now featuring: Apollo and the Midnighter!
Ugh. Self, there is a reason we don't buy cheesy poofs from anywhere but perhaps especially from Trader Joe's. Four years of training myself not to eat junk mindlessly just gets thrown right out the window when faced with the perfect mastery of terrible food that is a cheesy poof.
But let's not talk about cheesy poofs, or my new knee braces that have to be strapped so tightly in order to work that they're causing bruising; instead, let's talk about Apollo and Midnighter.
What's that, you ask? Who are these two superhero-named diametrically opposed probably very attractive and intriguingly damaged people? Why, they are in fact superheroes! After a fashion, anyway.
Some desperately awesome individual on my flist butterflythread! (thank you shiroi_ten) did this amazing, epic post about Apollo and Midnighter, team members of The Authority who are an out, married gay couple fighting side-by-side. When The Authority started, it was a thinly veiled reaction to the Justice League, and Apollo and Midnighter were thinly veiled versions of Superman and Batman--only, they were together from the first issue, an already established couple.
Be still my heart.
If I could find that post again I would link to it, possibly in sparkly text, because I've killed these books so fast and hard since then. There's five volumes, sort of, and several ancillary TPBs as well; and of course, now that I've finished it all, I've learned that DC is tanking the Wildstorm imprint and The Authority as we know it shall be no more. Instead, they're rebooting it into Stormwatch, which is a whole 'nother can of worms; but at least Apollo and Midnighter will still be there and still be together.
Have I mentioned my highly rational dislike of this forthcoming DC Universe reboot? No? I don't think I can talk about it without a martini in hand anymore.
Anyway, I offer all this baffling prelude to entice you into looking at some pretty pretty pictures of manly pining and textual tragedy. If this pimps you into finding out more, uh, I'm sorry the canon was just effectively ended in its current form. But at least you have fifteen new books to read.
Spoilers for the last 29 issues ahoy.
To explain: in v5 of The Authority, the Wildstorm Universe has undergone an apocalypse that doesn't need explaining at this juncture. Anyway, when the dust has settled, it's settled into a band of smog and grossness that prevents sunlight from entering the breathable atmosphere. And here's the thing--Apollo is, of course, a sun-charged superhero; he can't stick around with the rest of the team because his power becomes drained. Midnighter, his husband, is a gravity-bound superfighter who can't breath in a vaccuum.
They are tragically separated by circumstance. Allow me to swoon. This leads to panels like this (click to embiggen):
And, while Apollo is up there in the sun's corona working on his tan, Midnighter is down in the muck of it all sending up mylar balloons to get his honey's attention.
Midnighter's stoicism is unflappable--unless it's about Apollo, or their daughter Jenny. But, god, I wish you were here is like fucking hearts and rainbows from him.
So then some comic booky stuff happens, blah blah let's mercilessly threaten the best thing about this series, blah blah infecting someone with an immune system subject to space, blah blah Apollo disappears for awhile. Midnighter freaks out, for his value of freaking out. I don't even know where he's getting this many mylar balloons, but I do know I was clutching my sometimes-metaphorical pearls.
Nothing says love like hypoxia. Of course, they save their hero, and at least for a brief moment Apollo and Midnighter have a moment together. This being The Authority, we actually get to see two men kiss and not just fade-to-black. Excuse me while I send a mental "fuck you" to the Comics Code Authority back in time.
Oh my heart. Dear Warren Ellis: though you are questionable in so many ways, you are forever on my gold list for giving me Apollo and Midnighter.
And here's a single panel from a different storyline that made me laugh for several hours. The Authority are stuck visiting different parallel universes as they try to get home, like you do, and encounter a lame version of themselves. Polly and Middy just came imagine why people would think they were together, like a couple of homosexuals!
Why, that slash fiction! It's just so odd! (But he can't stop reading it!) The best part of this, and other versions of themselves The Authority have met over time, is that Apollo just laughs at them and Midnighter brooks zero shit. He's all, "Yes, not only do we fuck, but we got married too. With a priest. And raised a child. Together. Like a family. Which we are. Your point?"
Midnighter is basically Bruce Wayne with his memory wiped, and lord have mercy, that's the Bruce Wayne for me.
I will of course be reading "Stormwatch," like I'll be reading all the titles in their reboot form. But I'm not going to like it, damn it. Seriously, I get that rebooting means you can trick a bunch of new readers who came in through films into spending all their disposable income on pull lists without necessarily having to read the 500 issues of backstory that makes your current storylines have any sense at all. But as someone who's read those 500 issues, the idea that I'm losing characters I love to rebooting makes me really fucking sad.
P.S. Thank you to the nice folks who've sent me vgifts in the past; I don't seem to find out about them until they show up on my profile, but they're lovely and appreciated. <3
But let's not talk about cheesy poofs, or my new knee braces that have to be strapped so tightly in order to work that they're causing bruising; instead, let's talk about Apollo and Midnighter.
What's that, you ask? Who are these two superhero-named diametrically opposed probably very attractive and intriguingly damaged people? Why, they are in fact superheroes! After a fashion, anyway.
Some desperately awesome individual on my flist butterflythread! (thank you shiroi_ten) did this amazing, epic post about Apollo and Midnighter, team members of The Authority who are an out, married gay couple fighting side-by-side. When The Authority started, it was a thinly veiled reaction to the Justice League, and Apollo and Midnighter were thinly veiled versions of Superman and Batman--only, they were together from the first issue, an already established couple.
Be still my heart.
If I could find that post again I would link to it, possibly in sparkly text, because I've killed these books so fast and hard since then. There's five volumes, sort of, and several ancillary TPBs as well; and of course, now that I've finished it all, I've learned that DC is tanking the Wildstorm imprint and The Authority as we know it shall be no more. Instead, they're rebooting it into Stormwatch, which is a whole 'nother can of worms; but at least Apollo and Midnighter will still be there and still be together.
Have I mentioned my highly rational dislike of this forthcoming DC Universe reboot? No? I don't think I can talk about it without a martini in hand anymore.
Anyway, I offer all this baffling prelude to entice you into looking at some pretty pretty pictures of manly pining and textual tragedy. If this pimps you into finding out more, uh, I'm sorry the canon was just effectively ended in its current form. But at least you have fifteen new books to read.
Spoilers for the last 29 issues ahoy.
To explain: in v5 of The Authority, the Wildstorm Universe has undergone an apocalypse that doesn't need explaining at this juncture. Anyway, when the dust has settled, it's settled into a band of smog and grossness that prevents sunlight from entering the breathable atmosphere. And here's the thing--Apollo is, of course, a sun-charged superhero; he can't stick around with the rest of the team because his power becomes drained. Midnighter, his husband, is a gravity-bound superfighter who can't breath in a vaccuum.
They are tragically separated by circumstance. Allow me to swoon. This leads to panels like this (click to embiggen):
And, while Apollo is up there in the sun's corona working on his tan, Midnighter is down in the muck of it all sending up mylar balloons to get his honey's attention.
Midnighter's stoicism is unflappable--unless it's about Apollo, or their daughter Jenny. But, god, I wish you were here is like fucking hearts and rainbows from him.
So then some comic booky stuff happens, blah blah let's mercilessly threaten the best thing about this series, blah blah infecting someone with an immune system subject to space, blah blah Apollo disappears for awhile. Midnighter freaks out, for his value of freaking out. I don't even know where he's getting this many mylar balloons, but I do know I was clutching my sometimes-metaphorical pearls.
Nothing says love like hypoxia. Of course, they save their hero, and at least for a brief moment Apollo and Midnighter have a moment together. This being The Authority, we actually get to see two men kiss and not just fade-to-black. Excuse me while I send a mental "fuck you" to the Comics Code Authority back in time.
Oh my heart. Dear Warren Ellis: though you are questionable in so many ways, you are forever on my gold list for giving me Apollo and Midnighter.
And here's a single panel from a different storyline that made me laugh for several hours. The Authority are stuck visiting different parallel universes as they try to get home, like you do, and encounter a lame version of themselves. Polly and Middy just came imagine why people would think they were together, like a couple of homosexuals!
Why, that slash fiction! It's just so odd! (But he can't stop reading it!) The best part of this, and other versions of themselves The Authority have met over time, is that Apollo just laughs at them and Midnighter brooks zero shit. He's all, "Yes, not only do we fuck, but we got married too. With a priest. And raised a child. Together. Like a family. Which we are. Your point?"
Midnighter is basically Bruce Wayne with his memory wiped, and lord have mercy, that's the Bruce Wayne for me.
I will of course be reading "Stormwatch," like I'll be reading all the titles in their reboot form. But I'm not going to like it, damn it. Seriously, I get that rebooting means you can trick a bunch of new readers who came in through films into spending all their disposable income on pull lists without necessarily having to read the 500 issues of backstory that makes your current storylines have any sense at all. But as someone who's read those 500 issues, the idea that I'm losing characters I love to rebooting makes me really fucking sad.
P.S. Thank you to the nice folks who've sent me vgifts in the past; I don't seem to find out about them until they show up on my profile, but they're lovely and appreciated. <3