Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, DC Comics | Tagged: authority, censor, censorshop, Comics, dc, dc comics, entertainment, frank quitely, Mark Millar, Paul Levitz, wildstorm

DC Publish Original Uncensored Mark Millar & Frank Quitely Authority

Published Wed, 31 May 2017 17:00:37 -0500

by Rich Johnston

Last updated Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:29:51 -0500

Comments

Article Summary

DC Comics censored Mark Millar and Frank Quitely’s The Authority series starting in 2000, causing fan backlash.
Editorial changes included altering politics, violence, nudity, and references to other comic characters.
Original, uncut versions of The Authority #13 and #14 will be published in the Wildstorm: 25 Years collection.
This release offers fans a chance to see The Authority as originally intended without any edits or censorship.

In the year 2000, DC Comics started censoring The Authority by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely, the flagship comic book from Wildstorm, the Jim Lee-started publisher that DC Comics had purchased.

We recently looked at the Wildstorm Oral History account of what went down in those days.

David Baron: They didn't quite like it. This was no secret, I'm not spilling any beans or anything like that. It was no secret that DC had a problem with The Authority, and it was a little bit shaky at times.

John Layman: All these issues were in the pipeline including this issue where they go in and they're going to kill some dictator in some little country no one's ever heard of. Turns out that was a real person, and that was a real country, we're just dumb Americans. We didn't know that. Somebody up the DC chain figured it out and flipped out. And now, these scripts had all been approved and art was in motion. Everything was approved, but in this game of musical chairs, I was sitting in the chair when DC suddenly noticed this book, and all the shit fell on me, and they're like, "Well, how could you let this happen?"

Richard Bruning: There were just things about it that made Paul uncomfortable, and I know to some degree, it was that Mark Miller was doing a take up on the Legion of Superheroes in this one issue of Authority. Paul saw that, and he literally didn't want to do that because Legion of Superheroes was like his baby. He wrote [it] for so long and so identified with it. And in the story, they were making buffoons out of the characters.

At the time I managed to get the original art that demonstrated some of the changes that were made to Frank Quitely' artworks, exposing what was going on behind the scenes. In the beginning, it was issues 13 and 14 that seemed to bear the brunt. Sometimes it was just politics…