#and on what john prioritized when shaping the culture of the nine houses

[g1deonthefirst]

wasn't alfred a hedge fund manager? i get where ur coming from re: the class divide post otherwise btw but am somewhat stumped ab this bc he was definitely the one making the most money and likely highly educated as well, and ended up a cav. ig it is STEM/nonSTEM divide?

hi! yes, alfred was a hedge fund manager — he was also augustine's brother and so comes from a similar (presumably very wealthy) background. this exception doesn't really disprove the rule to me: either way, john was disproportionately likely to make people who were highly educated necromancers and people who were not cavaliers. i want to walk through a couple possible reasons for this.

the first possibility is that john (1) believed that people who were more "intelligent" were more likely to be able to understand necromancy and (2) implicitly believed that people who were academically high-achieving like scientists, lawyers, doctors, etc. were more "intelligent." clearly, john and the lyctors all seem to think pretty highly of their own intelligence. john in particular went from being a poor māori kid to being an accomplished scientist, and i don't think it's a stretch to say he probably believed he deserved it on the basis of intelligence.

in contrast, both alfred and cristabel have their own talents and intelligence disparaged — john describes alfred as "useless, but a darling" and augustine describes cristabel as "not hav[ing] the intellect you'd ordinarily find in a sandwich or an orange." additionally, necromancy is talked about in scientific terms, which lends itself to the idea that you might need some scientific understanding to be good at it. i think it's entirely possible that john consciously decided that some people wouldn't be intelligent enough to hack it and made them the cavaliers, a problematic assumption chiefly in that it equates academic achievement with innate intelligence.

the second possibility, and to me the more likely one, is that john simply made the people closest to him necromancers while making people he wasn't as close to (essentially his friends' friends) non-necromancers. it's pretty clear that the people john made necromancers were people who directly worked on john's original cryogenics project with him, while the cavaliers were all people who got dragged into his cult by those original project members. alfred is a perfect example of this — he's there because he's augustine's brother. other people have made posts about the possibility that john did this to intentionally separate his friends from the people they loved.

but either way, i think this demonstrates who john as a character cared about. john, as a successful scientist, surrounded himself by people who were highly educated and successful, predominantly (as you note anon) people in STEM. people who are disproportionately likely to be white, neurotypical, and cis, or at least disproportionately likely to be able to conform to white/european, neurotypical, cis standards. not only is john not as close to people in his project-turned-cult that aren't as highly educated, but poor people aren't present at all. there are no janitors, no retail workers, no manual laborers, no farmworkers. i don't get the sense that john ever really unpacked his internalized biases or questioned why he primarily values people who are highly educated.

"but," i imagine my hypothetical reader who's somehow made it this far protesting, "of course he's surrounded by highly educated people. he's working on a cryogenics project!" well...precisely. tumblr user sophelstien's scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds essay touches on how this project demonstrates that john is not as progressive as some people assume he is, but what i'll say here is simply that john didn't have to make the people in his cryogenics project the leaders of his new society. and by installing the very people who our society rewards into positions of power, john — consciously or not — shapes the new society he's creating with the old society's inequalities.

[tessatechaitea]

Inferior 5 #1

Hopefully this will be like when Giffen made the Legion of Super-heroes super fucking dark.

How many dicks can you find, kids?!

"How many dicks can you find, kids" is the least quotable line I've ever written. The Kamandi just out of surgery cosplayer winds up getting exploded by the kid in the canvas sack face mask. You know the kid is bad news because he can make people explode with his mind. Although if you ran into him in the desert, you wouldn't know that immediately so I should have stated the other ways you can tell he's bad news so as to maybe avoid exploding. First off, he's a kid out in the desert alone. Kids by themselves are creepy. Plus he's wearing a canvas bag on his head. Canvas is always a warning sign that you might be dealing with cannibal hillbillies, especially when it's covering an almost certainly mutilated face. Also, the kid's canvas bag mask has a big red X on it. Anybody who's been through the American educational system has a strong aversion to red X's. Also spooky: the kid recites nursery rhymes. When you hear one of those, you know you're either about to die or laugh hysterically because did you hear how the Diceman said "cock" instead of "clock"?! How did we never stop laughing in the Eighties?! Oh, one more clue that not all is right with this kid: he lives in Dangerfield, Arizona. That's almost as big a red flag as some sweaty, long-haired kid in overalls from Back Swamp, North Carolina. The story picks up with some nerdy kid (probably Merrymaker since he's the big virgin of the group) whining about how his dad died in The Invasion of Metropolis (what was that? Is that a reference to the beginning of The New 52 when Darkseid attacked Earth? Or is this a reference to the Invasion by the Dominators which was compiled in three way-too-long comics?). After the Invasion, he and his mom moved to Dangerfield, Arizona. Because who wouldn't feel safer in a place with a name that causes constant anxiety over a place where the greatest hero in the world lives?

According to the date on this calendar, the Invasion mentioned was the Dominator one which created the Meta-Gene explanation of superpowers which we recently learned was a computer jargon shortening of the term "metal-gene."

The calendar isn't the only proof that this invasion was by Dominators and not Parademons! By turning the page instead of trying to ferret out what's going on by examining every panel carefully and spending an inordinate amount of my short lifespan trying to guess what's about to happen instead of just fucking turning the Goddamned page and letting the writers explain it to me, I discover the Dominators are leading an invasion of Earth Number This Is Fucked Up. At least I think it's Earth Number This Is Fucked Up because the invasion seems to have worked. Superman is dead and most of the other heroes have been placed in a space gulag. Plus that kid in the canvas bag marking X's on houses seems to play an important role in the Dominator's invasion force.

Unless this is all just a comic book on Earth Number Main Earth?

Maybe I should turn some more pages! But first, I just need to Google "Lisa Loeb's boobs." The kid complaining about the Invasion comic book is named Lisa (no relation to Lisa Loeb's boobs) and she points out to the suspiciously bloody comic book seller with a light sensitivity named Vlad that the Invasion really happened. So I guess DC is simply profiting on everybody's pain and misery. I bet just to make the series even more painful and miserable, DC hired Scott Lobdell to write it. Justin, the whiny kid from Metropolis, is being observed by some outside observers (as opposed to inside observers which would be, I guess, parasites?). He heads downtown where he's about to make contact with Dumb Bunny and Awkwardman! Except he doesn't. Man, I should probably read more than two panels at a time before writing anything. It would save everybody a lot of wasted effort, me with writing sloppy synopses of comics and the three people reading this having to fucking read this. But then I don't have any responsibility to anybody to make these "reviews" shorter. It's not my fault if somebody wanted to Google "Lisa Loeb's boobs" but found they didn't have enough time because they were reading this shit. That's their own fault for not prioritizing their desires! Googling "Lisa Loeb's boobs" was so important to me that I did it in the middle of this review! Come on, people. It's the modern age! You can view Lisa Loeb's boobs any time you want (through clothing, that is. I'm not advocating for searching for nude pics of Lisa Loeb's boobs which probably don't exist anyway and if you think they do, it was probably just Lisa Loeb's head photoshopped onto a naked torso). Lisa has been uncovering clues to the weirdness of Dangerfield, Arizona because she dresses like Velma. Unless she dresses like Velma because she searches for clues the way her hero, Velma, searches for clues. I don't know enough about Lisa's backstory to say. It's possible Lisa isn't even aware of Velma and it's just Giffen spending some easy pop culture capital so readers associate Lisa with Velma and understand her more simply by looking at her image.

Here are a bunch of the clues she's uncovered that I didn't want to try to parse through my digressions and fascination with Lisa Loeb.

Billy Shanker, the kid with the canvas bag who says things like, "Oh! The three little kittens! They fucked their mittens! Oh! Look at the way I hold my cigarette! Boom!", murders Justin's mom and takes her corpse to some guy in a hazmat suit that might be a Dominator but also might be, seeing as how Giffen is writing this, Ambush Bug. Man I hope it's Ambush Bug! Justin returns home to find his mother gone and the interior (five?) of his house covered in red X's. Oh no. That's a really bad sign! Not one black check mark in the bunch! Some people might think Keith Giffen isn't the best artist in town because he's a writer and his art isn't for everybody. Plus he never puts any thought into his panel layout and just goes the same size boxes every time (sometimes in the six variety, sometimes in the nine). I happen to love his art so I'm not one of those people. But in keeping with a guy whose art isn't what people would call great (although those people usually love mainstream great garbage art like John Romita Jr or David Finch or Tony S. Daniel), Jeff Lemire draws the back-up story. I don't think that was an insult at Lemire's expense. If it was, I'm sorry because I was really just trying to insult John Romita, Jr and David Finch and Tony S. Daniel. The back-up story features Peacemaker whom I only remember by look. According to the Who's Who, Peacemaker is a guy who loved peace so much that he realized sometimes he'd have to use extreme violence to ensure it. Also he suffered a head injury during Crisis on Infinite Earths which seems like a weird thing to mention in the Who's Who. "Trillions of lives were extinguished during the multiversal extermination event! Billions and billions of worlds destroyed! People's pasts erased in the blink of an eye! Supergirl and Flash and some other people nobody remembers killed! And Peacemaker suffered some head trauma." I suppose it's important to the character. Maybe it was meant to make him more extreme so he'd be relevant in the post-Crisis era. Peacemaker is on a mission for Amanda Waller to find some super weapon that the Russians want. His search leads him to a bunker with a dead Dominator, a mysterious capsule, and a map leading him to Dangerfield, Arizona! Inferior 5 #1 Rating: B+. I'm a sucker for Giffen stories and Giffen art. And Giffen stories backed up by Lemire's writing are probably even better. This one was pretty good so consider it evidence that my previous statement is almost certainly correct. One thing I like about Giffen is that he doesn't mind writing things that can be confusing on their first (or even second!) read through. He tells the story, makes the jokes, slowly unveils the plot, and to hell with anybody who doesn't want to invest a little time in making it all out. Seems to me, a lot of modern comic book readers could learn to love ambiguity. But they're all so desperate for the interior monologue of the main characters so they know exactly what to think after reading something. They're so coddled that they think subtlety is when a story explicitly shows them what's happening without the main character also explaining it in a monologue as they experience it. They wouldn't recognize subtlety if it...well, I mean, it's subtlety. It should be hard to recognize so I don't know how to finish that statement. Now go read Inferior 5 and hate me for recommending it when you're finished.