The Authority/Heartwarming

• "Human on The Inside" starts out as a highly cynical story of how a Government Conspiracy has the team falling prey to their own doubts and weaknesses and how humanity has screwed up so badly that a time traveler from the future attempts to unmake existence itself since the future is such a Crapsack World that nothingness would be better. The team comes to term with their failures and despite the time traveler's insistence that such a thing is impossible, one of them discovers the solution to changing the present in order to improve the future: Hug one young girl and tell her that she's loved.

The thing about it, the thing is: the human body can take a lot of damage. Even when you crush its spirit it'll keep going like some kind of... Well, like something that isn't human. But I believe, at least I've come to believe, in everyone there remains the light of humanity. And for it to burn again, all that needs is a spark.

• Any moment with Midnighter and Jenny Quantum when she was still a toddler. Seeing a Badass bottle-feeding an infant will always do this, but how can you not die of cute when the little girl later pats said Badass on the head and tells him:

Best I stay with you, Daddy Midnight. You just get into trouble when I'm gone.

• For someone who pretty much personifies the Darker and Edgier Anti-Hero, Midnighter gets kind of a lot of these moments - if it's not his daughter, it's his husband. In the "Godhead" arc, a man named John Clay forms a cult devoted entirely to worshipping himself - only it spreads like a virus, converting everyone it touches. When the Authority tries to fight him, they find that the worship has given him the highest levels of post-human power, and he ends up beating the snot out of them all and infecting Jack Hawksmoor, the Doctor, and Midnighter. Jack becomes a rich celebrity schmuck with a bad goatee; Jeroen reconciles with his wife, a brainless, selfish J-Lo Expy; Midnighter actively resists. How? Well, they want his first act as a convert to be a public statement that he's lived a wicked, perverted lifestyle, but is now cured. Under the influence of the virus, they can make him flagellate himself with iron spikes, but they can't make him say he doesn't love Apollo.
• From the most recent run, this, which has been known to prompt noises normally reserved for giggling babies and boxes of kittens. As one commentator puts it, "I keep getting weirded out of the d'awwww because this is the d'awwww of a killer."
• From issue #17 of Abnett's run: Midnighter, in search of a cure for Apollo, has finally found out who's calling him North - it's a little girl called Gaia. A century baby like Jenny, Gaia's real form turns out to be the island Midnighter's wound up, and in return for helping her, she gives him... an apple.

Midnighter: What the--?
Gaia: [Walking away through the ocean] Remember Avalon... The isle of apples... the fruit of immortality... of love...

• • Two pages later, Apollo's just fine.
• The ending of Abnett and Lanning's issue #17 was one giant Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.

---

Back to The Authority