Rating: 
Summary: Shallower than Hollywood
Review: This wildly popular book suffers from thin plots and thinner characters. Ellis won praise for his frank portrayal of a gay superhero couple in this series, and rightly so. Ten points for social sensitivity, and about minus a million points for shallow, one-dimensional characters (yes, even Apollo and the Midnighter), literally mindless violence, repetetive plots, and aggressively insensitive portrayal of practically everything else. Particularly offensive was the grinning Fu Manchu villain and his yellow horde.It is interesting that Ellis was happy to turn this book over to another writer. Perhaps he chose to concentrate on Planetary, a companion series to the Authority that was it's polar opposite. Planetary had great character development and clever plots that both satired and honored the many genres that inform current superhero comics.
Rating:
Summary: Shallower than Hollywood
Review: This wildly popular book suffers from thin plots and thinner characters. Ellis won praise for his frank portrayal of a gay superhero couple in this series, and rightly so. Ten points for social sensitivity, and about minus a million points for shallow, one-dimensional characters (yes, even Apollo and the Midnighter), literally mindless violence, repetetive plots, and aggressively insensitive portrayal of practically everything else. Particularly offensive was the grinning Fu Manchu villain and his yellow horde. It is interesting that Ellis was happy to turn this book over to another writer. Perhaps he chose to concentrate on Planetary, a companion series to the Authority that was it's polar opposite. Planetary had great character development and clever plots that both satired and honored the many genres that inform current superhero comics.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic, but forgettable
Review: When I first read AUTHORITY, I was blown away but just......how darn cool everything in it seemed. Its a masterpiece of style and force. Unfortunately, it goes so fast, and its so relentless, that it ultimately just remains kind of forgettable. It clobbers you over the head, and then just walks away. You read it for a half hour, then forget the details even faster. There's no buildup, no slowdown, just ACTION ACTION ACTION! VIOLENCE VIOLENCE VIOLENCE! Not to say that it isn't great at what it does, far from it. But once the Authority evens out and really gets meaty, it'll be one of the best things out there.
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