It's not been a particularly good year for WildStorm, who've seen a raft of high-profile launches plummet straight to the bottom of the sales charts.  And now it's time to shoot themselves in the foot once again, with Authority: Scorched Earth.

What DC seem to have trouble grasping is that the fanbase of Authority was not particularly interested in seeing the book continue indefinitely as an all-purpose superhero title.  Under Ellis and Hitch, the book worked because of its impressively demented "widescreen" style, a celebration of ludicrous destruction that distilled the superhero team genre to its essentials with tongue lodged firmly in cheek.  Under Millar and Quitely, it became a clodhopping anti-establishment satire, still subversive in its way, and attracting plenty of attention as DC cheerfully took the razors to it.

What we have here is a perfectly competent generic superhero story.  In theory, the scale mimics the Ellis/Hitch era - the sun goes nuts, starts to attack cities.  But that's scale in terms of plot only.  The point of widescreen comics was scale in terms of depiction, as the stories would sit back and show page after page of lavishly drawn mass destruction.  In substance, this is virtually indistinguishable from a JLA story.

It also makes use of a plot device which StormWatch fans had been suggesting for years - that Winter, the energy-absorbing character who entered the sun at the end of the gloriously ridiculous WildCATS/Aliens one-shot - didn't die, but instead stayed alive thanks to his powers absorbing the energy.  Ellis had described this idea as absolute nonsense, but here it is nonetheless, straight from the realms of unwritten fanfic to the printed page.

This would rank as a middling JLA annual; putting it out as an Authority one-shot indicates that DC just still don't get why the book was popular in the first place.

Rating: B-

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