Customer Reviews

Monarchy, The: Bullets Over Babylon

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

"No wonder it was cancelled", a fellow reviewer notes. An experimental, non-linear, hyper-critical labyrinthine tale that turns heroism on its head and is truly unique... a book which dares to actually ATTACK the neo-dark-age superheroics represented by Mark Millar's Authority, at the height of Millar's fame, in a spin-off of that very book no less! Challenging societal norms while being genuinely culturally sensitive. A capes/tights comic concerned with being poetic, utilizing ideas from the forefront of science, the story itself dipping into sub-fictional realms to become somewhat self-aware, or "meta"- a story about stories. To top it off, it makes use of characters and concepts from the WildStorm universe going back to early Stormwatch days, while adding completely new ones with no introduction or explanation... yes, it's a wonder it was ever allowed to happen in the first place. This is a challenging read, but for many of us that is far from a bad thing. It's true that you need to read ALL of it. The story is told in 13 issues; reading half of them would be like reading half a mystery novel, then complaining that the story made no sense. It all comes together in a big, twisted, and glorious way at the very end.

Besides the mysterious, swirling structure and the out-there Morrisonian ideas such as Synergies' transformation into 'The Queen of Origin Stores', Union's suicide and resurrection, or 'The Fevermen' ("living manifestations of humankind's willing enslavement to fear"), what's most exciting to me is the challenge this book represents to superheroism in general. The Authority was supposed to be a subversive, anarchist, no-holds-barred version of superheroes, but I never felt that they really were. Rather, they're a meddling, potentially-fascistic force (I'm not knocking the books, just disagreeing with the leftist label). The Monarchy exists to topple them, to subvert the integrity of all 'authority'. The Authority claim to get at the root of the problem rather than merely treating the symptoms, going after harsh dictators and greedy CEOs; The Monarchy sees that these are just larger symptoms in a corrupt universe, and seek to change the very nature of reality itself. The Authority threaten and explode; The Monarchy perform secret surgery.

For all its bravery and experimental qualities, however, there are indeed some serious problems with this work. First, as I have noted, you need to know a thing or two about the WS universe as it existed then. Warren Ellis' Stormwatch run is without a doubt among the very best superhero comics of all time, so if you're even looking at this book and haven't read those, get on it without delay. If you have, and you've also read his and then Millar's continuation of that book, The Authority, you'll get the references here.

Unfortunately that's not all. This excellently bizarre story is marred slightly by sloppy writing: generally mediocre dialogue, occasional poor pacing, and the imposed limitations of 13 issues (plotlines that never go anywhere, for inst) contribute to its difficulty in a negative way. Much worse is the artwork, by the absolutely intolerable John McCrea. Why this guy ever got work, and continues to, is beyond me. I don't want to go on and on about it; just know that it's really horrible. But the audacity and cleverness of the story, to me, is just about enough to make up for these things.

I wish that Young would have been given more issues to tell his crazy tale. I wish that readers would not have responded to their own confusion with hate and anger towards the book. I wish that someone else would have drawn it. But we got what we got, and here it is. A real comic for comics-people, a failed Flex Mentallo for the Wildstorm Universe.

A fantastic fever dream of superheroics! While the universe stumbles sleepily through business as usual, there is a cancer affecting all of reality itself. The only hope of defeating it lies in the hands of a telepathic, telekinetic madman named Jackson King. Together with his wife Christine, he recruits, rebuilds, and ressurects unique members of his surgical strike force, the Monarchy. Their mission: to eradicate the cancer at any cost. Doselle Young's writing is brilliant. His original superhero creations are some of the most imaginative in years. The book is a puzzle and as the pieces slowly come together you will be amazed...

The Monarchy - yet another spin-off from the remnants of a broken Stormwatch. Unlike THE AUTHORITY or STORMWATCH: TEAM ACHILLES, however, you will be hard-pressed to figure out what in the world is going on, much less why this title was even created. From what I can figure, Jackson King is depressed after the demise of Stormwatch, and some unexplained phenomenon inspires him to create a new super-team. So, he finds the members (somehow), gets a base of operations (by some method), and they are a fully-realized team by the beginning of the second issue... or something kinda sorta approximating that. The sad part is, even though this trade paperback collects 5 comics (Authority #21 and Monarchy # 1-4), and even with 128 pages to work with (and multiple re-reads on my part), there is absolutely no coherent story. Writer Doselle Young apparently fancies himself as a deep, hip, and edgy writer, perhaps the heir to Warren Ellis, but I feel that Ellis would have at least spent some effort to start from square one, align these scattered plotlines, and give the reader a reason to come back. I can't imagine how someone could have stuck with The Monarchy on a monthly basis: no wonder it was cancelled.