Posted in: Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: dc comics, dc studios, the authority, warren ellis

Warren Ellis Tells His History Of The Authority

The Authority was created by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in 1998 for the comic book studio WildStorm, And then from DC Comics, And now for Janes Gunn.

The Authority was created by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in 1998 for the comic book studio WildStorm, owned by Jim Lee, later 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 they had worked on for the  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. And now James Gunn is going to turn them into a DC Comics movie, possibly involving Superman.

Warren Ellis writes in his newsletter, 

I'd been doing a book called STORMWATCH for Wildstorm. We relaunched it once. Bryan Hitch came in and did a few issues of the second run with me, which is where we created Apollo and The Midnighter.

(Apollo, because the sun-god metaphor made connections with Superman. The Midnighter, because Batman was once called "The Darknight Detective" and because my dad, in his youth, was a drummer in a band called The Midnighters.)

Bryan and I gelled really well on those issues. We were talking regularly, and I started wondering what else we might do together and what I could write specifically for him. Around that time, I happened to find out the actual sales figures for STORMWATCH, and called the office in horror. The sales figures were like negative eight hundred. It was an actual comics black hole that reversed the laws of capitalism, the sales were so bad. "Why are you still paying me for scripts?" I asked. "Why are you still publishing them?"

What happened next tells you a lot about what kind of people worked at and ran that company. This was twenty-five years ago, but their response was something very much like "We really like it and we always want to find out what happens next, so we'll keep publishing it until you don't want to write it any more."

I was gobsmacked and MORTIFIED. I felt so f-cking guilty I just sat there in my chair for hours.

And then I started coming up with a plan to repay them by coming up with a version of the property that actually made them some money. In the next moment, I realised Bryan was going to be the perfect partner for that, so I wrote it very much for him. I already had one of the five best colorists in the world at that time, Laura DePuy. All I had to do was convince her to stick with me a little longer and give her space to push the envelope of what was possible at the time.

And that's how THE AUTHORITY happened. We did twelve issues, and then I told my editors to hire Mark Millar and Frank Quitely to replace us, which they did. And, with that hiring, actual comics history was made, and I repaid my debt to my wonderful publisher. (Aside from the debt of gratitude I will always owe to Scott and Jim and everyone else there.)

THE AUTHORITY by Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary and Laura DePuy Martin will be back in stores in about five weeks.

It may also be worth recalling where the name "The Authority" may have come from in Warren Ellis' mind, from an introduction to Hellblazer: Fear And Loathing, written some years earlier.

"What's John protecting these things from? Authority. With the capital A. These are stories about what authority does to people. about the poison in its foundations. You can substitute Authority for Government, for the Establishment, even for God, and it all means the same thing: someone exerting control they did not earn and do not deserve, grinding lives into sh-t largely because they feel like it. This is what Garth and Steve found the anger, in people using our fear on us, locking us in the black iron prison of mediocrity and ignorance."

So that's The Authority. No matter how they disguise themselves as progressive forces for good… they are exerting control they did not earn and do not deserve. I wonder how much of that will make it to the big screen. The Authority Book One will be back in shops next month.

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