Back In July, I Had A Problem: I Had Finished Nona The Ninth And Realised I Had No Idea When Alecto The

The Power Cut previews: The Superpowers

Essay and art previews for some of the essays from The Power Cut, an upcoming The Power Fantasy fanzine!

Credits:

Masumi: essay @jkjones21, art @tazmuth

Heavy: essay @idonttakethislightly, art @jkjones21

Etienne: essay @meserach, art @artbyblastweave

Magus: essay @rei-ismyname, art @jkjones21

Valentina: essay @khepris-worst-soldier, art @idonttakethislightly

Eliza: essay and art @idonttakethislightly

I've never made any connections between Worm and the Captain America mythos before. Spill some ink?

Okay, so from a purely aesthetic perspective, the gimme is Miss Militia. She's the most obvious "Captain Patriotic" in the roster, she has the power of GUN, she's the only one who actively buys into the mythology of America specifically. She's a Kurdish woman occupying an aesthetic niche generally held by a rugged squinty white guy. She's an output of the melting pot narrative. She's sort of a rendering of what a grounded superhero who somehow became very aesthetically into America might look like. Not in the craven marketing-driven way of Homelander or Comedian, not in the jingoistic maniac way of USAgent or Peacemaker. She buys it in the broadly left-liberal (USamerican connotation of that term) safe, friendly, reclamative way. Why, what a great rehabilitation of the archetype!

She's also deeply, deeply afraid of rocking the boat. She's got a deepseated childhood trauma related to the bad things that happen when she puts herself in a leadership role. She goes along to get along. When she's proactive, it's usually to point a gun at Tattletale to stop her from upsetting the status quo. She sits through a lot of situations where Steve Rogers, as commonly modeled, would probably plant himself like a tree by the river of truth and go, "Hey, this is fucked up." She more or less capitulates to Undersider domination of the city, in a way that predisposes us to think of her as a voice of reason after all these total nuts that Skitter's been up against- but would Taylor "to relinquish control is a form of ego death" Hebert really be willing to leave someone in charge of the local Protectorate branch who she thought couldn't be corralled? She looks like a beacon, but doesn't- indeed, probably can't- ever truly behave like one. I mean, you can debate the on-the-spot morality of any given one of her judgement calls, that's actually one of the less exhausting Worm Morality Debates to have- but in aggregate, a person in American flag garb who actually meaningfully criticizes the paramilitary organization they're part of is not gonna survive long in that role!

So again, she's the gimme from an aesthetic standpoint. But what I don't really see a lot of discussion of is how Cauldron plays into the riff.

Captain America is institutional, but in a comically morally uncomplicated way. The serum was originally mana from heaven, granted to a living saint, conveniently divorced from any nitty-gritty sausage-making process and even-more conveniently divorced from the horrible consequences of giving the, uh, the U.S government a replicable super soldier process. And in fairness to Captain America, this is 100 percent something the overall mythos eventually patched to my satisfaction; the sausage-making process eventually revealed as prototypical government fuckery driven by human experimentation on black servicemen, the overall Marvel Setting littered with failed attempts by the U.S. Government to recreate that golden goose so they can have their fun new jackboots. (In Ultimate Marvel, this is how almost all contemporary superhumans were created, and this is a state of affairs with a body count in the millions or billions.)

Cauldron draws you in with the same noble rhetoric about greater goods, the same one-off proprietary irreplicable formula- but you don't get the luxury afterwards of representing nothing but the dream. You aren't partnering up with a plucky crank scientist with a heart of gold. You're selling your soul to an organization with an agenda. The narrative makes no bones about the fact that everything you do is fundamentally tainted by the fact you opted into an end product created through torture, kidnapping and human experimentation. You don't get to pull a Kamen Rider by going rogue or opting out or making good use of the fruit of the poisoned tree; you are owned, and everything you do has this Damocles sword hanging over your head- when are the people who bankrolled this going to come to collect?

So that's the question of "who would willingly dress like that" covered, and the question of who creates a serum like that. What about the question of who takes a serum like that? I'd argue that Eidolon is the examination of that. Pre-Cauldron David reads to me like pre-serum Steve Rogers viewed through a significantly bleaker lens. They're both sickly kids desperate to serve, rocketed to the pinnacle of human capability by an experimental procedure. But for Steve Rogers, the crisis was that he had a specific vision of the world and was frustrated by his inability to carry it out. Before the serum he picked fights over what was right and wrong and got his ass handed to him; afterwards he picked those same fights and just started winning instead. The serum neatly solved a problem he had, and to the extent that his mindset is influenced by his pre-serum experiences, it's generally constructive; a desire to protect the weak, help the helpless, an appreciation for people who stand up for what's right even when they're clearly gonna get pancaked for their trouble. So ultimately there's no dark side, downside, or underlying neurosis ascribed to his initial impulse to take that serum.

But with David, it's not a tragic case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. He isn't a preternaturally-noble soul, out to represent the best elements of the American ideal- he kind of represents the inverse, a guy who's been failed at every level while utterly convinced that he's the problem. He's actively suicidal because he's a wheelchair-bound epileptic in an economically-depressed socially-backwards rural town in the 1980s, and he's spent his 18 years of life internalizing the idea that he's worse than useless unless he can somehow find a way provide value to something larger than himself. Doctor Mother finds him in the aftermath of a suicide attempt spurred by his rejection from the army- and he didn't even want to join the army specifically, necessarily, he just needed his situation to be literally anything else, and he took what he thought he could get. And then he finds himself in a position to become a superhero, so he does that, molds himself into that, subordinates himself to that, builds his entire sense of self and values around the value he can provide in that role. No grand design or sacred principles carried over through the metamorphosis. Just relief at finally, finally having something that looks like an answer to the question of what he's supposed to do.

And you know, you know that if Steve Rogers was facing down the barrel of being depowered, he'd smile and nod, he'd Cincinnatus that shit. It's happened before. But for David, the emotional trauma and self-worth issues that caused him to roll the dice on a Steve-Rogers treatment never really went away. When would it? He's been Providing Value as a ten-ton Hammer Against Evil for thirty years. No family, no social life. Certainly, no incentive on his handler's part to lance his Atlas complex. So he barrels towards atrocity in the name of remaining useful. Admittedly, this is where the comparison breaks down in a significant way; Captain America is much more of a symbol than he is an irreplicable powerhouse, so it's not catastrophic if he's taken off the board. Eidolon is so unbelievably powerful that his myopia and self-centeredness actually do align with a real problem everyone else is gonna have if he loses his powers. But in terms of the starting points- I think that Steve Rogers embodies the myth about why you'd want to join the army that badly. Eidolon is, I think, much more closely modelling why you'd actually want to join the army that badly.

it is rlly funny that wildbow thinks so little about legend that he forgot he never gave him a name in worm so ward accidentally canonizes that his son’s name is also his name

@the-joju-experience asked me about Issue 1, page 1 of The Power Fantasy, mentioning "the scale of the Superpowers in the image and the single intro line." It definitely is remarkable that these two incredibly powerful characters are kept small and in the corner of the panel- making them look like an afterthought to the peaceful, everyday city scene. For me it creates this sense of separation for the two Superpowers- their power makes them outsiders to the mundane world.

Sometimes smallness represents weakness or unimportance, but here I think it's more about them not centered in the image, because they're not really a part of this world. We see two laughing people much closer to the foreground, showing that this is the kind of thing people are doing on this lovely evening in the city. They're the rule- Valentina and Etienne are the exception.

The sense of the two Superpowers' isolation is reinforced by the lineart and color. Most of this page is packed full of vivid color and intricate detail, but right around Valentina and Etienne is a patch of gray. The ground under their feet, the wall behind Valentina, and the door just around the corner. It singles them out as not really part of this lovely evening scene. There's also a lot less detail drawn right around them- there's chalk drawings on the wall, sure, but notice how the bricks and stonework around the two of them drop out of view right next to them. In an image that's drawn with so much diligent attention to reality, Valentina and Etienne exist outside of that tangibly detailed world.

Basically- I'd say this page illustrates how everyday life can be beautiful and peaceful, and how our two Superpowers are isolated from that life. This is the very first page of The Power Fantasy- nothing's been said or shown in-canon about their powers, or the burden of having those powers. But I think the visuals here do a lot to provide emotional context to Etienne saying, "Of course, the ethical thing to do is to take over the world."

Etienne himself is standing casually, and he's wearing fashionable but not outrageous clothes- his body alone doesn't make him look like he has godlike powers that would actually enable him to follow through on what he says. But the framing of the page tells us there's something different about him- something about him that sets him apart from those laughing background (foreground?) extras. He's visually not just here to have fun on this otherwise beautiful night- when he makes that big bold statement, it looks like a serious moment in an otherwise lighthearted world.

The dialogue of The Power Fantasy takes a few more pages to really drive the point home of how Valentina and Etienne's powers isolate them from the rest of humanity, as well as their own ability to be human and find joy. But the art has already started doing that in this very first image. I think, in some half-conscious way, I understood that all along- it's part of what makes the comic emotionally work. But, thanks to Joju for encouraging me to look close enough that I actually spelled it out to myself!

I really love how Taylor can either hold a grudge forever or have it disappear alarmingly fast, and it all depends on if she acts on her anger at first. Like she forgives and is willing to work with Sophia after the bullying, Lung after he tried to kill her, Rachel after she tried to fuck her over, Defiant after the everything. Like most people wouldn't forgive all those acts and trust those people afterwards, but she hardly even considers otherwise because she believes that people should work together against unbeatable foes despite their differences and when she fights alongside someone she kind of just forgets the things they've done.

When she acts on something though, when she acts immediately in an irreversible way the people she lashes out against are immediately marked as 100% irredeemable evil bastards in her mind. Alexandria, she doesn't regret the murder in the slightest despite the fact that it had consequences and Alexandria isn't a being of pure evil. Since she killed her she has to convince herself that it was right and just and that she doesn't regret it, which erases any nuance Alexandria had in her mind that would lead to her forgiving her. She does this again a buncha times throughout the book. Against the C53s in the Cauldron raid she thinks about how everyone in the crowd could be innocent, forced to go along with the mob out of fear that they'll be next and with no chance or choice of getting away and being peaceful. But then she dangles a disintegration knife into all their faces to kill Mantellum and suddenly they're all monsters who delighted in torturing innocents and all voluntary members of the mob and none of them deserved any mercy because they're Evil Bad People, so she'll never lose sleep or forgive them.

Aisha points something like this out in 29.5 actually, she says her and Alec had an argument over it because Alec was annoyed at how quickly and easily Taylor stopped being mad at her bullies and didn't want revenge. I think Alec equated Sophia to Heartbreaker in his mind because they caused both their respective triggers, and he can't fathom the idea of someone not wanting to slowly torture and kill their Heartbreaker to make them feel an ounce of the pain he felt, and honestly Alec is the normal one here I think? I think most parahumans would get revenge on the people who caused their triggers in a heartbeat if given an opportunity, and honestly poor Alec imagine trying to understand and make sense of your dulled emotions and Taylor Hebert is there as the worst example ever with her weirdo decisions. Aisha defended Taylor and her choice to not get revenge but she still got revenge for Alec because she hold grudges for herself and other people.

Letting go of hatred to someone isn't something other people can really do like Taylor. Going back to Aisha, she fucking despised Bonesaw during Gold Morning and hated how she got a redemption, but Taylor was fully willing to work with someone who sawed her skull open for the greater good when it would be completely fair for her to never want to get help from her. Idk what my point is here I just think it's really neat that unless someone is her enemy right then and there or unless she already killed that person and sorted them into the Bad Person Category, Taylor is willing to forgive anything and everything to make sure everyone works together.

This is fun, but I have a single addendum: instead of controlling a small number of bugs but getting detailed sensory data, Lisa should have no control over any bugs but get the sense data from all of them within a range similar, if only a bit smaller, to Taylor’s

I'm chewing enthusiastically on the possibilities of an AU featuring Taylor, Lisa, and Brian as cluster triggers. Setting aside the incredible AU gymnastics required to make something resembling their canon triggers occur in close proximity and rapid succession to each other, the possibilities of their versions of each other's powers have me frothing at the lips.

I think their versions of each other's powers should still be shaped towards their own traumas, so:

Taylor's version of Brian's power focuses more on the power copying than the darkness. I think when she makes contact with a parahuman, she picks up an extremely weak version of their power for a short time. Like, touching Sundancer would let her make a match flame. But when her bugs touch a parahuman, they also gain a weak version of the power, and she can use a large swarm of very weak powers to very great effect. I think her version of Lisa's power would give her insight specifically on power mechanics and interactions; she can extrapolate power function from seeing it in use or its consequences.

Brian's version of Taylor's power would, I think, be a very direct, more limited form. I think he can, with concentration, manifest bugs out of darkness that he can control to the same degree that Taylor controls her swarm. What he does not get, however, is her multitasking ability, and if he's not maintaining active concentration on a group of his shadow bugs, they dissolve. So manifesting and using more than a small number for a simple task is pretty incapacitating for him. His version of Lisa's power is all about his own presentation; he can intuit how people perceive him and what he would need to do to change their perception of him into something different.

Lisa's version of Taylor's power would be all about information gathering - she can manifest a very small number of bugs under her control, and her control doesn't have much finesse, but she can process their sensory input extremely well. Her version of Brian's power would let her tag people with clinging shadows via projectile - as long as the shadow lingers, she can sense exactly where they are relative to her in great detail.

And that's not even touching on what their cluster power balancing would be! Something fun and psychological that really plays up the opportunity for cluster bleed through and kiss-kill dynamics.

It'd also be a ton of fun to explore how that bleed through affects them all psychologically, especially if they come together at a point in time where Lisa and Brian are as new to and insecure in their powers as Taylor. I think there's room for delightfully frightening shades of codependence only previously visible to shrimp.

And, of course, I think that would all almost inevitably lead to what would be simultaneously the most emotionally horny and emotionally repressed threesome known to man. None of them would be able to look each other in the eyes for weeks - except for Lisa, who Won the threesome, something that is not only possible but extremely Normal and Healthy, thank you very much.

Blue Delliquanti, the creator of one of my all-time favorite comics, did this post a while back about cartooning technique. The quote I want to highlight is:

"A question I ask is who the “viewer” of a scene is intended to be. Adversary is often framed through Curtis’s visual perspective, but not always. There are certain things that he doesn’t see or can’t recognize, and I was very deliberate about what those moments were." (Where Curtis is one of the characters in another comic they created.)

When I first read that quote I found it intriguing, but I couldn't quite make sense of what they meant by it. I got the sense it meant more than just "Is the panel showing what any one character literally sees?" but I couldn't reason through what someone's visual perspective really was.

Now, after spending about a zillion years staring at certain pages of The Power Fantasy, I think I get it. Let's talk about what Tonya sees in this page, versus what she experiences, and how the visual storytelling zig-zags between those two things.

There's two interesting things- okay, there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this page, but let's talk about the shift between panels 1 and 2, and between panels 3 and 4. They're both communicating what Tonya experiences, but not by showing what she sees- in fact, showing the world through her eyes (literally) would probably do a much worse job of putting you in her shoes (metaphorically.)

Panels 1 and 2

While Tonya is being yanked through the air by Heavy's gravity powers, the colors go from "realistic" (full-spectrum) to a limited palette that turns her skin blue. This isn't an indication that gravity powers turn things blue- they never do that any other time, and also it doesn't make sense for gravity to have a color. Heavy's powers aren't blue, Tonya's feelings are blue- it looks weird and unnatural to have blue skin, and it feels weird and unnatural to be sent flying. Also- I think the implication is that in panel 1 of this page, she's already arrived, because the only movement we see is her opening her eyes. She continues to feel like the world has gone all wrong, right up until she opens her eyes and sees that she's arrived.

Panels 3 and 4

Panel 3 is the one panel on this page that could plausibly be what Tonya actually sees- page 4 definitely isn't. But they both communicate how she interprets Heavy in that moment, even if she can't literally see his face from their positions in panel 4. He goes from a friendly, somewhat romanticized figure in panel 3 to sketchy and roguish in panel 4. Heavy's suddenly in shadow (even though he's facing a light source, if you really think about it!) because he's acting shady. (A lot of visual effects overlap with verbal idioms, which is something I could talk about for about a million years if given the change, but I'm trying to stay on topic.)

...so this entire page is fairly strongly from Tonya's perspective, even if only one panel of it is through her eyes. I plan to keep digging into this topic, because I don't think that's always the case- I think there's scenes/pages that switch back and forth between characters, that don't align the reader with any one character, and so on. Updates forthcoming as I learn more.

Taylor being paranoid about her passenger is such a fun character trait. Like none of her friends really seemed to give much of a shit when they learned about passengers from Bonesaw, but Taylor consistently notes the times her passenger acted without her consent, she tries to talk with it, communicate with it, just anything to learn what this thing that can control her without her say wants with her. One of my favorite little details is that during the timeskip this was the focus of a lot of her therapy sessions with Yamada, trying methods like hypnosis to communicate. I think part of it is that she's inherently just paranoid about the fact that this thing is helping her sometimes and she doesn't know why and she HAS to figure it out because no one would help out of the kindness of their heart, and another part is just that she can't bear to not be in control and this is something that threatens that in a very ominous way.

Another aspect of her paranoia towards her passenger is that she doesn't want to take blame for her own actions I think. During the Behemoth fight when her ally tried to shoot Phil Sē, she pulled the gun off target with silk and got him killed. She's the one who pulled the string, but because she's genuinely unsure if it was her being wary or her passenger setting up the string she settles on the second option because it absolves her of the possible blame or need to admit she's paranoid and ready to betray people in an instance. When Glenn shows her the video of her being the most terrifying fucker in existence she ignores how horrifying she is and fixated on how her passenger moved her, and then she doesn't have to think about the fact that she'd fit right into the ranks of the Slaughterhouse Nine because well, she can blame her passenger and focus on that instead. This applies to other people too, she sees Lung not using his power and thinks that maybe he's concerned about his passenger like she is. She projects hard onto Sophia in my opinion when she says that she got violent because of her passenger. If this person she doesn't like isn't to blame for everything she inflicted on Taylor, the surely Taylor can't be blamed for the violent steps she took to take over a city. It's another way she rationalizes everything to herself, if something is so bad that she can't justify it immediately there's always the excuse of "my passenger made me do it." But crucially, Taylor ends up being aware of the fact that she's doing this during Gold Morning.

And I think it's really good that this is something she grows and accepts about herself. It's wonderful growth for a character who's so often too stubborn to move herself forward. She's generally more in touch with her passenger during Gold Morning, like the time when she thinks that her and her passenger were in agreement in wanting to hurt Scion on the oil rig. No one else in Worm really seems to accept their passengers, Riley is questioning how much of herself has been subsumed by it, Eidolon is always annoyed it doesn't give what he wants, and most other people don't even know about them. But Taylor forms a bit of a symbiosis with hers after a long time rejecting it at every turn. I think this quote really sums up her feelings towards the end.

And by towards the end I mean like, at the very end, because immediately after this thought she becomes Khepri, and yet another fucking theme and character trait cumulates and reaches its peak with Speck. God damn what a good arc. The blur between Taylor and her passenger that she always feared is finally an actual thing consuming her, and she can finally communicate with her passenger as well. I do wonder what this is like on her passengers end. It's clearly down for the idea of killing its maker, and it's heavily implied that her passenger does care and doesn't want to actually leave Taylor as a husk (too lazy to get the quote because I've been typing for 45 minutes but Contessa remarks upon the administrator claiming everything about her until there's nothing left and she feels fear that she thinks is from both her and her passenger. 30.7 I think, near the end). But there's still so much about Taylor's passenger that's unknown. Was communication something it may have wanted when Taylor kept trying to communicate, but doing so required punching holes in the connection that would lead to more bleed through and functionally destroy its host? Did it slowly grow to care for Taylor more than the cycle, or was it always wanting to fight Scion? Did Taylor's autistic swag convince a multidimensional alien made of crystal to rebel? Is Queen Administrator trans? Idk how to end this post if it's not obvious, sorry.

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.