All his life he’s been surrounded by meddling people in American popular culture who despise the schematism of his comics, the vulgarity of his pulp, the absurdity of B-series fiction, the Manichaeism of his protagonists, and what makes today even more threatening is the latest evolution of the “mad scientist,” that delicious, frequenter of the high-cholesterol narrative.
The unfailing cliché of the mad scientist is no longer the messy old man in a white coat and glasses wielding a boiling beaker, but a Silicon Valley billionaire backed by wealthy brats playing pinball when the algorithms take a break. Dr. Drawing from the glorious past of Frankenstein and all the horror fiction appeal of science, the mad scientist turned from liberal revival of Reagan and the yuppies to evil capitalist in the 1980s. Back in the ’40s, Lex Luthor was a lab freak who took on Superman; In the 1980s, the billionaire owner of a cutting-edge industrial company with a desire for universal power.
Elon Musk (whose sizzling coils adorn every crazy pop lab) is so fascinated by Nicola Tesla that his self-driving electric cars are named after him, but he credits crazy businessman Lex Luthor with “artificial intelligence civilization-destroying potential” and an investment in it. Sam Altman, CEO of chatGPTI, which is Artificial Intelligence, warns about what he has just developed.
These “visionaries” are considering colonizing another planet because they think the Earth is depreciating, they fantasize about the apocalypse as if it’s a fireworks plan for a night in July, and all of this is already widely read in basic comics and hardcover novels. heroes, girls, planets and cosmic threats. Isn’t there a way to order 12-year-old Iowa boys to these men who are breastfed by fiction?