SFP

Markus

She just spent a fistful of panels showing off her lightbulb factory before giving a big speech about how badly she wants to be a battery person…

MisterTeatime

What lightbulb factory? The only thing we’ve seen being built at Excelsior is Excelsior. Yeah, she’s got cool robots and an office full of stuff, but the cool robots are all busy *helping her employees*. That seems like battery work to me.
- Markus
  
  Her super suit, the entire line of Templar drones, the Strong AI, the police suits from issue 1, and the floating droids are all very lightbulb. The only thing that seems even moderately battery in her suite of things is the construction suits.

Johan

Ackkkk no funny alt text T_T
Kidding, I love this page. The wording is clear and deep, adn the art is top notch. This no-outline style looks great 🙂
Introducing Lisa Bradley is brilliant. The timing is well chosen (or luckily fitting, I don’t know ^^) and she is very interesting. I can’t wait to see Alison and Lisa learning from each other. It’s like they look at the same direction, but from very different vantage points.

I don’t think I’ve ever told you guys that, but thanks for creating this comic, It truly is a pleasure to read it 🙂

William Sked

I think Alison’s going to like it there.

Ross Van Loan

Hmmm, ‘Power to the People!’ is usually not quite such a literal statement.

Charles M. Hagmaier

Except she’s saying “power from the people”, which is basically a truism. “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces” and all that.

Although an interesting case could be made for the irrigation works of pre-feudal hydraulic tyrannies being a sort of battery, redistributing flood waters so that they could be used by the peasantry, whose control was in the hands of the tyrants, even if the construction and maintenance had been done only at the direction of the tyrant, by the hand of the people. All the agricultural usage of that oppressive technology being “lightbulb” consumption. Likewise, the granaries by which the tyrants justified their oppressions again being a sort of battery, the storage of resources against drought and famine, the wealth that buys spears and hands to hold spears. Eventually light-bulb priesthoods usurped the power of the tyrants in many cases, although that usually sparked a collapse of dynasty and a return to basics once the blood was washed off the temple floors.
- Ross Van Loan
  
  All of that leads to the next tyrant promising ‘Power to the People!’
- chaizzilla
  
  Houston, Houston, do you read?

Charles M. Hagmaier

You know, batteries don’t generate energy, and they themselves are resource sinks. Batteries are valuable for their capacity to displace energy in time – to preserve the potential of expended resources until the moment of their usage. A resource consumed without a purpose immediately to hand is wasted without a storage medium to preserve that spark for future tinder. One of the great failures of “alternative energy” is the massive disconnect between generation timeframes and usage patterns, and the lack of any practical or even imaginable battery technology to carry over the gap. There’s been some serious talk of using wind/solar power to pump water into elevated reservoirs to “store” energy for steady consumption via artificial hydroelectric generation.

Tohron

Right now there are actually some interesting new technologies for grid-level energy storage:

http://rameznaam.com/2014/09/30/the-learning-curve-for-energy-storage/

Makes wind/solar a good deal more viable as a primary energy source.

Pol Subanajouy

One added benefit of going to color is that art style of the past few pages simply would not have had the pleasing impact on the eye had it all been grey scale. I personally love what I’m seeing here from an aesthetic point of view.

Also a rather timeless depiction of humanities relationship with hierarchy and imbalance in society.

S.I. Rosenbaum

She’s in the uncomfortable position of being a populist titan of industry.

Myrddin Emrys

This sounds like a supervillain rant of the first order.

Insanenoodlyguy

Nah. Her robot children will be the villians, she’s the well intentioned mad scientist who won’t see until too late that it’s all gone horribly wrong.
Rufus Saltus

Not supervillian, just Marxist. The “We treat the things that soak up the energy and resources like they’re valuable, and the things that generate them like they’re disposable,” line is a pretty decent summary of the labor theory of value and capitalist exploitation of labor.
- Charles M. Hagmaier
  
  Well, sort of. Marxist labor theory presumes all labor is quantitative, interchangeable, Paladin’s approach seems more qualitative. But it definitely has an air of Marxist notions of “ideology” and culture as an inessential or parasitical “superstructure”.
  
  Although any metaphor which equates energy with work is going to have problems with consistency. “Power is energy applied to work”. And the way that she puts the banker in the peak apex “lightbulb” tier is remarkably obtuse. Love or hate bankers – the whole point of banking is the coordination of resources in time, and thus a bank is a sort of fiscal battery. And like the hydraulic tyrant and his irrigation-works and granaries, the banker with his control over the resources represented by the bank is in a position of great control over the aspirations and lives of others.
  
  Looked at from this prospective, Paladin’s metaphor is Randian in populist drag.
  - Nightsbridge
    
    I don’t know. If her solution is ‘fuck ya’ll let’s go away and stand BY THE SWEAT OF YOUR OWN BROW’ then maybe? The big question is, now that she’s got the problems as she figures in her sights, what is her ideal solution?
  - S.I. Rosenbaum
    
    Not everything about Rand is terrible (although most of Rand is terrible); her point about giving artists resources to work and not be ground down by having their work devalued is pretty strong. Paladin seems to be taking that bit of it.
    
    Banks SHOULD be a fiscal battery, and at best they are. The banker up there on the pyramid, though, is probably just a crook.
habeasdorkus

Yes. It’s not far removed from “The world is a mess, and I need to… rule it!”

A fan of the quasi-marxist sentiment she’s expressing, though!
- Rufus Saltus
  
  Well yes, there is a reason that many leftist revolutionaries start out with the most noble of intentions and end up becoming dictators.
Philippe Saner

A supervillain rant is just a political speech given by someone with superpowers.

KidUrza

Th… This is beautiful…

Taylor

She made us build the structure for this so she could have people pose for the painting. There’s a pretty beefy central support column, so no one got squished or anything.

Some of the crew made some extra scratch by sitting uncomfortably for an hour. I don’t know why she couldn’t just have photoshopped a picture up and had them paint that, though.

Markus

It would’ve been nice in my mind if the gaps between the layers got smaller and smaller the further down you went, so the top folks have the luxury of standing, lower layers start crouching and kneeling, and the bottom layers are practically bowing and being crushed under the weight.
Mystery girl

You try me Taylor.
- Taylor
  
  It’s what I do, ma’am.

Ian Osmond

They have precisely the same goals. Lisa is actually the FIRST person Alison has met who has the same goals as she does: to change the world to be more fair.

Actually, Patrick has similar goals, too.

A Menace/Paladin/Mega Girl teamup. What could possibly go wrong? I SURE the world would end up TOTALLY better, because it’s not like any of them are obsessed or anything.

John Smith

Eat your heart out, Justice League.

Potatamoto

I’m beginning to feel like whatever force/entity/organization it was that was killing off supers with the potential to change the world might begin to feel like this one slipped through the cracks.

Stephanie Gertsch

Is that Kim Kardashian on the top…?

Adam McKinney Souza

I REALLY hope Paladin doesn’t end up going villain. These writers are too clever for that.

Protoman

“Battery People” makes me think of The Matrix.