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Tweak says, "Sleep"

starwolf_oakley (starwolf_oakley) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-09-23 23:27:00

Entry tags:

publisher: wildstorm, title: the authority

runespoor7's post of Jason Todd talking to Mia Dearden led to a thread discussion about billionaire vigilantes beating up poor criminals.

A panel from THE AUTHORITY: TRANSFER OF POWER shows that at least a few comic creators are aware of this.

"The Authority" was always pretty "out there" for superheroes. But that's Warren Ellis and Mark Millar for you.

For more than a few superheroes, actually being a superhero can be seen as a case of Noblesse Oblige. Noblesse Oblige can be seen as "With great power comes great responsibility... and a really smug sense of superiority."

It came back to Batman, as these things do. After all, we never really go into detail about how "well-off" the Kents were from farming, or how much Clark Kent's Daily Planet take-home pay is. Some seem to think it ties into "Lonely Place of Dying," that since Tim Drake's family is wealthy, Tim isn't as "street" as Jason Todd.

Quotes from users via http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/987439.html?thread=27947311#t27947311:

runespoor7 said: "The fact is, 'Oh, Jason was lower class and her turned out badly, and then he was replaced by Tim, who came from a good family the same side of the streets as Bruce and who did very well as Robin' leaves a strange impression."

lynxara said: "In particular, confronting the class issues at work in the Batman stuff is impossible without coming to the conclusion that most of the characters involved are selfish monsters so steeped in white privilege that they've lost all grasp of reality."

icon_uk said: "Dick was suddenly an ethnic Romany with angst about the likelihood of him ending up in jail like so many of his kin."

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kiev4am
2009-09-24 08:58 pm UTC (link)

Oh God, 'Transfer of Power.' I have to come in off-topic a bit and defend the Authority here. The trouble with Millar's run is that it was so anvilicious and obnoxious that it's often what people remember as the 'definitive' Authority. Millar's Authority are swaggering jerks with barely a single social conscience between them; but that's not how they were originally conceived by Warren Ellis, or how they've been defined by several subsequent and (IMO) better writers than Millar. In Ellis' run, and Ed Brubaker's, and Abnett & Lanning's, for example, there are plenty of instances of one or other character wondering about the body count or the rightness of what they're doing and (crucially) not being a flippant asshole about it. There are whole story arcs devoted to dismantling what Millar did to the team both as a concept and as characters.

(note: this is not in any way to have a go at the original poster for using that page from 'ToP' - it makes the intended point very well! I'm just saying that Millar's run was just one run and that a lot of other authors, including the book's creator, made the Authority a less brattish and more interesting bunch of characters. Taking the whole series into account, I think Millar put a lot of people off a really good book, and that's a shame.)

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