MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

I know that laws are fake and nobody's going to enforce them on Elon Musk while he and Trump are still in each other's back pockets, but it's still an eyebrow raiser, somehow, for a billionaire to just be actively tweeting out "I spent the weekend committing clear federal crimes hbu"

..he's just the one that's worried about the genocide of the Atomics in similar terms to the apocalypse. And why not? It would be an apocalypse for him.

Etienne absolutely would trade all the Atomics' lives for the lives of an equivalent number of ordinary humans. Heavy would not.

Magus might say that Heavy is *American*, but he isn't *America*, not the way The Major was, an instrument of a nation state. Not least because the comic opens with the USA trying really hard to kill him.

But nor can you get out of the game. So long as accumulating power is a possibility for anyone, it'll be a possibility for arseholes, and if you set all your power aside you're powerless when the next arsehole with power comes along.

It's a truism that power corrupts, but one for the goals here is to really understand why. The standard answer, I think, is just that without constraints people just end up more able and willing to indulge their base instincts. But Magus' story isn't that. For him it's about safety.

(See him examine the data in these panels. Side note, what's the decline circa 81-82 about? That's in reaction to The Major being killed off in 81, and/or Masumi's Tokyo event in 82? Or is there something else here? It's not an abrupt cliff like in 1989...)

We don't yet fully understand why Magus felt he had to do this, but he didn't do it lightly. The "first" Pyramid wasn't solely made of suckers; he made it out of, if not friends, people he admired and liked:

And the power disparities here are stark. As the kids say, it's problematic.

Issue #2, the not so secret meeting of Jacky Magus with the two extradimensionals.

PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE
Let's kick this off with a little triptych.

More dualisms will doubtless become evident over time. But there's also ways to divide our cast up into factions. One of them is given as a data page:

Somewhat subtler is this conversation between Masumi and Etienne Lux. Lux means light, natch. Etienne has a brain that's all light, all sharp angles and clear delineations and clarity, networking everyone like fiberoptics, learning everything.

Masumi's mind is a void from which no light escapes.

But he's not the only one holding himself together with his powers, is he?

Etienne is an omnipath psychic in the Professor X mould. He controls minds. Including his own:

SCARS AND SHARDS

The Power Fantasy is about damaged people in a very literal sense, and a damaged world in an even more literal sense, as the huge scary on the globe itself in issue #3 demonstrates. But scars and shards are everywhere.

Shit, does this make me an elder?