Never looked back except for the Planetary/Authority two-parter, but that was a Elsewhere project, if I remember correctly.

What two-parter was this?
There was a one shot team up book of the two released, but that was back in the first year of each title.

I remember thinking at the time that Jenny Sparks should come back from the dead and kick all of their asses for making the turning the headquarters of the Authority into “Carrier 54″.

But Millar also wrote a Jenny Sparks mini that just made you wish Ellis had worked out a deal for her like Gaiman did with Morpheus.
It changed characters origins for no discernible reason, turned Jenny into a bi-sexual girl who also likes group sex with old men, and although each issue told it’s own story, they were linked by a threat running through them that even Millar didn’t seem to care about.

I think Millar may have done more to kill The Authority than the scrapping of the Azzarello & Dillon arc did.

Not fair, because Millar has areas where he is genuinely talented. He’s good at writing morally ambiguous and reprehensible characters, he’s really good at pacing a script and playing to an artist, and at depraved humor. The troubles arise when he does stories that aren’t dark satires about dysfunctional protagonists; with the exception of Ultimate Avengers, almost all his recent Marvel work ( Civil War and onward ) has fallen into this category. When he tries to write a genuinely sympathetic character, they end up sounding like a mechanical cliche’. See: Miriam Sharpe.

Tarantino might be a better analogy than the creatively bankrupt Bay, were Tarantino not already used as the Bendis comparison ( and Bendis is more David Mamet by his own admission ).

Ellis’s run was quite fin and pretty to look at, but I found it a little bland. Millar’s run felt much closer to what I loved in Ellis’s Stormwatch. And Quitely is probably God

Millar’s run actually reminded me of the post ’86 mania for “grim and gritty” comics. All the grunge, none of the fun. Ellis had Jenny Sparks give God a lobotomy. Millar would have had her give him a blowjob and electrocute his dick.

That’s good, sometimes. I don’t mind a mindless movie once in a while, nor a mindless comic.

What bothers me is when they’re portrayed as being so much more meaningful or so much deeper than they really are. They really aren’t.

There are lots of explosions, lots of one liners, lots of ‘get the audience up and cheering,’ but very little more than that.

Personal opinion and all that…and I’m not saying it’s always a bad thing. It’s just all surface to me.

But, I should go back and read these again sometime.

Other than that, I have no problems with this run, although giving it more weight and reverence than it deserves is a bit disturbing, as it really doesn’t say much more about politics and humanity than a random issue of, say, SuperPro or Sleepwalker.

When push came to shove, Millar had no idea how to demonstrate the other side of whatever alleged hypocrisy he was lampshading. It’s an artistic failure that leaves the run without thematic closure or a proper climax, and indicates pretty strongly that Millar hadn’t given any of it anywhere near as much thought as his incredibly overgenerous fans.

Frankly, I’ve never seen a writer get as much unearned benefit of the doubt as Millar; considering how rarely he delivers anything beyond cynical action-movie cliches dressed up in fashionable political buzzwords, he’s maintained a slew of readers willing to turn the least hint of an idea in his work as if it were a 1,000-page prize-winning thesis. Say what you will of Morrison or Ellis as too meta or too self-involved, but they do at least explain and make efforts to artistically develop their themes and ideas. Millar’s not even a clever self-promoting ideologue.

(Planetary strives to merge the cosmic and socio-political sides of Ellis’ writing more than anything else I’ve seen of his, and since he was working that ground around the same time as The Authority – at the same company, even! – putting The Authority in the same arena would have been redundant. Of course, this wouldn’t have been clear to anyone reading only The Authority.)

Anyway, Millar came in and obviously decided to have The Authority try to change the people of the world, not just save the world itself, which is a markedly different tone from what Ellis had established. It sounded interesting at first, but ended up being a complete disaster: Wretched, grim, cynical stories full of gratuitously bad language, sex and violence (that is, all three were gratuitous and bad), populated with villains and anti-heroes, issue after issue of mayhem for mayhem’s sake, and really nothing deeper than that in all of it.

I don’t think Millar’s run really “exposed the reader to his (or her) own hypocrisy is supporting the status quo of superhero groups and superhero comics in general”, because he never really grapples with that issue in any depth. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity offered up in his run, but none of it is ever really considered, it’s just presented. And honestly it’s been presented (and considered!) much better many other times before and since (Watchmen, for instance). This run of The Authority is shallow.

Honestly, the word I would use to describe this period of The Authority is “disgusting”. I’ve never really warmed to Millar’s writing anywhere, since it always seems to be heartless and is often disgusting, and just plain no fun to read. I wouldn’t recommend this run of The Authority to anyone.

He did Peyer’s fill-in arc, of course, and then came back for Brubaker’s relaunch three years later.

Then the Peyer filled-in with his four-parter to give Adams time to complete the Millar four-parter.

At any rate, I got fed up with all the delays and dropped the book.
Never looked back except for the Planetary/Authority two-parter, but that was a Elsewhere project, if I remember correctly.

The Ellis/Hitch run was far more memorable.

Millar’s Authority continued the momentum of Ellis’, and had some really good ideas, but I have to say it holds up badly. The dialogue is awkward, the voices are interchangable, the heroes are basically sociopaths finding deserving targets and paying lipservice to humanitarian ideals, and the villains have all the depth of Dr. Light. The only way to read it is to treat it as one big farce, and even then Millar’s offered better ones since ( Ultimates being the most obvious, but Wanted, Kick-Ass, and even Wolverine: Enemy of the State have all the bloodshed without the pretensions. Plus, their art is consistent; Quitely’s even more talented than Hitch, but he didn’t keep a full run, and the fill-ins were too different to keep up the flow ).

I feel bad saying this because the Authority was doing great things at the time and the emptiness in DC’s collective sack cut off its momentum permanently, but my favorite superhero comic as a 16-year-old looks somewhat embarassing now.

Wait, how is that different from Ellis Authority?

They stayed away from politics.

I may have understated the political talk, but go read Millar’s first issue, where the characters talk about how they have to make a change, and topple a dictator.
The rest of the run is them talking about how they’ve changed everything and are totally different themselves, whilst proceeding to star in over the top, yet run of the mill, stories.
Ellis’s book was all about the action, and it stuck to that principal.
Millar’s book was all about doing something new – from what he said, and how characters talked – and all they did was fight super-villains.

Also Greg, one of the issues you listed as by Millar was actually written by Morrison.
The one with Relgimon.