Annotated 49-24
No FB to speak of for the next couple of strips. Flo’s move meant that this page got delayed, so we doubled it up with page 25 in the original.
It’s interesting watching Syr’Nj and Gravedust, the main thinkers of the group, try to talk HR down or at least further shake his faith in himself, while the others are basically treating this like a conversation that’s just between the five of them. We get some crucial payoff from Gravedust and Byron’s storyline in Episode 41, in which Gravedust rejected his own role in the cosmos in favor of mortal life and its earthbound priorities.
Best is quiet in panel 4 because some of Gravedust’s story overlaps his. He too spent a lot of his life too focused on the future to properly experience the present, too busy being the LEGEND IN THE MAKING to be fully a person, which ultimately made him more of a dick. Gravedust, though, started to turn toward his present life even before he joined up with the others. Best, well, he took a bit longer to get there.
This is essentially the Fantastic Four confronting Galactus, right? Or the Ghostbusters going toe-to-toe with Gozer the Gozerian? A small band of warriors facing a supernatural being. So, it’s a thing in fiction, it works, it’s popular, there’s nothing wrong with it as a trope, I think. But it does nothing for me.
This page always worked for me because it’s so obvious that The Five and HR are in such different places. Despite all his inhuman efforts, he could simply not catch up to the Five.
Not even when they began to share the same dimension.
Yes, in this scene, in that classic Fantastic Four story, and in Ghostbusters you can find similar elements, but I’m interested in the ways those stories differ from each other.
The powerful FF try to stop Galactus, but they’re too puny to take on the Devourer of Worlds. The Earth only gets saved because of the Silver Surfer and the Watcher learn to care about humanity enough to go rogue and ditch their respective duties.
The Ghostbusters are two goofy scientists, their smarmy conman friend, and a blue collar everyman, taking on (and obliterating!) an obscure Summerian deity with the power of science.
In Guilded Age, the protagonists don’t rely on cosmic help to handle the final boss, and they don’t rely on their superior sciency super weapons to conquer the evil god-like villain. IMO, this scene is more like a debate than a battle.
The lack of humanity in the villain is of course the point. But it’s precisely that element that makes me disinterested in the threat they represent. They’re not fit to a human scale. Their evil is an abstraction. I’m not saying that anyone is wrong for employing this trope. I’m just trying to process why it does so little for me as a reader.
That’s cool. The examples you mentioned -Gozer, Galactus- are, like you said, not very relatable to a normal reader. HR, however, kind of is. To me, at least. Who hasn’t dreamed of transcending his or her own limitations? A lot of people would compromise and sacrifice and barter a bit of themselves in exchange for status, or power (or even answers to the big questions in life). It’s scary, but there are quite a bit of real life HRs out there.
Godhood work’s just fine for Darkseid. And you can’t tell me that there aren’t people you’d snap out of existence or write their name in a death note if you could.
It does feel kinda weird that everyone just switches from full-on confrontation to empathy mode. It makes sense for Syr’Nj, but not for Frigg. Of course they’re pinned under Frigg’s glowy shield-thingy-shit and none of them has much else to do right now, but that doesn’t mean you’d have to get all constructive and stuff. This is the moment where I would expect Frigg to go “what the fuck, you getting tired of devouring the world, and now you want life advice or what? I got some life advice right here if you want some!”
Frigg has already shown character growth away from that more simplistic sort of reaction (see her confrontation with Ardaic). Here she can tell that her friends are using psychological warfare against an enemy that may, otherwise, be too powerful to defeat and boasting that she found available godhood beneath her is pretty on brand with her.
Oh yes sure, but she has not abandoned her mojo over it, as demonstrated just a few pages ago where she showed a very “on-brand” reaction to Ardaic’s confessions. I think Ardaic in that situation would have deserved a lot more empathy than HR here.