Superman & The Authority #2

Superman & The Authority’s first issue was about two men coming from opposite ideological positions, one of them winning the other over for at least a temporary joining of forces. The second issue takes that same spectrum and turns it into a framing story, with an issue that begins in a kind of heaven and ends in a kind of – or perhaps the very one and only – Hell. Along the way, we see members of the team take on medium-sized threats, with technology as a recurrent threat across both issues.

The first words, “Fort Superman,” hearken back to the Silver Age, not 1963 but 1958, in the title of the classic “The Super-Key to Fort Superman.” That’s about as Silver Age as it gets, and that’s why Morrison chose that phrase, to begin the blend that we see from the squeaky clean to, well, right down to Hell. The moral decline begins as Manchester Black has a transgressive smoke in the Fortress of Solitude and it angers Superman’s squad of Kryptonian robots, but not to the point of their, well, killing Black, as he dares them too.

The second issue is built around a framing story, like many old JSA and JLA stories, where we see the parts of the team in side action (or so it seems) before they finally come together at the end. If you count both issues of the series, we have seen individual sub-teams in action four times, and these four encounters develop a couple of distinctive themes.

First, there is a noteworthy relevance of technology, and in particular networks of computer-linked minds, in three of the stories. First, Superman and Manchester Black face robots from the Phantom Zone – a peculiar twist from the usual setup where good, old-fashioned human (well, Kryptonian) villains escape. Second, Natasha Irons faces off against a particularly sadistic and highly realistic threat from an Internet hive mind with all of social media’s worst characteristics. Third, Midnighter and Apollo confront a beast possessing a network of minds. It is only the fourth confrontation, with June Moone, that differs from the pattern, involving a supernatural threat in character with the character’s history. Perhaps three instances is not enough to infer a pattern, but while artificial intelligence networks don’t make for an absolutely novel threat, it is a bit noticeable to have it come up in three cases out of four.

A more undeniable theme is that of duality, and conflict, between one “bright” personality and one “dark” personality on the side of the heroes. This is absolutely front and center in the scenes showing Superman and Manchester Black, and is moreover downright core to the concept of Midnighter and Apollo. Finally, it is equally apparent with June Moone and Enchantress, to the extent that Enchantress appears to be the villain in that substory. But, again, we have a theme that extends across just three of the four stories which perhaps makes us pay more attention to the one that doesn’t hold… Natasha Irons appears to have no dark counterpart. Still, it is obvious that the entire concept of this team is to bring together characters from opposite poles of the spectrum. It is virtually impossible to describe this series without pointing that out.

SonOfBatmann pointed out in the comments of my last post that Manchester Black, describing his disdain for Superman in the first issue, was serving as a stand-in for fans in the real world. This in fact was core to Joe Kelly’s original story with the Elite. In issue #2, the enemy facing Natasha Irons is even more obviously borrowed from the real world of ours; in fact, it has never been more blatant that the villain in a DC story is a reflection of some of the people who are reading the story (at least, if some sliver of the worst people on social media are also DC fans). Nat’s villains attack her with words and other forms of information rather than physical blows, body-shaming her posterior, insulting her looks, and threatening to send nude photos of her to her grandmother and her boss. And, amusingly, Morrison renders these trolls as literal trolls. She somehow defeats them with the combination of a heavy hammer and sharp words, which is unlikely to solve the same problem in the real world, but then that’s true of all superhero stories, isn’t it?

Midnighter and Apollo happen to be the only original Authority members in the issue, and their story, with the piquant title, “HARD,” begins with the kind of backstory that may be a colorful way of introducing their personalities or may just tie into the bigger story. We won’t know until later. But we see the two go into action and crush their threat so decisively that we have to suspend disbelief that such a formidable pair (and couple) could have existed in Superman’s world without having met him previously. I have to salute the issue’s four artists – whichever is appropriately to credit – in capturing Apollo’s expression with brows that communicate the combination of affection and consternation for his difficult and loyal (perhaps unfaithful?) partner.

Enchantress crossed paths with Superman’s world way back in 1980, as a sort of frenemy to Supergirl in Superman Family #204-205. Here, as there, Enchantress is the real threat in the story, at least while under someone else’s influence. Here, as there, her supernatural archfoe Dzamor (first appearing in the first Enchantress story in 1968) is the big bad behind the scenes. This time, the feeling is distinctly like the film Rosemary’s Baby (also from 1968!), with June Moone a horribly mistreated victim of the evil beings who try to corrupt her. Then, with a satisfying turn for the better, D’z’amor (now the name is spiced up with apostrophes) is punched offscreen by our hero; in what is presumably an oversight in the art, the punch comes from a bare arm, which doesn’t match Superman, Apollo, or anyone else, but is probably from Superman.

The team’s challenge in Hell is foreshadowed in the framing story’s title, “One Soul at a Time,” which out of context would imply a mission of saving sinners in a Christian sense, which makes Superman, in this story, an agent of God. We begin the issue expecting the recruitment of the new team, but at the end, it seems to identify June Moone as the poor soul who needs salvation but will surely end up being a member of the team fighting at their side, at least insofar as the Enchantress “is” June Moone, a tangled identity which is often a pair rather than an individual, which brings us back to the theme of duality among our heroes. Most likely, though (as we can see from the cover), Enchantress will be redeemed rather than eliminated.

The cover also reminds us that the Ultra-Humanite (in his big, white gorilla form) is part of the story, and it’s therefore remarkable that we reach the mini-series’ midpoint without him having done anything but talk in three panels, all the more remarkable in that the heroes (and antiheroes) will enter the third issue facing a threat that is – maybe – not even related to the Ultra-Humanite. The pacing of the mini-series, sadly, already, half over – highlights that it is transitional and more about putting this team together for future adventures than about a single four-issue battle against a single foe.

Perhaps the substory threats are disconnected sideplots, but we’ve seen Morrison before turn those seemingly disconnected elements into one big web. Either way, the Midnighter / Apollo case is full of familiar Morrisonian notes, such as kids with metahuman powers being abducted and utilized as an weapon (Final Crisis) and the genetic / biological engineering of a superpowered henchman (Final Crisis, Batman Inc.). This storyline echoes the origin of Midnighter and Apollo, who were biologically engineered by a villain – Midnighter reminds us, “That’s how they made me” while Black reminds us that Apollo came from a vat – and plainly indicates an unseen Big Bad somewhere offscreen. And if we’re looking for clues on who that might be, consider that the lab in Batman, Inc. – specifically 2011’s Batman: The Return – and in this story were both in Yemen, not a likely location to come up twice by coincidence. Could the person behind the scenes be, if not Talia herself, someone who’s taken over part of her operations?

Another choice element from another time is the Supermobile, which originated in Action Comics #481 in 1978. The in-story motivation was that the light of an exploding red star took away Superman’s powers just when he had to battle Amazo with all of the world’s other superheroes already beaten. The out-of-story motivation was to create a merchandising opportunity for a triple crossover between Superman: The Movie coming out that same year, the comics, and a toy and – yes – I owned one. When Manchester Black calls it Batman envy, he’s psychoanalyzing Superman, but the merchandising people were clearly copying the Batmobile as merchandise (and I owned one of those, too). Here, the Supermobile, like the limited speeds on Superman’s treadmill, reinforce the earlier claim, despite my suspicions of a ruse, we still see signs that Superman is losing his powers and needs any kind of help that he can get.

Now, with the team facing one crisis, recruitment not complete, and the big villain yet to appear in his fourth panel, this miniseries has to have a seriously packed final two issues. If there’s a lingering thread that’s yet to unspool, it’s that the Ultra-Humanite’s hate-filled spiel in the first issue is about Superman’s dishonesty, calling Superman’s double identity and more “lies” and he’s not strictly wrong to do so. When the Ultra-Humanite says that kryptonite will destroy Superman, I think we’re going to see that be about something other than the effects of radiation. In issue #2, Superman talks about atomic bombs having been utilized by idealists. While the first issue showed us Manchester Black being brought over to the light side, there are hints here, besides the black in the chest shield, that Superman’s going to show something of the dark.

Superman & The Authority #1

 

It feels like we’ve been here before, but where is “here”? Grant Morrison’s “Superman & The Authority” is an Elseworlds made of Elseworlds, with several worlds placed into a blender. It’s a world where the Justice Society – sans Superman or Batman – served during World War Two, but Superman is around early in his career to meet President Kennedy… that feels a lot like Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier. Superman’s previous go-arounds in this continuity with Manchester Black are possibly much like the ones we saw in Joe Kelly’s issues of Action Comics. Superman tapping Manchester Black to serve on his team is a notion that Kelly entertained, briefly, in 2006’s “Superman, This Is Your Life.” A Superman who has long since retired to the [Ant]arctic, facing unsolvable problems, and wearing black in his shield, is how Kingdom Come begins. And heroes haunted by their failure to prevent the assassination of a President is the premise of Morrison’s The Multiversity: Pax Americana, riffing hard on Alan Moore’s Watchmen. With winks and nods, Morrison tells us that we’re visiting a world a little like all of these but exactly like none of them.

From the start, and befitting the titular characters, Morrison hits us with rapid-fire alternation between optimism and pessimism. The first panel shows the last leaves falling off a tree and a caption that informs us that John F. Kennedy is about to die, while the doomed President speaks of “tomorrow dawning.” Superman asks if Kennedy will need his protection in Dallas. We know that the answer is yes, but Kennedy says “No.” All of Kennedy’s words in 1963 speak of a bright future and limitless potential, but his imminent assassination is just the first of things to go wrong. While JFK’s sunny aspirations give us detailed exposition of the superheroes’ history in this Elseworlds, a few other details check off how this world is and isn’t like the real world of 1963, with the objective of sending astronauts to Mars rather than the Moon before the end of the Sixties, and an ominous reference to ending all wars – a hope that never works out in the real world, and didn’t in this world, either.

Then the framing of the panels tells us that this is the history of this world as seen in newsreels, or – as Manchester Black wakes up – Black’s dream of history, a dream that ends as he is awoken by a police raid that overcomes his considerable abilities.

Morrison has long maintained that Superman is most interesting when he’s strong, which makes one of this issue’s surprises the fact that Superman is now – apparently – physically weak, an unexplained (and misleading?) exact 180° from Kingdom Come. But this Superman is morally as strong as ever we’ve seen, with an optimism that pays off when he is – apparently – able to win the acidic Manchester Black over to his side in a moment of super crisis. I slather on the “apparently”s because I see possible deception everywhere, and in the one panel where we see Superman while Black is unconscious, the hero lands dramatically – and seemingly powerfully, but the artwork keeps that intriguingly ambiguous, with a mighty fist joining his feet in a three-point landing that could project either power or (by Superman standards) weakness.

When Black awakens, he gets the pitch: Superman needs his help. There’s a war, but first there’s a battle. Superman needs Black’s help in a larger sense, a strategic sense, and Black isn’t prone to agree, but first there’s an imminent, urgent and arguably worse crisis with a massive breakout of Phantom Zone robots due to occur in minutes. Again, it feels like possible deception: Superman’s Pollyannaish recruitment speech to Black served only to alienate him, as Superman must have anticipated. The imminent Phantom Zone breakout, on the other hand, was an urgent crisis in which Superman and Black inarguably faced a mutual enemy, and gave Black no time to think the matter through. Black needed either to accept Superman’s pitch, or to reject it and in so doing possibly risk his own life, should the Phantom Zone escapees ravage the entire planet after they’d beaten Superman. And it seems a bit of a coincidence that this singular existential threat would arise “exactly twelve minutes” after Black awakens. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we are to learn that Superman manipulated the situation and showed a bit of deviousness on his own part. In any event, even if the timing were coincidental (and existential threats to the DCU have a way of showing up at least daily if not hourly), the outcome is the same – after Black contemplates, with the minutes that he has left, whether or not he and the Phantom Zone prisoners are on the same side, he chooses to back Superman and, with a savvy nod to the Silver Age, he tries to defeat the escapees with a Kryptonian Thought Beast. Guess when those first appeared in publication: 1963, a year that is brought up over and over again in this issue. Did Morrison choose that 1963 reference knowingly? I don’t know.

I’m also not sure if it was on purpose, when Superman first mentions that year in the present, that Morrison curiously quotes every note of a line from the Eighties Dream Academy song, “Life in a Northern Town”: “In Winter 1963, it felt like the world would freeze, with John F. Kennedy and the Beatles.” This refers to a notoriously severe wave of winter cold that hit the UK in early 1963, when the native Scotland of Morrison, just then turning three years old, had subzero (Fahrenheit!) temperatures. So much is coming together here that ties Morrison’s biography with this story that we should pay careful attention to the author’s place in the story – presumably on a symbolic level. The story features an acerbic, sarcastic, cynical Brit coming face to face with the symbol of American idealism and power. The story begins in the early 1960s. After decades in which things go variously well and poorly, there is a time of reckoning in which the Brit decides just how much he believes in the god-hero of American superheroes, and we can ask, perhaps thumbing through the autobiographical pages of Supergods just how much this story is about where Morrison’s viewpoints, and possibly the world’s current geopolitical status are now in 2021. Perhaps it's Morrison and not Manchester Black who's referencing "Amazing Grace" in asking whether or not Superman can "save a wretch like me."

The plot itself, on the surface, is brimming over with pregnant details and mini-mysteries presented by the shadowy villain who not revealed in the story, but the solicits promise us that he is the Ultra-Humanite, a choice which takes us back to the absolute origin of DC supervillains, and moreover hints at another one-and-done Elseworlds series with an ampersand in its title, Superman & Batman: Generations. All of the little expository details slipping from the dialogue of Superman, Black, and the Ultra-Humanite set the stage wonderfully, as Morrison has done in his Batman run, Action run, 52, and elsewhere, mixing details that are respectively from canon and contrary to canon, freeing the author to tease us with hints, then go back on those teases later, or confirm them as they see fit. Perhaps kryptonite in this reality is nothing like it is in any reality that we’ve seen before. Or perhaps it’s exactly the same. Perhaps Superman really is losing his powers, or perhaps it’s all a big ruse and, like in Kingdom Come, he’s stronger than ever. We just don’t know, but we have to consider both – all – possibilities, which is wonderful.

The title hides one such alternate possibility, which is likely rife with meaning. While Manchester Black was the leader, in Joe Kelly’s DC stories, of a group called The Elite, it was based on Wildstorm Comics’ The Authority; here, Morrison uses the inspiration’s name for, presumably, the version of the group in this reality. But why? Maybe the answer is a superficial “just because” but it makes the title say something that we ought to listen to with common nouns instead of proper nouns: The story is about Superman and the authority (small “a”) that he has. Whether he really has lost his powers or is only pretending to do so, this story clearly brings into question whether or not Superman has authority (small “a”) that comes from his qualities as a leader, as an inspiration, and not simply whether or not Earth’s yellow sun has charged his muscles with incredible power. And that promises a much more interesting story than a title that promises us meditations about Superman and the elite (small “e”).