25: Chapter 25: “Genius.
GENIUS!
This thinking.
Is this not exactly America’s current situation?!” Edward came out the far side of the issue with the whole plot still rattling around his skull and the author’s intent, as he read it, burning a hole in him.
Surface readers, the Bobbys and Johns of the world, would skim the top of these books and taste nothing.
But to a man of Charles’s depth, or to a critic who had eaten a thousand comics alive, the direction the two new books pointed was blindingly obvious.
He fell on the keyboard.
Twitter underneath him was already a riot, and the moment he posted, every follower with notifications on got the ping.
“Issue two of Shonen Jump.
I’ll keep it short: it exceeded my expectations by a distance.
But the thinking inside it, did you actually understand that?
Hear me out, point by point.” The first book, he wrote, had overturned traditional heroism and built a new definition of the hero, its settings salted throughout with satire of the superhero glut.
The second, Attack on Titan, told its story straight: titans eat people, and humanity fights back.
The third, Tokyo Ghoul, took an ordinary man of ordinary life, broke him with a man-made calamity, and set him wavering on a single question, to eat or not to eat, and the wavering rang in the chest of every young reader who met it; chapter two had even introduced the concept of the kagune, tilting the quiet book toward battle with a flair all its own.
And from just these few chapters, one theme surfaced in both new works: the reflection on humanity and the Other.
When a being can no longer be counted as purely one species, where is he supposed to go?
“Both new comics point one direction,” Edward concluded.
“The outsider.” The flood came in confused.
“How did I see exactly none of this?
What is Edward even on about?” “Outsiders.
No kidding!
I have eyes!” “How is he getting all this out of Ghoul?
The Ghoul opening felt completely mid to me.” “You’re not alone.
Titan is obviously the better book.
The protagonist just DIED.
Who cares about eating people!” “This many people awake this early.
Shit, I still haven’t found a copy.” “Edward’s making sense.
If you can’t see it you’re braindead.” “Heh.
Found the shill.
Reading two comics this deep?
The lead’s garbage.
Saitama’s cooler.” “The above is my personal speculation,” Edward appended, serene, “and does not represent the comic’s stance.” The uproar did its work.
The heat index climbed rung after rung and vaulted into the top ten, and Edward watched it climb and chuckled to himself.
This was stage one.
Only with the temperature up would his real analysis land as an explosion, and if it landed right, the piece might make actual news.
In Edward’s playbook, timing was the whole art.
He waited, patient as a fisherman, until the topic broke into Twitter’s top five nationwide.
Then he opened the draft he’d finished an hour ago and hit enter.
“Perhaps nobody caught what I meant by outsider.
So.
As everyone knows, fantasy draws on reality.
Comics are no exception.” “Yesterday, at the New York carnival, the supercriminal Green Goblin appeared and slaughtered a crowd.
He is an outsider.” “At the critical moment, the superhero Spider-Man appeared.
To us, he is also an outsider.” “Now map it into the comic, and it is not hard to see: the citizens of New York, we ordinary people, are exactly the civilians penned behind the walls.” “Civilians can only be slaughtered by titans.
Only the Corps can resist.
Only other, friendly outsiders can protect us.
I will even guess boldly: Eren, in the titan’s belly, is the Spider-Man on the wall.” “And the third book.
The outsiders there are ghouls, who eat people.
Ken Kaneki is half man and half ghoul, keeps his goodness toward people, and the flesh he takes is corpse flesh only; and Anteiku, as the name implies, wants nothing but peace, and harms no one.” “So then.
In reality, who partly bears malice toward humanity, and who, at the same time, bears goodwill toward it?” “Mutants.” “In 1973, the President was attacked.
The culprit was Magneto.
And the one who stopped that evil was Mystique.” “Mutants are a vast group, and the latest research is clear: they are, in fact, a branch of humanity.
Mutants are outsiders.
But outsiders are not all mutants.” “From here the third book reads as the second’s thought carried one step further: that humanity, in an era this chaotic, needs to build its own Survey Corps to protect us, and needs to live in peace with the outsiders who are friendly to us.” “This week’s issue demonstrates what friendly mutants are worth to humanity.
It is, moreover, an indictment of the Mutant Registration Act.” He posted the whole thread and sat back, and the comment section did something it had never once done in the history of his account.
It went silent.
Not one reply.
Edward’s confidence, fully inflated ten seconds ago, developed a slow leak.
His heart gave a lurch, and the doubt crept in on schedule: had this, in fact, been blind bullshitting?
Because the comics had never said one word of any of it.
Not one panel, not one caption.
The entire edifice stood on a critic’s years of conjecture and association, and maybe, just maybe, he had overthought himself off a cliff in front of the whole country.
Then the next second arrived, and the dam went.
“Shit.
Full-body goosebumps.
I’m not joking.” “It…
adds up??
Does it add up?
Is this real?” “Huh?!
Why am I kind of convinced.” “Me too.
My brain’s a mess.
So the artist is anti-registration?
And said it through COMICS?” “I want to say something and I don’t know what to say.” “The author is testifying for mutants?” “I’m scared onto the floor.” “Edward.
Do you believe yourself?” “Is nobody going to talk about ‘the Spider-Man on the wall’??
I’m crying.” “@ Marvel Comics, someone stole your manuscript, call the police.” The fans were stirred to the bottom, and under the noise ran a genuine current, because Edward’s reading had put a finger on something none of them had words for.
Comics did not map reality.
They never had.
At most a book borrowed a similar power, filed off a name, and produced one more Captain America fan-work; that was the entire tradition.
And now, in one magazine, three books all faced the real world: one had broken the hero mold over its knee outright, and two, circling, quiet, had said it was time humanity reconsidered its own definition.
One issue.
The books’ worlds weren’t even fully sketched yet.
And Edward had taken those few chapters, held them against the morning’s news, and thrown a grenade into the public square.
It looked like nonsense.
And nobody could work out how to rebut it.