Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Don't Respect the Authority

i just finished reading several collections ("human on the inside," & "fractured worlds") of "the authority," which i only picked up because, of course, there are hummasexuals involved. i'm often displeased with this kind of "straight" (so to speak) tradition of superhero comicing, and i didn't find "the authority" to be different. the plotlines are sloppy and chaotic, and i even felt confused about what the individual characters' superpowers were. the art suffers terribly from a lack of knowledge of human anatomy at times.

then, there was the misogyny. look, putting in two gay men doesn't excuse you from blatantly hating on women. when the word "pussy" is used as an insult 50,000 times, including by a group of dead sages who speak with "the doctor," it's a good sign that the writer has a problem with misogyny. and to back up that feeling, there were needless physical punishments for female characters that had been written to be "evil" or just kinda annoying. "the doctor" gives his wife a giant, deformed ass in punishment for being a selfish bitch, for example. a black female badgirl (whose superpower was basically nuclear gospel singing--um, racist) gets killed by having metal bar rammed down her throat, and this is after her body keeps morphing grotesquely back and forth between average-sized, small-torso-balloon-thighs, and grossly overweight. don't know if that size-changing was supposed to be part of her superpowers, or if the artist just got really into hating her character.

oh, and the gay men involved in the story, apollo and midnighter. out of these two volumes, there is no sex, no kissing, and hardly any touching. i'm sure they managed to get to that in later volumes, after the author and artist spent months preparing for the "ick" of depicting physical love between two men. i mean, seriously, we see just about every other character in a naked, sexual situation, but these two just don't seem to get around to it. lame.

also, terrible costumes. all around. just my opinion.