The Power Cut

He posed a comparison of three scenarios:

Peace

99% of humanity die in nuclear war

100% of humanity die in nuclear war.

Most people would agree that 1 is the best of those options and that 3 is the worst but is the difference between peace and 99% of humanity dying versus 99% of humanity dying and 100% of humanity dying greater?

Parfit argues that though while for many the difference between 1 and 2 may intuitively seem more significant the larger difference is actually between 2 and 3. This is because if 100% of humanity dies what is lost is not just the humans who exist today but the much larger number of future lives that could exist across the entire future span of the entirety of human history.

The transhumanist Nick Bostrom developed Parfit's argument in a more grandiose direction that presaged the current longtermist movement. Bostrom would argue that every day that humanity had not colonised the Virgo Supercluster and filled it with happy lives was an astronomical waste. He didn't however argue for speeding towards colonising the universe despite the lost opportunity cost that horrified him but instead for taking every step necessary to protect the cradle of the galactic civilisation that he imagined growing from Earth.

The longtermist community has roots in utilitarianism, transhumanism and existing concerns about existential risks. They were convinced by the type of argument Bostrom made and see positively influencing the far future of humanity as the key moral priority of our time. The longtermists see the far future as a particular pressing issues for our time for two reasons. They believe that the development of new technology has led to new existential risks from nuclear war to biotechnology to AI and the world is therefore at risk like never before. They also view the present as a pivotal moment where there is a greater opportunity than in the past to shape the long run future of humanity. The focus on the future as their key moral priority has led to longtermists facing accusations of neglecting the present.

At first glance a philosophy aimed at averting the extinction of humanity founded in utilitarian views would seems to be one that would fit Etienne Lux but if we consider him further he appears less ideologically aligned with them than you would expect.

It is Valentina who seeks to preserve the "music of the future", Jacky who holds steadfast belief that ordinary humans will get there if they're just given time, and Heavy who builds Haven and frets about who will protect Atomics after he's gone. Etienne, by contrast, thinks of the future relatively seldomly. He doesn't ignore it, but it isn't his overriding concern when he works to prevent the mass deaths that Superpowers can cause with his concern being at least as focused on the immediate destruction they can bring.

Even in the first pages of the series, where his proposal for world domination gives more focus to the future than he does elsewhere he is still primarily concerned with the near term. His long term plan for a "psychic quasi-democratic model" is an afterthought, something to be fleshed out later, compared to the overriding immediate threat of billions of people dying. Lux does not raise arguments about the paramount importance of future lives when he discusses saving the world and outlines his utilitarian views.

Lux also differs from longtermists in he is scrupulous about minimising the extent of the harm he causes in the short term. Lux is perfectly willing to do terrible things but remains almost obsessively focused on avoiding acting unethically in so far as possible.

Other than when dealing directly with the other Superpowers, when Lux takes actions outside the bounds of accepted morality he strives to use as light a touch as possible and puts off acting until necessary to avert imminent disaster. This can be seen in his physic control of those surrounding Masumi. He only alters the critic Olivia Brown when Masumi is on the verge of exploding. Rather than rewriting Isabella at will, he waits until she asks and uses nudges instead of larger changes. Longtermist ideology would, with the future at stake, see proactively making larger changes as justified.

In addition to this lack of ideological alignment with longtermism Lux is increasingly pushed by circumstances to focus on the short term to the exclusion of the long term.

Lux being pushed into this short term focus begins when he sets aside his plans for world domination for the balancing act. Rather than making long term plans we often see Lux reacting to immediate threats or perceived threats; in this respect he arguably plays the closest to the role of a traditional superhero of any character in The Power Fantasy. Lux is willing to act proactively against Superpowers but this stems from the fact that as far as Lux is concerned any Superpower is an immediate walking threat to the safety of the world.

This focus on these immediate threats underlies many of Lux's actions. He is far from Adrian Veidt with a grand plan to save the world forever. Lux understands that his balancing act is an ongoing process without an end. It requires saving the world again and again so he focuses on addressing immediate threats instead of planning how to save the world once and for all.

Lux's focus on the short term is not without its drawbacks. The clearest illustration of this is his handling of Masumi. Lux considers every time Masumi gets upset as a risk to millions or even billions of people and concludes that he needs to ensure that she is never upset. That she is never confronted with "unpalatable truths".

It is hard to fault his logic in any individual instance. He is right that it is a terrible risk and yet the consequences of him doing this are leaving Masumi emotionally stunted and ensuring that because of that she will remain just as much as a risk as ever. Lux sees doing otherwise as unacceptably flipping a coin with the faith of the world at stake. An unacceptable risk. So rather than helping Masumi develop coping skills and gain experience in handling distress Lux instead ensures she is kept shielded from anything that could hurt her.

Until eventually Lux misses a beat, and she is confronted by Isabella. Lux isn't wrong that this was a coin flip in the moment but working through it left Masumi a little better adjusted, closer to her girlfriend and a little better able to handle the next time she's risking dissociating until she turns into a Kaiju. Isabella, quite unintentionality was able to make the world safer from Masumi in a way that Lux's short term reactive planning was never able to do.

We see this tendency present itself in Lux's belief that in conflict between Superpowers "first strike is the only hope". We see it when he argues that they should kill the Queen if they have the opportunity. We see it again when we learn he argued for Masumi's death and is only convinced otherwise due to practical concerns.

To understand Lux's reasoning here we need to make a brief digression into game theory. Game theory is the mathematical study of strategic interactions. The originator of the field John Von Neumann was also a believer in first strikes. He advocated bombing Russia before they could develop nuclear capabilities and become a threat to his adopted home country of the USA. He infamously suggested "if you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?”

Game theory distinguishes between one-shot and iterated games. One-shot games are ones which are played once and then done with nothing outside that instance taken into account whereas iterated games are repeated multiple times.

The distinction is simple to explain but can be easy to miss in practice. The paper that introduced a famous game The Prisoner's Dilemma (the specifics of which do not concern us here) involved the game being played repeatedly and ends with a footnote by John Nash (pp. 24-25) arguing that this amounted to "having the players play one large multimove game... If this experiment were conducted with various different players rotating the competition and with no information given to a player of what choices the others have been making until the end of all the trials, then the experimental results would have been quite different, for this modification of procedure would remove the interaction between the trials." (emphasis in original) If the game is repeatedly with the same person or the players have information about the past games of the person they are playing against it stops being a one-shot game and becomes an iterative one instead.

Considering this the mistake Etienne is making becoming clear. He is viewing his conflicts with other Superpowers as a one-shot game when they are actually an iterative game. Conflict between Superpowers can only ever be a one-shot game if there are only two Superpowers. Etienne shows his willingness to act via first strike again and again. Every time he does so he is providing information that the players of future games with him will take into account in their own strategies.

We see this come to pass when Eliza learns the truth that Dev is alive, has replaced Jacky Magus and while attempting to grow to the strength of a Superpower is vulnerable for now. From knowing the results of how Lux has played the game in the past Eliza and Dev both conclude that if Etienne learns the truth about Dev's vulnerability that he will kill him in a first strike. Their belief about how Etienne will act leads them to conclude that they have no option but to preempt his first strike with a lethal first strike of their own.

The decisions taken in each individual instance are, as is so often the case with Etienne, easy to see the logic of, but their cumulative effect led to a scenario where Eliza felt she had no option but to kill him. Any other emerging Superpower who feared Lux would carry out a first strike on them would be backed into a similar corner.

In Etienne’s defence this is far from his ideal scenario. It’s shown from the beginning of issue #1 that this is Plan B because Valentina would not go along with Plan A of taking over the world. Etienne understands the balancing act as something that is fundamentally unsustainable that becomes more so with each additional Superpower introduced. He just does not think there is any alternative. Lux for all of his short term focus isn’t so blinded that he doesn’t understand the need for a sustainable solution.

Though he shows some awareness of the limitations of his approach in Etienne's focus on maintaining the balance between the Superpowers there's another balancing act he neglects - balancing the short and long term. He doesn't balance stopping Masumi exploding now with developing her coping skills in the long term. He doesn't balance first striking the potential threat of new Superpowers with the risk he is creating of somebody deciding that they need to first strike Lux before he first strikes them. He fails to balance these short and long term considerations and in the end that is what almost gets him killed. Lux survived but if he is to succeed going forward, he will need to chart a new path that avoids both his previous excessive short term focus and longtermist neglect of the present.

Kid Ignition’s initiation into the Superpower club is marred by an attempted assassination of Etienne (although as of the end of issue #11, readers don’t know if anyone is aware the attempt failed).  Before things get explodey, however, Kid Ignition sees firsthand that being a Superpower is more about accepting constraints than being able to throw your weight around.

This paradox of constraint by one’s own power is the core of The Power Fantasy.  Our cast of Superpowers all fundamentally agree that the world should continue to exist and so they rely on this tacit understanding of one another to check themselves against doing anything that might jeopardize the planet.

Then in 1989 the Queen appears.

The Queen is an anomaly among the Superpowers, an extradimensional being whose origin cannot be ascertained by any methods available to the others.  She appears fully formed in Manchester one day, giving off enough radiation that she could give everyone in the vicinity cancer, and explains when Valentina arrives to make first contact that she has come to make heaven on earth for everyone.  Valentina, herself an extradimensional entity who arrived with a specific mission to protect the world, gets on board with the vision immediately.

What follows from this moment is perhaps the single greatest crisis the Superpowers collectively face in their fifty-five year history.  The chief actors among the Superpowers, Valentina, Etienne, Heavy, and Jacky, are divided on whether the Queen represents a threat that needs to be managed or an opportunity to tangibly improve conditions on their very fragile ball of dirt.  Their collective mission up to this point has been the balancing act, and the Queen is an obviously destabilizing factor.  Valentina and Heavy are cautiously optimistic, seeing the Queen’s utopian vision as a chance to make more people happy.  Etienne and Jacky take a more pessimistic view, citing the alien nature of the Queen and how incomprehensible her actual motivations are.  When the Queen has an apparent mental collapse after realizing that she cannot achieve her goal, the question of whether to change the status quo gets interrupted by an immediate need to save reality from the Queen’s lashing out.  While personal failures haunt the older Superpowers, Jacky Magus and the Pyramid succeed in saving reality through immense sacrifice, including Jacky’s apparent death and secret replacement by Dev, now Magus of an obliterated Pyramid; the descension of Eliza Hellbound, binding her soul to extradimensional hell in exchange for the power necessary to mercy kill the flailing Queen; and the complete destruction of Europe.

It’s a bad day for everyone.

This event, dubbed the Second Summer of Love, hangs over everyone in 1999.  A proactive Superpower emerged, and she couldn’t cope when she failed in her mission.  Where does that leave the other Superpowers?  How do they cope themselves as they continue to sustain the balancing act, understanding intrinsically now just how fragile it is?  They’re acting as guardians of the planet, but to what end?  The Queen’s stated vision appealed to at least half of the active Superpowers in 1989.  She failed and flamed out spectacularly.  Was this a problem with her vision or with her personal standards?  Does that kind of planet-threatening self-destruction await any other Superpowers who dare to let their reach exceed their grasp?  Is it worth the risk to try to make something better of the world?   

It may be useful to divide the six Superpowers into three distinct generations with differing visions for the world.  In the first generation, we have Valentina and Etienne who fundamentally agree that maintaining a stable status quo is more important than any other concerns.  Valentina arrives declaring her mission of saving everyone.  Later, when she first meets Etienne, she suggests that the specific threat she’s guarding against is nuclear annihilation.  They form a friendship around this shared goal, although Etienne develops his own theory about existential threats to the planet, namely that the only way to ensure that he and Valentina can effectively respond to them is to become worldwide benevolent despots.  These two are the old guard among the Superpowers, people who prioritize stability above all else.  Valentina, who prizes free will for humanity much more than Etienne (perhaps because she sees the timeline as the only place in existence where it’s even possible) is conflicted about this approach, and takes radical action in moments of extreme distress, but she and Etienne are generally in agreement about not rocking the boat.  They see their responsibility as ensuring there continues to be an Earth where a heaven can eventually be established, although they leave that vision for the future up to other people.

In the second generation are Heavy and Jacky Magus.  While Heavy is of a similar age to Etienne, his debut as a Superpower with a clear political agenda aligns him more closely with the slightly younger anarchist magician who emerges a few years later.  Heavy proclaims his agenda proudly: he wants better treatment for the growing Atomic population, people who develop extranormal abilities as they mature, and he wants to counter the American imperial project that grows in scope as the Cold War drags on.  Heavy describes himself as a leftist and eventually disavows his American roots to found Haven, the traveling Atomic nation-state.  His ideals are fundamentally progressive with a strong focus on protecting his preferred group.  Jacky provides a paradoxical counterpoint, as his anarchist politics are even more radical than Heavy’s, but he accumulates power through a strictly hierarchical cult system that leaves him vulnerable to co-opting by established power structures (as his successor Dev realizes and embraces in the 1990s).  The cult is necessary to both lock down access to magic and to allow Jacky to become powerful enough to be reckoned with by the other Superpowers.  He understands this paradox and copes with it by arguing that his Atomic ability of knowing things makes him uniquely suited to acquire power for the sake of giving anarchism a seat at the global table. He hates that this is the conclusion he has reached.  In these two figures, we have Superpowers who want to change the world.  They have clearly stated goals and visions for how they think things could be better, and consequently, they are the two most politically active.  The series’s precipitating crisis is a moment of posturing by Heavy being aggressively countered using technology that Dev, masquerading as Jacky, covertly supplied to the American government.  Where the first generation focuses only on preservation, Heavy and Jacky (and later Dev) ascend with distinct visions of how to make the world better, although they both find themselves caught up in machinations to increase their power rather than actively using it to make improvements related to their stated goals.

The third generation of Superpowers consists of the two who would most like to be left alone to live their lives in peace.  Morishita Masumi has no ambitions towards power.  While her kaiju form grants her a level of social privilege that she couldn’t attain otherwise, she understands that the privilege is an artificial construct designed to keep the rest of the world safe from her.  She’d rather just be an artist, focused on exploring what her unique circumstances mean for herself and the world.  Eliza Hellbound contrasts Masumi in her decisive embrace of power.  While she enters the story as a member of the Pyramid trying to climb the ranks, ostensibly aligned with Jacky’s stated purpose, her moment of Superpower accession comes in response to a crisis.  In the midst of the Second Summer of Love, with Valentina neutralized for unknown reasons, Eliza makes the decision to damn herself so that someone can kill the Queen.  She takes power for a specific, limited purpose, and then she appears to have no more interest in exercising it, an ironic turn since Eliza most likely joined the Pyramid to achieve a specific goal of world improvement in the first place.  Instead she cloisters herself away, relying on her Catholic faith to sustain her as she anticipates the eventual realization of her damnation.  For both of these women, their vision is intensely personal, mostly because they rightly understand that their attainment of power imposes remarkable restrictions on them.

It becomes more clear with this generational schema to see how the Superpowers respond to the trauma of the Queen’s Second Summer of Love.  Etienne and Valentina’s general conservatism towards interfering with global politics turns into them being more controlling about how the other Superpowers behave, with Etienne citing his general inability to take action during a crisis besides pain mitigation for victims and Valentina being shaken by her personal failures in seeing the threat the Queen posed.  Dev Magus, having witnessed the sacrifices the Pyramid had to make to stop the Queen’s destruction, has betrayed Jacky’s anarchist ideals in favor of doubling down on American imperialism in order to ensure his own survival.  Masumi slept through the crisis at Etienne’s direction, once again finding herself no more than a liability.  Eliza took enough power to make a difference to the world, but the cost has paralyzed her will to do anything further.  Heavy’s response to the Second Summer of Love is the least apparent, but he has stayed the course with his plan of raising his son to be an ally in the complicated web of Superpower politics.  If there is a clear conclusion to draw from the Queen’s appearance, it’s that she underlined to all of the Superpowers how little power they have to pursue any kind of utopian vision if they want to live to see it. While the first three generations of Superpowers represent a range of visions for the world from aggressive conservatism to radical progressivism to yearning for the ability to simply find personal satisfaction, Kid Ignition sits on the edges of the story, eagerly waiting for his chance to take his place among his Superpowered peers.  He is young and impulsive, apparently unscarred by the events of the Second Summer of Love, and questions remain about what his vision for the world could entail.  He’s spent eighteen years living inside a bubble, and now he gets to learn about the world at the same moment he assumes the power to shape it.  Heavy hopes his son will act as a reinforcement for his own leftist politics, but as everyone knows, it’s the rare child that perfectly mirrors the values of their parents.  Questions remain about what vision of heaven is knocking around inside Kid Ignition’s fiery head, whether it’s something we’ve already seen or something radically new.  Regardless, the most salient question he may end up posing is this: what good is a status quo that makes nobody happy?

Beyond the straightforwardly racist depiction of Kenyan society inherent to this entire beat, Xavier’s framing of this decision, and Ororo’s acquiescence to it, leave a bad taste in my mouth. For one thing, attacking her divinity is a quibble in the face of her functionality; she’s more attentive and conscientious than many of the literal gods that exist in the setting. To call her current situation a “fantasy” feels off, as well– was the drought not a legitimate issue, hurting a lot of people? Was she not doing real, measurable good? Xavier’s issue can’t be the superfluous theatrics of her persona- he’s here to recruit her as a costumed superhero. Maybe his issue is that her work is too localized? Maybe her “responsibilities” to the outside world involve working with Xavier to systemize her power use, to combat drought and climate change globally, or even to research and replicate her powers, so she won’t be the sole bottleneck for the good they can do?

Of course not. Xavier’s headhunting her because he needs humanoid artillery. The “real world” he’s inviting her to join is choked with costumed maniacs who need smiting–  and that’s somehow less juvenile than the “fantasy” she’s living now? Her immediate “mutant responsibilities” to the world aren’t anything systemic; instead, she’s got the rather specific, mutant-centric job of springing a bunch of her mutant brethren from an evil, vampiric living island. The “real world” problems which Xavier will set her against won’t become more grounded from here.

A frequent, foundational swipe taken at the superhero genre is that it can’t substantially engage with real life politics or problems; superheroes either spend their time fighting fantastical threats that are orthogonal to real life issues, or fighting individual violent criminals while glossing over the systemic issues that produce crime. All superheroes receive this accusation to some extent, but the X-Men are uniquely susceptible because their runaround is couched in the kind of aspirational rhetoric that Xavier feeds to Storm. The team’s brand requires them to champion an idealized future that can never actually arrive, or indeed, be formulated too specifically, lest it become too tied to its era of formulation; this cageyness is visible on a review of the team’s behavior over time. The popular surface-level understanding of the X-franchise is that it’s a civil rights metaphor, though the specific movement being paralleled shifts with the decade. The more accurate understanding is that the deliberate political coding was a retrofit introduced in the mid-1970s by Chris Claremont. In the 1960s, they were traditional superheroes in good standing, deputized by the FBI – barely counterculture, let alone radical.

The underlying politics of that team can’t match the manifesto of the group that overthrew the human-supremacist Genoshan Government in 1990, or the politics of the group involved in the foundation of a Mutant psuedo-ethnostate in the 2020s. The actual practical goals towards which the X-Men are working will always be couched in vague platitudes informed by the zeitgeist. What they’ll always have to fall back on, though – their most enduring success, the short term triage work that defined the teams charter before political conscientiousness was on the minds of anyone in the bullpen– is self-policing. In their 1963 debut, the point of the X-Men was to serve Humanity, sure, but not by innovating or ushering in Utopia. The point of the X-Men was to counteract evil mutants.

Self-policing is laudable, when the group that’s self-policing is defined by the ability to kill skyscrapers with a glance. It’s not a political project, though. It’s not a worldview. It’s definitely not compelling if you’re running a utilitarian calculus on the existence of mutantkind, because it’s a mission that wouldn’t be necessary if mutant powers didn’t exist at all. Charitably, it’s the maintenance that you do in order to get enough breathing room to think about the future, but for the X-Men the future can’t arrive. Some mutants like Storm are introduced using their powers to improve the world in smaller, concrete ways, but inevitably, they’re drawn into the game of whack-a-mole, all forward motion stalled by a never-ending parade of crises that roll the boulder to the bottom of the hill. The X-Men have spent the better part of the 21st century in crisis mode, beating back existential threats to mutantkind – The Decimation, The Dark Reign, The Terrigen Cloud, The Fall of Krakoa – and when the fight is perpetually for survival and nothing else, the “Mutant Struggle” and “Xavier’s Dream” can begin to feel insular; siloed from every real world issue they could be a metaphor for. Superhuman power and agency, directed towards nothing but its own survival. Krakoa is the closest they’ve ever gotten to an on-page manifesto of what a mutant political project might look like beyond treading water, and we’re two years out from that going the only way editorial was gonna let that go.

Editorial. There’s the magic word, the ever-present bugbear, the real reason nothing can amount to anything. Editorial needs things static so they can keep printing the books. Editorial is why the once-topical life circumstances of Claremont’s initial X-Men lineup –  like Magneto’s zionism-inflected mutant separatism, or Colossus’s communism – grow fuzzier in their specifics over time. Editorial is why the mutant struggle is doomed to be a siloed, myopic cage match that can never be too intersectional with real life civil rights struggles, or otherwise generate any widespread change that the wider Marvel Universe would have to consistently acknowledge. Editorial is why a world in which Ororo Munroe exists still suffers drought. There’s nothing intrinsic to the premise of the X-Men franchise that produces this dysfunction–  it’s all downstream of the serial publication model. It follows that in a unified timeline by a single author of vision, unbeholden to editorial whims– surely we’d get to see what powerhouses like Storm could really do for the world, right?

Towhich The Power Fantasy responds, “No, not really.”

The Power Fantasy offers commentary on significant chunks of the superheroic tradition, but it’s most prominently a pastiche of X-Men. For the purposes of the pastiche, Heavy stands in for Magneto, but the ways in which he’s distinct from Magneto are telling. Like Magneto, he’s a partisan and champion of his superpowered demographic; unlike Magneto, whose political concerns are usually (and conveniently) siloed to mutants and mutants alone, Heavy’s ideas extend to what the Atomics ought to be collectively pushing for once they’ve secured their basic physical safety. When the U.S first tries to kill him in the 60s, he isn’t leading a generic “Atomic Rights” rally –  he’s specifically trying to rally fellow Atomics against nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. When he pulverizes The Major, he isn’t doing so out of a vague Atomic-supremacist stance – he’s avenging the imperialist atrocities The Major has committed for the U.S. Government. He hates cops, he loves free-love, and his long term goal is the creation of another Superpower aligned with his politics, putting a thumb on the scale in favor of a “more leftist” world.

What does a “more leftist” world actually entail, though? What can it entail, if it’s enforced by the fiat of a superpowered hereditary dynasty? Is Heavy a communist? If so, what kind? An anarchist? Jacky is expressly an anarchist, and he wrestles with the contradictions inherent to that label when he’s wielding power the way that he does. Heavy never specifies. This isn’t because he’s insincere– he’s bloodied the US government’s nose, and been bloodied in turn, to a greater extent than anyone alive could dream of doing. Instead, I think that he has the luxury of never having to specify how he’d order the world, because that’s always been academic for him. He’s never operated without there being at least two other Superpowers who’d reign him in, should he really swing for the fences. Lux, by contrast, once had a very specific plan on how to order the world in the absence of anyone to stop him – a benevolent tyranny-slash-hive-mind democracy enabled by his omnipathic abilities. In the company of other Superpowers, he instead puts his omnipathy towards the most pressing problem to which it’s applicable – preventing his peers from having world-ending meltdowns. He had a dream once – far more specific than Xavier's – but circumstances drive him into that exact same game of self-policing Whack-a-Mole.

Most of the Superpowers are like this. With the exception of Masumi, they have abnormally fleshed-out political worldviews for their genre, and in comparison to the specific work that they’re most directly in conversation with. Most of them have specific ways that they’d use their powers to change the world if they could. But their preoccupation with each other means that little has been structurally upended; the world of The Power Fantasy hasn’t moved that far afield of the World Outside Your Window. Valentina’s attempts to brute-force an end to the Cold War led to her being forced into seclusion in orbit; she provides standing protection against further nuclear exchange but she isn’t especially proactive beyond that, and nuclear war isn’t the same going concern it used to be. The Pyramid’s technology is never shown being applied to any problem unrelated to The Superpowers; are there any numinous desalinators, terraforming machines, carbon scrubbers? Or are the wagons too tightly circled, limited resources directed purely towards checking the other superpowers, with Magus keeping a death-grip on anything truly world-upending for fear of the repercussions of letting it out? Lux and Heavy conspire to kill corrupt cops at a high enough rate that it shows up in the statistics, but without the leeway to upend the system further, it’s just a leftist-flavored version of The Punisher endlessly murdering drug dealers. The Superpowers have killed two U.S. Presidents and this changed nothing; in fact, the second killing was an attempt to salvage the status quo. The biggest example of the superpowers permanently changing something about society, for better or for worse, is when their failure to stop The Queen resulted in the destruction of Europe. Even this feels analogous to the damage that the big crossovers at Marvel might tally up if the implicit human costs weren’t lost in the editorial churn.

 Eliza represents the epitome of this trend of incredible power finding itself in a closed loop. She sought power in the first place for the sole purpose of neutralizing The Queen, with no larger vision for her ideal world order; aside from a quick jaunt to rescue the Vatican, she appears to have cloistered herself for the following decade. At her level of power –  and her implied instability in the face of damnation –  there’s a sense in which her inaction is something of incredible value to the world at large. At the same time, she is demonstrably capable of more. Her first big expenditure of power after defeating the Queen is to assist Dev with his plan to annihilate Lux; in order to trick the others into closing the stadium roof, she casually demonstrates the ability to manipulate the weather from halfway across the world.

Storm has demonstrated the obvious humanitarian applications of this ability, but there’s no indication that Eliza pursues such things. Valentina parses the storm as one more example of Eliza exercising power to set the tone – exactly as inward-facing as the power she exerted to create her cathedral. But the real reason Eliza’s doing it is the same as the reason she took power in the first place– to neutralize another superpower. Before she pivoted against Lux, she was a hair’s breadth away from destroying Dev under the assumption he’d crossed a moral line by aligning with the U.S. military- again, only acting to neutralize another superpower. Like Storm, she emerges from divine seclusion for the express purpose of aiming artillery at her fellow superpowers, but it makes a bit more sense for her than it does for Ororo; more so than anyone who followed Valentina, she only exists the way she doesin response to the existence of other superpowers. They’re the problem that she brought herself into existence to solve.

For those unfamiliar with the anime, the basic premise of Evangelion is that on a post-apocalyptic Earth, a group of giant monsters called Angels attack remaining centers of human civilization, mostly Tokyo (now Tokyo-3). Tokyo-3 is defended by a group of children paired spiritually with giant mechs called EVA units, working for a shady organization called NERV. The protagonist, Shinji Ikari, is the young son of NERV’s director, estranged from his father and most other people as a result of neglect. During the series, Shinji is drafted into the EVA pilot program, and without spoiling too much, strains and breaks his ties to his friends and family as part of saving the world.

I have long joked that Evangelion has to exist in the universe of The Power Fantasy, because of its emphasis on a destroyed Japan living in fear of the next giant monster that will inevitably crush them all in a casual step again. There is extensive lore around the show’s creation and its intersection with real-world events and creator Hideaki Anno’s mental health during its development, which would likely be amplified by the more extreme devastation that happens in the comic’s alternate history. And that is not even acknowledging the fact that Masumi is functionally an Angel that would be fought in the show.

Comparing Masumi to an Angel is a straightforward analysis that would work well for psychoanalyzing an alternate-universe version of Hideaki Anno, which would be fun. But I am more interested in the effects of watching the show on Masumi for purposes of this fanzine about the comic Masumi exists in.

Imagine you’re Masumi Morishita. You are the most unintentionally dangerous person in the world. Every time you get stressed, you run the risk of killing millions of people in a best-case scenario. The five people who can best relate to you all have significantly more control over themselves and see you as a liability. You discover a show about a kid who has world-destroying power handed to him and is pointed at bigger problems and told to solve them. The connections write themselves.

Masumi and Shinji are close parallels in that neither of them asks to be in the center of the main conflict of the world. Both have an authority figure who puts direct pressure on them to play their part and play it perfectly, and the worst part is, they know that the authority figure isn’t wrong.

In Evangelion, much of the plot tension comes from the relationship between Shinji and his father. The show establishes that Shinji comes to Tokyo and chooses to stay with NERV out of a desire to have some connection with his father Gendo, who relentlessly exploits the connection to make him pilot the mech. Exact translations of the moment differ, but a key part of the reunion between father and son in the show is Gendo shouting at Shinji to “get in the robot or get out.” Shinji wants love and wants community, but all that awaits him is service.

The equivalent in TPF is the relationship between Etienne and Masumi. Etienne, long positioned as the spokesman or friendly face of the Superpowers, takes it on himself to watch over Masumi, trying to keep her from summoning her kaiju. He gives Masumi a cutesy phrase to get his attention - “Etienne-monster-crayon-kitty-Masumi.” He even micromanages her relationship with her girlfriend to keep it as saccharine as possible. He keeps her satisfied because it is the least bad option he can manage. As he admits to the other superpowers, he tried to kill her when she first appeared, but could not get into her head. So he shepherds her instead.

As of the end of the second arc, it’s unclear how much Masumi knows about what Etienne thinks of her. She seems to express genuine affection and appreciation for him keeping an eye on her, but there isn’t evidence that she knows Etienne would rather have a world without her in it, and Lux certainly has no reason to tell her.

Note: The rest of this essay will proceed with full spoilers for Neon Genesis: Evangelion.

Evangelion’s convoluted endings are a major part of its reputation, but there is something in their symmetry that would especially appeal to Masumi.

For people who are reading this section of the essay without watching Evangelion, there are three “official” and equally valid endings for the show: the televised ending, the movie ending released a year later, and the remake ending released decades after the fact. All three share a similar structure: NERV’s mission fails and the angels are used to end the world. Human consciousness is merged into some kind of collective entity, but Shinji retains enough individuality to make a choice about whether or not that collective consciousness will continue to exist or if the world as he knows it should return. The differences come in how this is visualized and, more relevantly, what Shinji chooses to do.

In the ending of the TV show, Shinji reflects on his own self-worth and decides that he is worth continuing to exist in a world with people, and restores the world by affirming his own value. In the movie ending, Shinji comes to the opposite conclusion: because he is miserable and isolated, he chooses to continue existing as a person and leaves the human collective. Finally, in the remake series, Shinji rejects the binary he is offered and instead chooses to make a new world where the events of the series did not happen, creating a world where people are able to live without the threats that exist in the world he knows.

While the remake complicates the simplicity of the binary choice, there is still a fundamental divergence that holds relevance for Masumi as a person. She seeks artistic fulfillment and validation. She, like Shinji, wants attention and community, but also has the dark side in her that, by being denied those things, can destroy humanity as a whole. Watching Evangelion for Masumi is watching someone with more agency than she has build up to making a choice once that she has to make every day. For her, every day is the End of Evangelion. And, like Shinji, when all is said and done, she can end up on the edge of a ruined Japan, watching the reddened ocean lap against the shore of what was.

It is a comic of numbers, logistics and mechanics. Even game mechanics: the Ubers exist in classes with a rock-paper-scissors interaction. Events crucially hinge on the logistical details of how long it takes to make an Uber (approximately a month) and the precise numbers of them it was possible for various combatants to field at various times. Uber’s narrative voice is objective and uncharacterised, commenting on events from the detached, hindsight perspective of the historian.

It also diverges significantly from established history, such that it would be impossible to imagine that Uber’s 1999 would remotely resemble our own. In this respect it is a truly alternate history: moving from a single point of divergence, nothing thereafter can be assumed to occur as it did in our own timeline. History in Uber is fragile, hinging on details and vulnerable to being shifted.

We can contrast another Kieron Gillen comic, in which the manifestation of superpowered individuals affects the course of the centuries, in which the squabbles of a small group of these powerful people could turn out to have massive implications for the globe. I speak here of course of Image Comics’ The Wicked + The Divine. Contrasting with the impersonal tone of Uber, the comic we'll shorten to WicDiv has a deeply personal narrative voice from one of the key participants and characters, Laura Wilson.

In theory the universe presented in WicDiv is even more vastly different from our own, with supernaturally empowered demigods striding the planet for six millennia, since the dawn of civilization, and with those gods possessing powers far more diverse in manifestation than the relatively limited and mechanical sets available in Uber. Despite this, the 2010s presented in WicDiv are intensely similar to our own. It is not that the gods of the recurrences have no effect on the timeline: we see analogues of various 1920s Modernists and 1830s Romantics dying ahistorically both in manner and timing. But these changes turn out not to matter, and the actions of the successive Pantheons have largely acted to steer history in exactly the fashion history reports, including having responsibility for phenomena such as the Black Death. This is a convergent alternate history, where events are different but conspire by the hand of an author to still produce a present much like our own.

These two approaches have different things to stress to us about the nature of history. Uber stressed history's contingency; how much things could have been different, how individual moments can have enormous effects downstream. WicDiv stresses instead broader historical forces, which may be orchestrated and guided by individuals (one in particular!) but where events largely serve a master narrative.

Where, then, in this implied spectrum, does The Power Fantasy sit? At first blush it would seem to sit much closer to WicDiv’s side of the aisle. The 1999 it presents has marked differences to be sure, and one enormous one, but is still largely recognisable; up to 1989 things have converged enough that it seems Ronald Reagan was still US president in the 1980s, even though Nixon was killed years before Watergate.

But there's a large Europe-shaped hole in this logic. The catastrophic conclusion of the Second Summer of Love scarring a whole continent from the map tilts the narrative, promising how far events could go by showing how far they've already gone. It's a major stakes-raiser, to be sure, but it's also the biggest single deviation from the historical timeline by far. But it's delayed until 1989, so the full ramifications of that deviation haven't really had time to express themselves. We're left with an alternate world still in a post-traumatic haze, still recognisably ours (right down to Neon Genesis Evangelion) but also irreparably shifted.

As for narrative voice, TPF has not yet offered us one. It stresses neither individual, subjective perspectives and narratives nor a quasi-objective “just the facts” recounting of minutiae. This is a story that is neither discovered through the assembly of historical data as Uber is presented, nor one that is being directly told by any of its participants. It is instead a story that's emerging as gestalt of the actions of personalities.

Why do it this way? To answer this we have to ask what alternate history narratives are for. It's tempting to say that an alternate history that hews closer to real history does so in order to better comment on our history, whereas more divergent histories are more intellectual science fiction exercises of exploring a premise to its conclusion. But that feels false; all narrative comments on the real world, however allusively.

It also feels insufficient to appeal to a relatively late diversion from history as pure stakes-raising for the purpose of escalation, a kind of inciting incident. Yes, narratives generally escalate in terms of tension, and having Europe be obliterated is certainly an effective way to do that, but it’s insufficient justification for something as structural as this.

I think the answer lies in that earlier dichotomy between the contingency of history and its being shaped by broader forces. Of course the truth of history is a mixture of both things: history emerged both because of small individual events with cascading consequences and larger trends. But the question of what creates history gains sharpness when we consider one of TPF’s key subtexts: how the twentieth century was formed by the prospect of nuclear war.

The Cold War period is especially acutely characterised by the intermingling of broad historical forces — such as the grim logic of mutually assured destruction — with moments where individual decision-making was what stood between us all and oblivion (everyone say thank you to Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov). It is both explicable and logical that we have not all died in a nuclear war, and tremendously fortunate; simultaneously rational and conditional.

In some ways TPF’s alternate history does present relatively direct comparators to Cold War events. The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolds similarly, for example, albeit with an actual angel substituting for the better angels of our nature to trigger the de-escalation. (And what effect did that have on the Cold War political situation, to have de-escalation enforced rather than arrived at by themselves?) Even the big departure of the Second Summer of Love is still timed so as to cause the fall of the Soviet Union roughly in line with established history.

Yet it would be a mistake to view TPF’s superpowers as simple analogues for nation states. Instead it is the decision-making pressures they operate under that are analogous. Nobody, not even Magus, represents America (well, maybe the Major did) in TPF’s universe, but the characters do partly embody types of thinking by superpowered actors, from cold utilitarian logic to hotheaded brinkmanship to the yawningly terrible knowledge that it could all come down to the wrong person having a bad day. Even the revelation that Jacky Magus deliberately sought Superpower status to get his viewpoint a seat at the table, or that Eliza did so to counter another Superpower, has a mirror in the nuclear proliferation that characterised our 70s and 80s, with nations recognising that possessing nuclear weapons was the way to be listened to internationally, or to avoid being pressured by a bellicose neighbour. If nuclear war were more personal, history might well have been more chaotic, but it would also still have been guided by many of these same thought processes. TPF’s relatively mild divergence from our history allows it to better depict both sides of that equation. It functions as a dramatisation of the effects of power on ways of thinking, on how the possession of world ending arsenals inevitably distort personalities, replacing trust with paranoia and peace with detente. And then it shows us just how fragile it all is, and just how lucky we were and still are: at least, for now.

When Lloyd from Phonogram listens to a Los Campesinos! track it articulates something intensely specific about what he cares about, what moves him, what that song means right now. If you know the band it’s ecstatic and if you don’t you’ll look them up.

Caspar Wijngaard is no stranger to comics about music either. The opening pages of Home Sick Pilots could only be drawn by someone who knows exactly what it feels like at a shitty punk show, with a Hernandez-esque reverence for sticky floors, bored crowds and electric guitars. I’ll spare you another hundred words about the fascinating alchemy between a purely visual and purely auditory medium (it’s all been said by smarter people than I) and leave it at this: The Power Fantasy has music in its blood stream, and the veins show.

The very second spoken line of the book is about the Lovin’ Spoonful. It’s an incredibly powerful scene. We’re introduced to the Superpowers twofold. These are people who could, as Etienne proposes, take over the world, and these are also people who go to gigs and eat pizza. It’s humanising, and in its humanity, petrifying – the ethos of the book. The mid ‘60s setting feels essential too: It’s the decade of pop music and the cold war, the Beatles and the Bomb. This is the central dichotomy with Valentina, whose birth in the opening sequence of the third issue puts it into very literal terms. Doris Day’s “Sentimental Journey”, an angelic little pop song, serenades the Brazilian hospital room  at the very moment of detonation in Los Alamos. It reads as a mission statement for Val, but also the book as a whole. The Power Fantasy exists at the critical intersection of the monstrous and the beautiful - every character is as much defined by their favourite songs as their powers of mass destruction. 

This issue is more overtly infused with music than any other in the series, and its standout sequence is no exception: during the apex of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Valetina sits wide-eyed, gleeful as she tears open a parcel - Telstar by The Tornados, “Number 1 in the UK.” as the note from Etienne reads. It’s an image that could be almost ripped from a period piece Phonogram story, as she shuts her eyes and enters a hippy-phantasia before disarming the major US and Soviet nuclear bases seemingly instantaneously. “I heard the music of the future. The music of the future needs a future to exist in.” It’s not subtle but Wijngaard works wonders here, between the pastel drenched serenity of one panel to the greyscale void of the other. 

It’s the ecstasy of falling in love with a song, and the comedown. In the prior page the symmetrical layout of the spread literally transforms the Earth into the centre of the record. As Valentina orbits it like the satellite of the song’s namesake, the visual metaphor is clear: it is her whole world right now.

When Superman saves the world it’s out of a fundamental goodness, his undying love for humanity. Valentina does it for a pop song. It’s no less altruistic, but it grounds it into something utterly human and specific. Telstar is an incredible track, and “the music of the future” is apt, both in its revolutionary production techniques and in the electronic, whining, utopian, sci-fi soundscape it conjures. And it makes sense that Etienne appreciates its technicality at the least. The fact he is the one to send her the record speaks volumes. In TPF, even the most chillingly didactic character - a man who literally controls his own mind on a chemical level - keeps up with the charts. 

I think another interesting differentiating factor with other musically-aware comics is how inextricable music and characterisation are in TPF. So many of the cast are grounded in scenes. Valentina seems like something of a musical omnivore, but she is constantly linked to the first and second Summers of Love - a hippy at heart. Heavy is a Detroit radical who Gillen talks about in the same breath as the MC5, with Haven as his Ann Arbor commune. Jacky is a Brixton punk and Dev and Eliza are at least connected to the scene. In all three cases music is intrinsically tied to their radicalism. Magus at first glance is the classic image of the sellout punk, the Johnny Rotten whose ideals were either hollow in the first place or traded in for a suit, tie and conservative politics. He’s a character as informed by archetypes of musicians as music itself - even if in his case the sellout really is a different person to the idealistic younger man. Ever aware of her ex-friends’ music tastes, in #3 Valentina gifts him a vinyl copy of the Dead Kennedy’s In God We Trust Inc. as something between a gesture of good will and a condemnation. 

Even beyond “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the increasingly right wing Magus is linked so specifically to a band famous for the song “California Uber Alles” in an arc which culminates with his plan to run for US Presidency.  But the interest in scene culture isn’t limited to characterisation. In an EXTREMELY Kieron Gillen move, the world-changing global tragedy, and primary focus of the second arc, is set in amongst the real world second summer of love: a British music and culture phenomenon fuelled on ecstasy and acid house. The Power Fantasy dares to ask - what if the world ended to a Stone Roses track? The Queen’s Madchester utopia is filled with bucket hats and drugs but what Val is most enamoured by is, of course, the music. Music, again being emblematic of her divine calling and hippy optimism. As the Superpowers meet to discuss The Queen’s intentions, Heavy and Val’s matching double denim and aligned position on the matter seems particularly of note.

 To return to my ‘scenes’ point, they are both most defined as 60s countercultural figures. Heavy is the White Panther activist and Valentina the idealistic bohemian - from “the utopian side of the movement” as Harris says about the Queen. Their shared values here are in immediate contrast to Jacky, whose 70s punk cynicism and anarchist principles would happily point out that free love led to Manson too. 

The 1989 sequences in Issue Seven are gorgeous. Even knowing the party is on a one way road to oblivion, the Queen and her followers make a compelling argument. Apartment buildings are draped in peace flags and connected with makeshift bridges. It’s an ever-expanding, city-wide commune. 

It’s Val’s heaven on Earth at last. Wijngaard paints the pages in the same blotted pastels as those previous Telstar panels while Gillen echoes Valentina’s previous gig-turned-nuclear-devestation. “I hadn’t been at a festival since New Mexico and this was like a dream of that…” But the Queen’s paradise shatters - our recurring dichotomy: perfect songs at the end of the world. Sentimental Journey and the Trinity Test, Telstar and the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Second Summer of Love and the decimation of Europe. Gabriel’s trumpet in the century of the radio. To self-indulgently quote both Kieron Gillen and my favourite band: “we are beautiful, we are doomed.” The apocalypse imagery is haunting and deliberate, a technicolour explosion from a single, perfect black circle. An eclipse of the Queen’s brilliant light. Or perhaps another kind of black circle at the centre of things – a record. 

Essentially, I think in The Power Fantasy music does two key things. On the macro-level it serves as a form of quiet worldbuilding. This is a world populated with our music history, grounded in the specifics of real movements and scenes. There is no equivalent to Watchmen’s fictional “Pale Horse”, Gillen is a writer interested in precision, and real world media is a more effective tool. But on the micro-level it informs and dictates these characters. The Power Fantasy is certainly not The Boys, and it is not even Watchmen. Doctor Manhattan and Homelander don’t have favourite songs. These characters do. The fact is, with the possible exception of Etienne, this is not a comic of Rorschachs or Adrian Veidts. In some ways, it’s a comic of Dan Driebergs. It’s a book about what real people do with immense power. People shaped by music like we all invariably are. Because in our world the people who press the big red button have a favourite song too. Is that comforting or terrifying?

Eliza positions herself in opposition to Aquinas. While her assertion that "God will save us all" is certainly contrary to his views, her insistence that all who display true penitence will not burn is a sentiment he would share. In Summa Theologica Aquinas argues it is "erroneous to say that any sin cannot be pardoned though true Penance... this is contrary to Divine mercy... Therefore we must say simply that, in this life, every sin can be blotted out by true Penance".

Hope for salvation was long considered a virtue by Christian theologians but prior to Aquinas this was largely considered to be hope for one's own salvation. Joseph Trabbic argues that this stemmed from Augustine claiming the object of hope was "only what affects the one who entertains the hope". Aquinas while agreeing that hope is about what affects oneself argued that as we are bound to others one is affected by what happens to them and can therefore hope for their salvation. There is disagreement about how widely Aquinas intended this to extend. Some claim that it only extended to hoping for those you are personally close to while others claimed it applied more widely.

After his death Aquinas was recognised as a saint. While there is a lot of mysticism associated with saints at its core a saint is simply a person the Church recognises as being in Heaven. As we are discussing Eliza Hellbound you might wonder whether the Catholic Church teaches the converse - that certain individuals are known to be in Hell.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that in 1460 Pope Pius II held a trial in absentia for an opponent of his Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. Malatesta was accused and convicted of various crimes including incest, murder and rape (though the veracity of these claims is doubtful). Effigies were burned and Pius publicly declared that Malatesta was consigned to hell even though he still lived. Even Pius himself doubted the validity of this declaration and few since would assert that Pius's theatrics mean that we know Malatesta is damned.

It is easy to imagine that Eliza might find Malatesta being damned by Pius reminiscent of her own experience.

The episode is of historical interest only. Despite Malatesta's unique case, it remains true that few Catholics would assert that they know any specific individual is damned. Since Catholics don't claim knowledge that any particular person is damned a further question arises. Is possible that nobody is in Hell?

The work of the 20th century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar is relevant to this question. Balthasar would go further than Acquinas and in his controversial book Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? would argue that hoping for the salvation of others should extend to hoping that everyone will be saved. Balthasar marshals theological arguments bolstered by support from scripture to argue that there is hope for universal salvation.

Balthasar's views while controversial are firmly within the Catholic mainstream. John Paul II announced plans to elevate him as a cardinal though Balthasar died prior to his consistory, the then Cardinal Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) presided over his funeral and stated that the church "tells us that he is right in what he teaches of the faith" and though not referencing him directly Pope Francis expressed similar views when publicly stating that "I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.”

Crucially, Balthasar does not argue that he knows everyone shall be saved. He draws an analogy to having a sick friend that he hopes will recover without knowing that they will. In Balthasar's view there are passages from scripture and revelations from saints that imply many are suffering in Hell while other passages and revelations imply the opposite. Faced with this contradictory evidence he believes that the correct position to take is to hope that all will be saved without asserting that you know this is the case. In this way his book is significantly more timid than Eliza's confident speech.

Balthasar is reluctant to quantify how likely it is that his hope will be realised. Even this however was enough to earn him opprobrium from those who believed that his teachings were likely to lead many to Hell by lessening their fear of it. On the other hand other Catholics have gone further than Balthasar and while rarely asserting certainty appear to argue that it is likely or even probable that all will be saved.

None perhaps has gone as far as Edith Stein who predated and inspired Balthasar. Stein believed that "the descent of the grace to the human soul is a free act of divine love. And there are no limits to how far it may extend". She argued that though the possibility of damnation remained in principle, "in reality, it can become infinitely improbable".

Unlike Etienne Lux, Catholic theologians have long had to deal with the concept of infinite. Something being infinitely improbable implies the probability that it does not happen is 99.999...%. It is simple mathematics that 0.999... repeating is equal to one. It follows that a probability of 99.999...% is equal to 100% and it is at minimum possible to read into Stein an argument that the possibility of damnation rather than merely being small is non-existent.

Eliza's views while not elucidated in depth assert that everyone will be saved. Different interpretations of what she means by this are possible - perhaps that Hell is a temporary state or that rather than being existent and empty Hell does not exist at all - but given the emphasis placed on how seriously Eliza takes her faith it is reasonable to assume that while radical she still wishes to fall in line with Catholic teaching as far as possible which those interpretations would not. This would imply she holds views similar to those outlined above but in her pride takes them further than is typical and claims not just hope but certainty that all will be saved.

When Eliza learned what the Pyramid knew about Hell it would have both reinforced and tested her faith. Despite Magus (both Jacky and Dev editions) claiming that this hell is not the Christian conception of Hell what Eliza learned of through them is that Hell exists and is empty which aligns with her long existing religious beliefs. Under Eliza's theology however it should not be possible to damn yourself with a ritual so the claim that one can give oneself over irrecoverably to Hell provides a challenge to her.

Jacky considered Eliza unsuitable to be a Fucking Arsehole not because she was a Christian but because she "actually believe[s] it". Later when he learns that someone has sold their soul he immediately infers that it must be Eliza. Jacky's reluctance to raise Eliza to the rank of Fucking Arsehole was likely in part fear that she would sell her soul. Catholics have an unhealthy fixation on venerating martyrs and many saints have both wished and vowed to sacrifice their own salvation for the salvation of others. When Jacky tells Eliza there is information he doesn't trust the Arseholes and "especially you" with he looks down at her crucifix necklace, a symbol not just of Christianity but specifically of self-sacrifice.

Jacky's fear was justified. Eliza damns herself to save the world. In damning herself to save others she acts saintlike in the very moment she becomes the opposite of a saint.

However, unlike the saints discussed here it isn't the salvation of souls that she does this for but the mere protection of mortal lives. It is hard to imagine how this would add up for someone like Eliza who takes her faith so seriously until you consider the specifics of her theological beliefs. She is certain that God will save everyone. Even as she damns herself she is certain that "God will never turn his back on" her. After the destruction of Europe she still clings to the belief that "no one's doomed" and it is only later as she grapples with what she has done and the destruction she has wrought that her certainty shatters.

We know less of Eliza's theological beliefs after the Second Summer of Love. While she fears for her own soul it is unclear whether she now considers others at risk of damnation. Given her inward focus in relation to questions of salvation it is not an unreasonable assumption that her faith that others are saved remains intact even as she now fears for her own soul. Returning to Balthasar this interestingly aligns with what he considered the ideal view a Catholic should take towards the possibility of damnation; he approvingly quotes Kierkegaard "as far as I am concerned the situation is that all the others will, of course, go to heaven; the only doubt is whether I shall get there."

We can now consider the question posed by the title of this piece. Dare we hope that Eliza be saved? If we view it through a Catholic lens the answer is clearly yes and not just for those who like Eliza, Stein and Balthasar hope that all will be saved. While selling your soul to Hell in exchange for power isn't something the Catholic Church would recommend, to put it mildly, neither is it an act that irrecoverably damns her. If Eliza is pentinent she can be saved.

For those of us who are not Catholic and look at the Hell depicted in The Power Fantasy from a non-religious point of view there is also reason to hope. Rather than by the love of God, Eliza may be saved by the love of Jacky Magus.

Jacky seemingly "died and descended into hell", though admittedly not in that order. Even considering it from a non-religious point of view, potential literary parallels to the Harrowing of Hell (Christ's descent into Hell following his death to release souls who died before he came) are obvious. Jacky sends Dev back to Earth and remains in Hell. Jacky may have been planning to hitch a ride on the Signal 2.0 or may have needed to remain to close the hole to Hell but it is only after he learns that Eliza damned herself that he proposes the plan with Dev taking his place which suggests a third possibility that he decided to stay in Hell as part of a not yet revealed plan to save Eliza.

If Eliza was freed from damnation it would seem to reaffirm her youthful theological views but if this happens her reaction might be more complex. The mark of selling her soul, destroying Europe and later actions particularly the mortal sin of murder will stay with her.

Even if Eliza is saved, she can't turn back time and return to being the prideful rebellious girl she once was.

People who say they know better tell you it can’t be helped. The world is doomed if she’s unbalanced, if she encounters a hard truth. We all have to work together to give her a perfectly easy life. It’s for the greater good, you know.

And your monster, despite her flaws, is yours. She’s sweet, and she smiles every morning when you greet her with real coffee instead of the terrible instant stuff she would make if left to her own devices, and she makes sure you know how important you are to her. She loves you, you think. You love her, you know. You think. It’s complicated.

Sometimes you hate her. This is a fact that everyone but she can see. You watch her, sleeping on a makeshift futon in her studio after pulling an all-nighter, and you wonder what would happen if you just walked away. She depends on you for so much, and it would be so satisfying to hear that helpless yelp as she realizes she’s lost you. The world could end on your terms, and that might just be worth it.

Except you wouldn’t hear anything, would you? Most likely she’d change and you’d be crushed before you knew you had been missed. And you need to know. It’s why you stay, really. When you’re drawn and tired and none of the good parts of your monster are shining, you can still hang on because you must see the end coming.

You saw it once, a technicolor black hole hanging in the sky right where the sun should have been. Then it was gone, and you were still here, sort of. Your whole life disappeared in an instant, but it left your body behind, forgotten.

You don’t dare take the chance that you will be forgotten the next time the end arrives. Surviving once nearly killed you. So you stay with your monster. With sufficient care, maybe you can make sure she loves you enough to remember when she destroys everything.

It would be easy to resent the need you feel for your monster.  People watch the two of you in public.  They’re too frightened to whisper in front of her, but you recognize the looks.  They watch you with the same sad intensity that you watch her, wondering what madness let you get caught in her orbit.  They think they have more sense than you by keeping their distance, but distance from disaster is a shared fiction. They can’t understand, or won’t. Either way, you know they think your need makes you a freak. Yes, you could resent it, but instead you cling to it. Needing something, anything, means you’re still alive. How could you not love what makes you feel alive?

And then she wakes, and you see her kind, oblivious eyes, and you smile. She’s lovely, and she will probably kill you, but maybe she won’t. Either way, you see her, and you hate her, and you love her, and you’re long past the point of knowing the difference.

Of course, actually controlling the minds of the entire population would be Unethical (and make Valentina kill him), so clearly he will have to allow most of humanity to make their own choices, allow them to shape their own world as they grow to fit within it. On the other hand, he also has a responsibility to protect them from the horrors of the outside world that humanity simply isn’t prepared to face, even if that means keeping them from exercising their full agency. The preservation of humanity is, after all, an Ethical Good (and also he’d die if humanity went extinct).

This is a dilemma many parents will recognise: Do you try to control your children more tightly, or let go and trust that you’ve prepared them well enough to stand on their own.

It’s just that the stakes aren’t usually this high.

Tell the Truth and Trust

In many ways, raising a child is about supporting them until they can face the world without you, and then letting go. This is not an on-off switch so much as a gradual progression towards independence. Slowly letting go and stepping back as they learn to walk, to run, to soar, still close enough to catch them if they fall, at first, but slowly but surely trusting they can handle themselves. Until they’re ready to pursue their own interests and goals as adults, and you no longer could catch them even if you wanted to.

Until they’re your fellow Superpowers, as it were. Etienne is, after all, rather limited in how he can approach the others. To some extent, he has to trust them to make their own decisions, take care of themselves and not wreck the planet in a fit of pique. Hell, he needs to trust Valentina, because she’s his own fallback plan.

It’s on this basis that he negotiates with Heavy and Magus, as well. There is still that echo of paternalism in his interactions with them, in how he presents himself as the one to ‘smooth things over’, makes himself the vessel through which the others can communicate without causing a disaster, and how he plants a spy in Heavy’s inner circle, but in many ways he has no choice but to trust them to be sensible.

Because we see what he does when he does have that choice.

Truth is a Luxury My Ethics Cannot Afford

Etienne sees Masumi and Eliza as the two most emotionally volatile Superpowers, the two that need ‘managing’, whether that’s overt or clandestine. He cannot allow himself to take that step back and trust them to handle themselves, because if that coinflip ends up tails and he’s not there to catch them, the world is done. With these stakes, it’s downright irresponsible not to keep hovering over their shoulder.

This is the anxiety that lies at the heart of every helicopter parent, the worry that stops them from letting their children stand and fall on their own. ‘What if something happens and I wasn’t there to help?’

Etienne’s ability as a Superpower, after all, is only useful for this kind of prevention. If things ever get bad, it’s too late for him to do anything, a lesson he learned the hard way during the Second Summer of Love.

So he keeps Masumi in her carefully stage-managed dollhouse, where nothing she experiences is distressing enough to set her off. He keeps Eliza convinced that she’s still standing in God’s light, that she has not completely damned herself to Hell, with all the mental strain that realisation might bring with it.

Is Masumi emotionally strong enough to handle the outside world creeping in? Is Eliza’s faith strong enough to not need the explicit confirmation of God?

Best we don’t find out whether or not the answer to either of those questions is ‘no’. The world’s at stake.

But that’s not how you raise a child.

The Cost of Not Flipping the Coin

As any parent knows, if you hold your kids back too much, you will stifle their development and hurt your relationship with them.

Masumi is well aware that she is being stage-managed, that much of what she experiences is artificial and she is being shielded from the truth. Like every other child, she isn’t stupid. She does very much trust that Etienne has, if not her best interests, then at least humanity’s in mind, but she very much strains against this imposed arrested development. She still wants to grow, she still wants to experience reality, no matter how dangerous that might be. The more this reality is denied her, the more reckless she becomes in pursuing it, and the less likely she becomes to heed Etienne’s warnings.

And Masumi still actually likes him!

There is already no trust between Eliza and Etienne. He has to resort to the most outrageous of lies to get her to listen to him in the first place, and while he says that pushing her too far would be unethical and dangerous, this lie itself is already playing into some of Eliza’s worse qualities. She is aware her big sin is pride, but she can’t help but gloat to Valentina about how she gets to talk to God. He seems to be poisoning her faith, as necessary as he says this skullduggery is. The longer he keeps this lie going, the deeper this false faith sinks into her, and the worse she will respond when she does find out.

Every time Etienne refuses to flip the coin, the odds of it coming up bad go up, and he won’t be able to stop it being flipped forever (even if he will be around forever).

After all, the damage he’s done to his relationship with Eliza, the environment of paranoia and mistrust he fostered, already saw her try to kill him once, all because she was too scared to tell him the truth about Dev.

Thank You For Being Brave Enough to Share

By contrast, when Isabella does show Masumi that bit of truth, that glimpse of the reality she knows is out there, and the Superpower proves able to handle it? She becomes more resilient, more able to roll with the punches.

Every time the coin comes up heads, it improves the odds for next time.

The stakes are high, and the Superpowers have to operate on a degree of logic so alien to most of us, but they are still people too. Trying to stage-manage Masumi through her entire life, trying to artificially keep Eliza’s faith alive, will lead to disaster as surely as leaving them to face the world without support will. But it’s through allowing them to grow that they can become the adult they’ve been prevented from being, and that’s the narrow path that will lead to reality’s persistence.

With frequent flashbacks and the dispassionate Issue #3 closing timeline, the series is a morbid unveiling of the near-clockwork decadal tragedies marring its alternate history. Much like Eliza confronting her inability to find meaning in her own damnation and the Queen's nuclear meltdown, I as a reader become uncertain that I'm gleaning anything new during rereads. Gillen and Wjingaard have delivered on their promise of a sublime and “dreadful” tension through sly plotting and dynamic visuals, but like Eliza I ask: “Do we ever learn anything”? Like Eliza's call to remember the Catholic God's “omnibenevolence”, what quality should we remember?

The “standardization of catastrophe”  is a concept first put forth by journalist Norman Cousins in 1946, referring to public outcry toward the Bikini Atoll tests shrinking as the bombings repeated – “the mystery dissolves into a pattern”. Nuclear studies scholar Dr. Laura Considine links the standardization of catastrophe to what she calls “nuclear cliché”. Considine asserts that international discourse calling nuclear weapons and their effects “unthinkable” obscure the material realities of which communities and geographies are affected by the environmental and political costs of nuclear proliferation. She thus suggests that the collective must “confront” and “disrupt” the “limits of international politics”, whose activities are enabled by the cliché of inconceivability and a fuzzy, generalized “humanity” they repeatedly claim to care for.

The cliché of The Power Fantasy's U.S. government's disastrous strong-arming is clear in what plagued Heavy and Valentina, and in the implied “neocolonial” actions of the Major. Power uses cliché to obscure how it gambles public safety. While glimpsed at Heavy's 70s protests, we barely see any on-the-ground response led by civilians against their government's actions – the masses of TPF's 90s silently watch commentators on TV, or wordlessly move through airports and life-as-usual. The manufacturing of consent via repetition is clear; one atomic bomb blast at a festival is but an echo of other bomb blasts. A murder attempt on Heavy is but one beat in an inevitable pattern. Suicidal magic use, the Minister of Magic might say, is technological teleology – damn the human or environmental cost.

To speak up against power is reserved for the powerful, like the grandstanding Heavy and the ominous Etienne… or the brave few like Isabella and Tonya whose role is to undermine cliché. Isabella disrupts the Lux-abetted cliché of her endless, perfect love for Masumi in Issue #9 when Isabella declares: “Sometimes, yes. [I hate you]. I love you, Mia Bella. But sometimes…” In Issue #1, Tonya interjects whenever Lux speaks to his benevolence, undermining the reasonable and down-to-earth image he repeatedly attempts to construct during her interview with him. “There I go again,” he is forced to admit.

Attending to Lux and Tonya's discussion raises the question: what clichés do the Superpowers, including now-dead ones like the Queen, invoke from issue to issue to obscure the true toll of their power? What do they use to pull the wool over others' eyes, and what covers their own? The most prominent cliché is Godly benevolence. The Queen invokes “heaven on Earth” to win Valentina over with a promise of “utopia”. Long before we read Eliza's theological musings in Issues #7 and #8, Lux pitches Valentina as a “beloved god-queen” whose “benevolent” totalitarian rule alongside him would bring about world peace. Eliza's faith in her God's omnibenevolence is what leads her to her tragic fate within a system we're repeatedly reminded is “unlike” the Christian imaginary. Promises of heavenly salvation are shown (or in Lux's case for dictatorship, implied) to result in the opposite. Most tellingly, art surrounding the Queen's call for “heaven on Earth” implicitly positions her as a haloed deity – a halo whose color inverts into a reality-destroying black hole to hell.

Gillen and Wjingaard's juxtaposition of the wicked and the divine suggests that seeking transcendence – from the Queen ignoring the material, “cancer”-causing limits of her energy emissions, or Eliza ignoring the metaphysics of her sold soul infinitely echoing through Hell – is a doomed project. Valentina's Issue #7 flashback, gorgeously illustrated in psychedelic rainbows, may be what opens our view onto the Second Summer of Love, but it's Issue #9's plain reality of a suburban rooftop in Tokyo that sees Isabella ending it. A lethal rainbow gives way to the muted colors of the real.

Isabella's retelling of the Second Summer of Love, besides ending on her accusation that no Superpower should exist if civilians are to remain safe, also outlines “the collapse of the food chains” that the Second Summer of Love caused, alongside the “sunburn”, “frostbite” and “cancer” victims suffered from the Queen's radiation. Material facts of flesh, soil, farming, and food return to the narrative despite their omission during the radiation-immune Valentina's retelling of the Second Summer. Returning to my question of which adjective – if not “omnibenevolent” – is vital to this text, the true beginning of Isabella's retelling of the Second Summer is important. Masumi starts it by asking Isabella for what happened, saying she needs to make art which “looks up” or “around”.

While Masumi is insensitive in her assumption that work which “looks around” requires mining Isabella's trauma for art, she has a point about acts that don't “look down” but “up” or “around”.

With “narcissism” framed as Masumi's problem by both Etienne and herself, Masumi is paralleled to both the Queen – whose void of ego collapsed around her – and Eliza – whose self-described “pride” led to her downfall. To a lesser extent, Valentina commits the same mistake of self-centeredness in the Second Summer of Love. She forgets that what's true for her isn't true for everyone: she's invulnerable, but Manchester isn’t.

Masumi's arrival at the theme of what is “around” therefore seems hopeful. If we recall Considine's point about nuclear cliché, the way out of clichés like divinity is specificity. Considine's call to specificity finds a friend in environmental thinker Donna Haraway's call to “stay with the trouble” or that of theorist Timothy Morton toward “subscendence” – to turn from thought-terminating cliché, such as capitalist infinite growth that pretends to transcend material limits, and instead remain with the “trouble” faced by nonhuman species and the disempowered, finding ways to flourish together as interconnected beings. In other words, to think and work carefully with what is “up” and “around”.

The Superpowers sometimes work in this subscendent, particular mode, underlining its value. Valentina, by living in space since ‘69, makes good on her promise to “live somewhere” the U.S. government “can't kill people” in explosive attempts to destroy her, attending to the squishiness of humanity. If Valentina hadn't broken from that pattern in ‘89 – reminding herself of the radiation the Queen was emitting, looking around at the squishy cancer-proneness of the humans in Manchester – the Queen's cliché of heaven would not have sucked her in and spat her out.

How might transcendence and subscendence figure in the futures of the series’ most volatile Superpowers, Eliza and Masumi, who are trapped in the comic-book cliché of the unstable superwoman? The infernal Eliza finds relief in the assurance of heaven. A source of tension heading into future issues is how Eliza will react if Lux inadvertently or otherwise reveals that there is no God who speaks to her but him, belying the trap of transcendence. Masumi, too, seeks a way to escape “what [she] costs” via “praise” and “public approval”, aspiring to an artistic greatness that eludes her due to her desire for it. Both, in the end, find themselves dwarfed and kneeling alone beneath their repeated performances of monstrous mythmaking, waiting for true comfort that cannot come.

But for Masumi, who is surrounded by magicked leaves when she first discusses “look[ing] around”, and is earlier framed by Issue #2's establishing cicadas and pylons, the implications are clear. If Masumi is the dissociation kaiju, to be grounded in nature, community, and the real rather than self-sabotaging greatness might just free her of power's curse. Perhaps the same will hold true for Eliza, and both women will turn away from the crushing rhythm of the rituals they bind themselves to.

To answer my question of which quality is vital to this text, then, presence is our objective over transcendence. To shatter patterns of catastrophe the Superpowers, and us unpowered everymen, must look up and around, rather than down.

Returning to the explosive start of The Power Fantasy and this essay, Etienne underlines the ruinous subtext of Heavy's 1999 New York flyby: “And to tell everyone who isn't [an Atomic]: “We're above you.”” That positioning holds true until the most powerful of those beneath strike back with an orbital laser. Even then, those lower in the Pyramid fuel the arcanology operations of Dev's laser – from sci-fi orbital stations to mundane server rooms of “support staff, scientists, and the rest” – thus laying bare the contradiction of power: in our world, power comes from around and beneath. We have a chance to speak and act after watching televised cycles of violence and rereading comics on Google Books. What unthinkable patterns have we abetted, while looking down… and what more can we do, hand in hand, once we return?

Both sets of nostrums bear some truth. Time is not literally cyclical, but all things have their precedents and antecedents. And barring some freaky shit with closed timelike curves and infinitely long cylinders, we probably aren't doing time travel ever, so time is literally irreversible. Yet while we cannot literally change the past, we absolutely can learn from it, and even if we cannot reverse the damage done, we can repair it.

Unless some idiot blows up Europe, or something. Hard to cover up an ouchie that big.

This issue of The Power Cut is packed with art and writing, literally some of which is about time. It's also about a lot of other things, because we pick the themes as an aid to inspiration rather than a constraint.

Why time? Well, The Power Fantasy in its second arc spends a bunch of time in flashback, picking over the intricacies of its alternate history. We've spent the middle portion of Mutually Reassuring Destruction taking a close look at the explosive Second Summer of Love (“SSOL”, here and throughout) and ruminating over what happened and why. Eliza in particular was really stuck in it, whence comes our title quotation “Time and Time Again”.

What Eliza's doing when she obsesses and confesses the regrets she possesses, is not merely a religious ritual or a guilt-driven compulsion. She strikes me as sincere when she says she's interested in how her perception of past events and her choices shifts as she looks at them.

As this zine is partially a document of, I'm obsessive when it comes to stories, and I'm a huge re-reader. I frequently return to the same narratives again and again. And when I do I'm struck by how I often get new things out of even well-lived favourites, how a turn of phrase can strike me anew, how the benefit of a few year's new life experience can shift my perception of something I thought I knew well. Rich texts reward this kind of detailed close reading, and TPF is a deeply rich text.

It's also rich art, an aspect of the comic we've tried to focus on more in this issue. Comics are a temporal medium; they're sequential art, where images are placed together such that passing from one to the other in a particular direction conveys information the images alone would not. A string of images arranged into a single timeline, each moment frozen but able to be returned to and held up in a new light; Eliza's perspective is much like a comic. (We've even got a few of our own nestled inside this issue.)

Let's all be Eliza then, in moderation, and pick over this history. What will we learn this time?