I guess the tiger headed man is just Bronze Tiger.

All of this could fall apart, of course; the real test will come when we see how they manage to handle the mixing of genre characters with the backdrop of reality.

No, of course not, and the backlash against realism in "mainstream" comics has been the prevaling attitude among vocal fans and critics - if not among sales numbers - for quite some time now. And certainly I've dropped most of my DC/Marvel comics because I just stopped finding them interesting. But I can see how a radically different approach would be called for The Authority, and this is one that could definitely work (although the pacing of the pamphlet format is troule for it - yet another data point supporting for Greg's "everything should be sold in paperbacks" argument). It's not so much that "the world resists change," as Morrison puts it. It's that corporate-owned comic books resist change, and that you can't really maintain the premise of a superhero team that's out to change the world if the company needs a static premise on which to base a publishing-and-licensing franchise for the next decade or so. But separate these characters from their stifling "shared superhero universe," get them into an environment that actually resonates with the reader, and you've got a shot of actually recapturing the feel of a superhero team out to really change the world.

The flipside of this is that the expectations should be accordingly higher. If the Authority really are interacting with "our world," then the various major figures and forces in our world have to respond to their presence in a way that's both believable and possible (i.e., they can't genetically engineer supervillains to send after them like in Millar's run). If Morrison handles this right, it could make for great, compelling drama and interesting social commentary; if he gets it wrong it'll be terrible.

Authority was kind of crappy, I must admit, and I like GM as much as the next man. Unless the next man is John Byrne.
That said, isn't there room for both types (or indeed all types) of comics? I mean, sometimes I'd like a realistic comic, and sometimes I'd like some four-colour escapism. Morrison certainly appreciates a good deal of escapism (most of his outpit these days could be called that), he's just trying something else this time. And failing, but you can't have everything

Didn't Morrison say he planned to have the Authority save that guys marriage. I'm kind of interested how the likes of Midnighter and Jack Hawksmoor can do that.

Maybe the Midnighter will go all Doctor Phil on that guy.

I thought Wildcats was pretty fun. It's clearly in the spirit of an early Image book (which I do have an affection for despite their flaws) but there's enough wit and clever twists to make it a little better. I have a feeling it won't last though. I predict DC will want Lee to finish his All Star Batman run and have someone else draw Wildcats.

The problem is that the "realism" is that creakiest of cliches, the government agent/cop/official whose job gets in the way of his efforts to save his crumbling marriage. For heaven's sake, this is nearly every cop movie of the last 20 years. When the plot is basically a decompressed version of the setup from Die Hard, it's rather hard to get excited about "realism."

The bimonthly idea does make more sense now, though -- WildCATS is set ina world where powers are the norm and everyone owns a superhero; Authority on "our" world, where there have never been anything remotely like superheroes. It's basically a monthly Marvel comic, as least the aspirational or Platonic version of a Marvel comic, split into its two extreme and warring poles of realism and fantasy and alternating between those elements with each month.

I hold out some hope that WildCATS is setting up a "Planet X" style rug-pull, since it's deliberately assembled the two major villains from Lee's original WildCATS in a few tossed-off captions setting up a battle resolutely in the past "before the WorldStorm." My guess is that we're going to get the WildCATS destroying their opposition once and for all and the cheery superheroes-as-sex-dream triumph Morrison usually ends just ahead of.

Unlike Mr Morrison.

When the Authority is a few issues in I'm gonna go and re-read the Morrison Animal Man. The idea of introducing Ken brings a unique perspective which has been done before, but not in Authority. The closest Morrison comparison might be Animal Man.

Methinks, by setting Authority in "our world" then the Authority get another chance to "change the world". The complication being the world resists change, while at the same time requiring it.

The main problem with the Authority and Wildcats is that when Morrison moves on the titles will be back where they started. How much more life can there be in the superhero team format?

Asked for his take on the September-debuting, also bi-monthly The Authority series with Gene Ha, Morrison declined to say to too much so as not to spoil it, but he did say he wants to return the team to its “full potency”. He feels originally the title was about a superhero team changing the world, but the problem is the world resists change, so the team eventually became weaker and weaker, and the changes either would not take hold or would be shrugged off by the world.
Morrison cited Warren Ellis’s original run as an approach he wants to return to, saying his new approach will allow the team to be effectual again.
-from Newsarama

Here's his quote from San Diego Con 06

Continuing with the presentation, Morrison said that his approach for The Authority drawn by Gene Ha, is to give the team their purpose and reason back. As Morrison explained it, the team and concept had become toothless due to the notion that, as a team that was established to change the world, the Authority didn’t do a whole lot of world-chaining, and got their butts handed to them with regularity. As a result of a storyline pitting them against the Wildcats, the Authority will be thrown into the Bleed, and come out on our world, “right here, right now,” Morrison said. “It’ll be the most realistic comic that you’ve eve seen,” the writer continued.

One of the main characters will be an expert in undersea salvage who befriends the team, telling them if they wanted to fix the world, they could start by fixing his marriage. As Morrison explained, the series will be a look at whether or not superheroes really could change the world. The writer noted that the new series will be set when the characters are a little older, and further into their careers.

Morrison said that Ha is drawing the comic much like director Steven Steven Soderbergh films his movies, with strange close-ups of objects and people, and he plans to have dialogue that trails off and skews off track, much like it does in real life. “We wanted to take the challenge of making ‘realistic comics’ seriously,” Morrison said.

This is one of the most straightforwardly "realistic" setups of any superhero comic I've read, so I hope Morrison runs with that - having people react like real people would react, having the superhumans meet with the kinds of failures and setbacks they'd never normally experience, even in their "gritty" home setting.

In short, though, I think that Morrison did a very, very brave thing that is at the same time very, very stupid.

I enjoyed the book. It's got me hooked enough to keep reading and buying it, which is more than I can say for a lot of comics. Keeping the reveal until the very end was a brave and crazy move. I like where I think Morrison is going to go.

On the other hand, it was a crazy move. A lot of people expect the title characters to appear in the book. I'm not necessarily one of them.

What Morrison has done, though, is invert our expectations of The Authority. Ellis's kicksplode widescreen style was nicely disected in Wildcats #1. This Authority, Morrison's Authority, is going to have to "grow up" and face the real world. No more kicksplode. It's a new book, a new world. It's a gutsy move. It's experimental in the extreme. This isn't a change like Daredevil going from swashbuckling to noir. This is Spider-Man going from soap opera to mystery book.

I liked it. I can understand why other people wouldn't, though.

I'd just like to point out, just because a couple people on the net say something, doesn't mean a bunch of people had "problems" with the book, for one thing.

But also, I'd like to point out that writing fiction isn't about addressing "problems" readers had with earlier parts of the story. It's about telling the story you want to tell, in the way that you can best tell it.

And knowing Christos Gage a little, I'm sure he's long been done with this mini-series, and didn't see a single word of praise or complaint from readers until he was finished writing issue 4.

Personally, I'm loving this Union Jack mini. Glad to see you are too, Greg.

The whole Authority in the real world makes the issue marginally more interesting, but I'm not terribly sure how Morrison will pull it off, since it's been done a lot before, and I wonder if there's anything else to say. I have a feeling when the next issue comes out, it will be a gut reaction if I pick it up or not. And I generally like Gene Ha's art more than Lee's, too, but I didn't like it here. At least Lee is on a big-time superhero book, and he's good at big-time superhero stuff.