Customer Reviews

Authority Vol. 2: Rule Brittania

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The continuation of The Authority: World's End (which continued Wildstorm: World's End), The Authority: Rule Britannia ends two years of post-apocalyptic story that, quite radically, took the world's most powerful superhero group and stripped them of most of their power.

Like Warren Ellis's earliest Authority work, writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, helped along by excellent artists, put character development into action instead of words. Nobody talks about trauma, but Jack almost kills a fellow teammate, Midnighter is either acting reckless or standing on top of cliffs sending up balloons with messages to Apollo (unexpectedly sweet), Apollo sits alone over the sun and broods, and the Engineer keeps so busy (while snapping at everyone) it's not hard to see she's trying to avoid thinking. It's only Swift I didn't get any sense of, which is too bad, because I wondered how her Buddhist, life-loving nature would react seeing the apocalypse.

The action-oriented plot takes some great twists, throwing things like superheroes gone mad and sentient viruses into our heroes' way. I truly didn't know what would happen next or how all the little battles would tie together, but somehow the writers made it work. All dangling plot threads come together in a satisfying way at the end as The Authority relearn how to kick butt.

I have a couple nitpicky complaints. The opening two issues have horribly corny dialogue that I think was supposed to be funny and failed (keep going, it gets better), and a couple of scenes were forced short by page limitations. But overall, this is the best Authority story since Revolution.