was bought out by DC Comics, with Jim Lee becoming VP and now Publisher/CCO of DC. Coming out of a series and using characters that Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch had worked on for DC/Wildstorm's series Stormwatch, The Authority was different. It jumpstarted the trend for what would be called "widescreen comics", using the comics page in a more cinematic fashion, and decompressing stories to take place over more pages, the series was adult in nature, political, and pushed against traditional ideas of superheroes. It featured prominent queer characters, with Midnighter and Apollo as a couple based on Batman and Superman, and included wisecracking characters, substance-abusing characters such as Jenny Sparks and Jack Hawksmoor, in the John Constantine model. As a team, they were hedonistic, debauched and all-powerful, taking down the big bad guys trying to control, or invade the Earth, but in doing so revealed themselves as immoral and lacking in principle.  Before The Boys, there was The Authority. The title of the comics, The Authority, was meant to be a note that however much you enjoyed their actions, they were the bad guys. Just the bad guys who happened to be needed at the moment.

The themes and tones established in The Authority would be taken by artist Bryan Hitch and the series' next writer Mark Millar when asked to do similar with Marvel's The Avengers in the comic book series The Ultimates. It was that series, with its roots in The Authority, that would most inform the tone of  Marvel's Cinematic Universe, specifically in Iron Man, Captain America and The Avengers movies, with Ellis' work on Iron Man also heavily informing that franchise.

And now the comic book that started it all, The Authority, will have its time on the screen, twenty-five years after it was first published. Will it have the same impact as the comic book did at the time? Or has that impact already been felt in the movies we have seen?

Oh and yes, copies of The Authority #1 from 1999 have been selling like hotcakes on eBay, with The Authority #1 selling raw for $18, Stormwatch Vol 2 #4 CGC 9.8 with the first appearances of Midnight and Apollo selling for $280, and raw for $160, and Stormwatch Vol 1 #38 with the first appearance of Jenny Sparks selling for $22 and Stormwatch #48 with the first appearances of The Doctor and The Engineer suddenly selling CGC 9.8 for $58. Expect all these figures, and more besides, to rise rapidly.

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