Grant Morrison is taking a leading role in the current relaunch of the WildStorm imprint, writing both Authority and WildCATS - each of which, depending on your perspective, could be seen as WildStorm's flagship title.

On Authority #1, he's coupled with artist Gene Ha, which certainly sounds like a winning combination.  But the end result is, frankly, bizarre.  On one view, in fact, it's premature to try and review the first issue at all.  Certainly any opinion is going to have to be revisited once the book fully hits its stride.  But by the same token, it's really no use claiming that people shouldn't reach an opinion on the strength of issue #1.  They have to.  They need to decide whether to buy issue #2.

As I read this issue for the second time, I was reminded of David Kemp and Steven Daly's tour de force of concise sarcasm, The Rock Snob's Dictionary.  They define "Rewards Repeated Listens" as "Euphemistic phrase employed by rock critics to confer value upon a dubious musical work that, given the reputations involved, has to be better than it sounds."  I have a nagging feeling we may be in that territory with Authority.

Here's the thing.  This isn't an Authority comic.  Literally.  They're not in it.  The story is about an ordinary-seeming English chap called Ken who's having problems with his marriage.  He works for the government, and he gets called in to help explore a downed submarine.  At the end they find a huge great thing underwater, which is presumably meant to be the Carrier, although that's more of an informed guess than anything else.

And that's your issue.

This is an aggressive departure from anything you might associate with the Authority.  Quite aside from the fact that they aren't in it, it's also a confrontational rejection of the whole widescreen ethos.  As if the subject matter wasn't banal enough - who wouldn't be thrilled by scenes of Ken arguing about his phone bill? - the art is muted, subdued, and positively obstructive.  Everything is shown in tight close-up; faces are usually cropped halfway off the panel.  It's the precise opposite of the Authority as we know it - slow, dreary, claustrophobic.

Now, here's the thing.

I'm intrigued.  But I'm intrigued against my better judgment.  Because the interest here comes entirely from the outside context.  I know Grant Morrison and Gene Ha aren't clueless, and they must surely have some idea of where they're heading with this.  I also know that this is a book which is deliberately going against expectations, since the creators can't possibly have come up with something so bizarre by accident.  There's enough of a "What the hell are they thinking?" element to make me want to know the answer.

But.  If you take the story on its own, and leave aside that context?  It's really very dull.  Low-key normalcy is not Grant Morrison's strength, and even if there's a great idea in here, he's not really managed to make it especially compelling in this first issue.  Gene Ha, who is capable of beautiful detail, seems to be drawing through some kind of murk.

It is, in short, not entertaining.  Not entertaining in the slightest.  I don't actually care about anything that happens in the story.  I just care about the meta-mystery: what on earth does this have to do with any sort of Authority comic?

Everything depends on the answer to that, and the rating here has got to be something of a cop-out.  I strongly suspect that by the end of the first arc, this will either be some sort of triumph or an outright disaster.  It's just too odd to be anywhere in between.

Rating: C+

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