It's been a while, again, but here's the bits on Ellis/Ryp's Black Summer that I added to the previous sections on Miracleman and Watchmen. In Black Summer, a lone superhuman executes George H. W. Bush for his supposedly criminal behaviour, but the narrative reveals that in so doing, he is squandering the technological tools at his disposal because he cannot think outside of his generic role.
Black Summer's super-powered protagonists have generic power sets, so they are not analogues per se. While Miracleman's analogues extend backwards in a chain of references, and Watchmen uses analogues that refer broadly to various iconic hero characters, Black Summer displays a few of the most generic superhero types. The heroes, who call themselves "The Seven Guns," all have cybernetic implants that give them superpowers. They call these implants "gun" technology, hence the name of their team. This name emphasises something obvious in superhero comics that they rarely acknowledge: super powers almost always function as a form of weaponry. They allow so-called heroes to do violence to alleged villains in order to save innocent bystanders. The characters design and build these cybernetic implants that grant them the powers specifically so that they can be heroes, but the implants, how the art presents them and the narrative treats them symbolically, also associate the Seven Guns with three other generic figures. First, the technology associates them with cyberpunk genre, and second, the excessively large pistols they carry associate them with gunslingers. Their visual design, doubtless a product of collaboration between Ellis and Ryp, includes recognisably superheroic elements but it also makes them look distinctly like bikers.
The gun implants turn the Seven Guns into standard superhero types--the tank, the technician, the flyer, the speedster, and the god-like hero--which makes them walking representatives of the superhero genre. However, as in cyberpunk narratives, they volunteer for ther surgery and many of them suffer side-effects. Angel One can fly, for example, but the narrative strongly implies that her legs and spinal column are so damaged by her surgery that she can no longer walk. Zoe Jump can run at super speeds, but the process disfigures her face. In cyberpunk, technologically that enhances the body usually has a corresponding loss of humanity, but characters nevertheless volunteer for it. They give up being human in order to become superhuman, for example William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic." (Tom Noir's power to telepathically interface with information technology is also a very cyberpunk concept, but has become and more and more common super power in the last two decades; it appears in the superhero-themed television show Heroes as well as Ellis/Robertson's Planetary. This technological telepathy is the super-power equivalent of the technology that many Westerners now carry with them all the time: cell phones and PDAs.) This trade is precisely what Liz objects to and refuses in Miracleman. Posthumanist critics, like Hayles and Harraway1 argue that cyberpunk literature represents a move away from liberal humanism, which presumes, among other things, an inherent (i.e., natural, mythic, and ahistorical) belief that the human subject has more value than, to quote Harraway, simians, cyborgs, and women, all of whom are supposedly less than human. Superheroes have generally liberal humanist values. They retain their humanity, usually as a secret identity, despite having god-like abilities, and they defend individual human subjectivity above all else, which usually amounts to protecting property. Cyberpunks and superheroes thus have entirely oppositional value systems, but Ellis and Ryp combine them, which renders them suspect within the logic of the superhero genre.
The heroes also carry large hand-guns that interface with their implants. These guns do not conform to known manufactured designs, and instead come strait from Juan Jose Ryp's imagination. They are larger than normal and often Ryp depicts them in close-up, so that they look even larger still. His art makes the guns a significant presence, even characters in their own right. Ryp also depicts the violence that the Seven Guns inflict as extremely gory, with dismembered body parts often flying across panels and gouts of blood pooling on the ground. After significant battles between superhumans, their urban space looks quite literally like a war zone. Black Summer never allows these superheroes, or their audiences, to conceive of violence without consequence, unlike the SA-style which the Code forbade from depicting blood and gore. Ryp's art does seem to fetishise the brutality of gun technology on occasion, though, but the series ends with Tom Noir admonishing John Horus for using his magnificent technological eyes for nothing better than political assassination. Their technology, over the course of the series, causes nothing but death and dismemberment, until the final issue in which the three remaining women of the Seven Guns decide to rescue the innocent bystanders endangered by their super-powered combat.
Black Summer rests on a partial-realist premise par excellence; all other elements of the modern (American) world are implicitly realistic except for the existence of a very small number of superheroes. The argument of the series is almost the same as Watchmen's: if powerful people take on the stock roles of the superhero genre, even if that means combining heroic altruism with a villainous willingness to intervene in world politics, they cannot affect real, positive change, only play out the superhero story, over and over again. Black Summer adds to that argument, however, by explicitly asserting that if and when humanity has access to the kind of technology that could turn humans into superhumans, there are much better uses for it than law enforcement or warfare. Ellis writing career, both in his comics and his various other prose work, indicates that he is personally very optimistic about technology, about how it might improve the lives of humanity. Orbiter depicts the possible ways that humanity might travel to the stars, his Bad Signal posts often describe his newest technological toys, most of which he uses to be fully connected to the internet from his local bar, and his discussion board/wiki Grinding consists of a series of links to real-world stories of technological re-purposing and the living culture of body modification (Grinding.be). In fact, the majority of Ellis' science fiction is an exploration of William Gibson's assertion in Neuromancer that "the street finds its own use for things," which Ellis has one of his characters quote in the three-issue mini-series Mek. Ellis' fictional characters, if not Ellis himself, seem to find it maddening that powerful technology is so often used for the decidedly mundane purpose of killing people.
The reason that Horus chooses to use his super-powers to kill Mr. Bush is explicitly generic. Horus essentially calls Bush a supervillain and eliminates him so that America can have new elections. He defends American democracy from someone whom he believes has subverted it. However, in so doing, Horus also recasts himself as a supervillain, a immensely powerful individual who chooses to intervene in American democracy and remove an elected leader. Most of the series is taken up by grand, gory battles between the Seven Guns, including Horus, and gun-enhanced agents created by the original inventor of gun technology, whose name is Jack Blacksmith. Both Horus and Blacksmith think of themselves as the heroes of their shared narrative, Horus for killing a supervillain (i.e., President Bush), and Blacksmith for trying to protect America from a mad-man who killed the president. Blacksmith, yelling at Horus, claims: "One man wearing a bucket on his head does not get to decide what laws are. / [...] / I'm the hero here, John! I'm the fucking hero because I gave up my life to plan ways to kill you!" (7.18.4). Tom Noir, through whom most of the series is focalised, admonishes Horus:
You could not think of a smarter way to change the way the country does business than just killing the villain? / You can watch the world like God and build palaces out of mud with those damned eyes of your [sic] and that is the smartest idea you had? (7.20.1).
Both Horus and Blacksmith stretch the superheroic mission, "somebody has to save the world," out of proportion--Blacksmith's agents raze a city trying to kill the Seven Guns--but they also remain stuck in its stock roles, both thinking they are heroes while acting like villains, which is similar to the manner in which Ozymandias occupies both roles. Tom Noir succinctly summarises their inability to think outside of their genre: "Wow, you two are stupid" (7.19.1). Within Black Summer, though, there is a glimmer of Ellis' own technological optimism, a hint that technology such as that which he speculates about could improve human life, an option that Moore offers in Miracleman or Watchmen, but always with a fascistic tang to it, either Manhattan's oblivious support of the military-industrial complex or Miracleman's astonishment that not quite everyone wants to be just like him. There is, then, a vague hope in the otherwise quite bleak story of Black Summer that the technologies that appear less and less hypothetical every day, the likes of which militarises normally employ to cause unfathomable violence, might also have positive, real-world applications. Unless we, the people of the world, stop thinking inside an incredibly simplistic dynamic of heroes and villains, good guys and evil-doers, we will never even conceive of those peaceful, constructive uses.