38 AUTHORITY, THE
enhanced hand-to-hand fi ghter; Apollo, an ersatz Superman powered by the sun;
Jack Hawksmoor, an alien-abducted master of cities and urban environments; and
Shen Li-Min (aka Swift), a Tibetan Buddhist birdwoman. Th ey were joined by
the Doctor—a drug-addled Jeroen Th orndike, the latest in a succession of mystic
shamans—and the newest Engineer, an American woman named Angela Spica with
a bloodstream full of nanotechnology. Apollo and the Midnighter enjoy an openly
homosexual relationship, and, as the “spirit of the 20th century,” Sparks’s lifespan was
limited to the end of the millennium. Since her passing, her possible reincarnation,
Jenny Quantum, has been born and adopted by the two men. Th e Authority has also
come to include a new Doctor, Habib ben Hassan, and the living embodiment of kill-
ing, Rose Tattoo. Peripheral members include the disgruntled genius Doctor Krigstein
(a stand-in for comic book legend Jack Kirby ), former Stormwatch leader Jackson King
(aka Battalion), and the hapless Kevin Hawkins. Moreover, a replacement team was
put in place by the G8 nations when they felt Th e Authority was running unchecked.
Th ese far more immoral substitutes consisted of Th e Colonel (a somewhat uncouth
British ex-footballer), Street (Hawksmoor re-envisioned as a street-gang thug), Rush
(winged like Swift), Teuton (god-like alternate to Apollo), Last Call (a brawling,
vicious, homophobic Midnighter), Th e Surgeon (a butchering version of the Doctor),
Machine (a Japanese Engineer), and Chaplain Action (another Sparks-like iteration,
replacing Th e Colonel as Quantum would Sparks).
Each manifestation of Th e Authority has been headquartered on the Carrier, a
35-miles tall, 50-miles long, and 2-miles wide interdimensional vessel powered by the
energy of a baby universe. Th is majestic craft was thought to be one of numerous shift-
ships, crafts capable of traveling through time, space, and alternate universes by means
of the reality-lining Bleed membrane. In essence, the Carrier was designed to tack
through the Bleed, but it had become separated from its fl eet and stranded in Earth’s
orbit. Given its artifi cial intelligence and advanced technology, the Carrier could be said
to be conscious, thereby actively choosing to aid Th e Authority rather than being in
any way commandeered by them. Th e Carrier’s reasons for allowing the immoral
G8-Authority to use it, then, are unclear. In theory, the buried shiftship found by an-
other of Ellis’s superhero teams, Planetary , could be a sister craft to Th e Authority’s,
also set off -course centuries ago. Th is notion is supported by the fact that a replace-
ment Carrier, obtained by Stormwatch’s secretly villainous founder Henry Bendix, now
houses Th e Authority in the wake of the original ship’s destruction. Th is replacement
Carrier, too, was scuttled, though its interdimensional hull remains a safe haven for
Th e Authority.
After three story arcs of escalating peril—a global terrorist, an extradimensional
incursion, and the return of a would-be God entity to Earth—Ellis and artist Bryan
Hitch left the series in the hands of the writer/artist team of Mark Millar and Frank
Quitely. Th ese new creators made the team far more pro-active, no longer settling
for Earth’s status quo. Life imitated art as Wildstorm’s parent company DC Comics ,
itself now owned by AOL Time/ Warner, became uncomfortable with some of the
