MARK: This is interesting because Vince and I didn't use a single violent image or curse word which hadn't appeared in the previous 12 issue. We were very, very meticulous about this because we wanted to avoid censorship problems with what we new needed to be a radical kind of book. You want to see exploding heads? See Authority issue 2. You want to hear about sexual violence on a continental scale, see Warren and Bryan's second story-line and rape-camps in China. It was great stuff and part of what made me feel like I was reading something different from Marvel and DC books.

RICHARD: You want images or words that hadn't appeared in Authority before? Poofs, faggot, pakis -- as well as the scenes of necrophilia, anal rape and baby killing. none of this was seen in Ellis and Hitch's run...

MARK: The baby-killing happened off-camera in much the same way children were murdered or eaten (see Sliding Albion) off-camera in the first 12 issues. Likewise, mild-cursing like 'poofs' is allowed on prime-time television whereas words like 'piss' and 'bastard' are generally banned until the 9pm water-shed in the UK so I don't think there was a real difference in tone. If anything, they used more BASTARDS and CHRISTS and PISSES than we did because we had most of that stuff removed from our scripts. Not that I'm keeping count, but I completely reject the idea that we were given more freedom. Is off-panel ANAL rape worse than off-panel VAGINAL rape? And the point is that we asked repeatedly for a Mature Readers label because the book needed it and they said no.

The original 12 issues had an edge which JLA or Avengers could never have and this is what appealed to us about the book. When we had fun with this and attracted all the mainstream praise and ever increasing sales, they asked us to keep doing a great job, but to stop doing all the things which were making the books such an outrageous success. It was crazy. To be fair, though, Jim, Scott and John Nee were absolutely fantastic for the bulk of our run. New York didn't get what we were doing at all and couldn't understand the success, but the guys at Wildstorm were shielding us and getting 90% of what we wanted on the page. We knew the restrictions (and it wasn't all-ages, btw), but asked repeatedly for Mature Readers and even formally issued a request for this by means of a proposal. But Paul knocked us back because it wasn't what he wanted to publish. And that's fair enough.

He was running the company and it's his decision. No creator likes to see their work hacked up (which is what happened in the end), but the only thing you can do is walk away and work elsewhere because you're a freelancer and they're management. You can't even get in the ring and I'm cool with that.

Ultimately, it just wasn't what they felt comfortable publishing.

Continued here...