Ian Mollusk

WE who write and draw the Phantom daily strip had some fun with Elon Musk in recent months, not knowing the odd duck would make us look topical by inserting himself prominently into all matters MAGA.

We may have seemed to be executing the story around the dominant event of the year, the November 5 election, but, the fact is, the story was written, penciled and inked before Musk morphed into Trump’s stunt double at his bloviating worst. The strips to be published November 18 through 23, the story’s closing week, were transmitted to our subscribing newspapers two weeks before the election.

I’m told our audacity in lampooning Musk wounded the reddest of the red hats among our readership; that in the miracle of MAGA transubstantiation, poking fun at a self-interested sycophant to Trump is tantamount to thumbing one’s nose at the great man himself. Personally, I haven’t had this much fun since Jiminy Glick interviewed Ice Cube and kept calling him Vanilla Ice.

Here’s a look at The Avarice has Landed, in lieu of the vastly better look you can get by subscribing to Comics Kingdom. We launched the story with a moonshot on June 10. It concluded two days ago after a 23-week run.

Insofar as I know anything at all about it, I’m told many readers liked that the story poked fun at a grandiose ego in the news, and could be read as social commentary on internet culture, state capture, greed as the national life force, and the vanity of plutocrats who, given November 5, have never been in a better position to govern America in the service of themselves.

I have no window into what readers think. I’m not on social media, not on Comics Kingdom, and the Akismet filter native to WordPress shunts most of my mail into a self-emptying spam folder. The algorithm reads for the rage of the cuckoo clocks. In some cases all it has to see is an IP address it doesn’t like, given that the app tracks behavior across the internet. What reaches me here is hardly a gauge of public opinion, so keep that in mind.

In a tweet, Ian Mollusk boasts about the launch of his Starship Avarice before he knows whether the launch is a success. Maladapted, as so many of us are, to the instant in instant communication, Mollusk, a filter feeder without a filter, is impulsively eager to torment his rivals in the billionaires’ space race. We see one of them listed in his contact list as Cueball, the other as Stoner. I’m certain you can guess who they might be. They each rate a cameo you can see on Comics Kingdom.

If this were the Superman universe, the rocket would come down on the outskirts of Metropolis. Heavy-hearted Batman would deal with it outside Gotham. Here, in the Phantom strip, the Avarice Mission comes down in the wilds of Bangalla, East Africa.

The ship attempts a landing on water, tips over, rockets across the surface and comes to rest on a jungle shore.

What a privilege to work with an artist of Mike Manley’s caliber—and Jeff Weigel’s on the Sunday narrative. Jeff’s art to be published in May has been coming in over the transom in recent days. What a talent! Readers are going to miss these guys when the gig goes away, as it surely will. The untouchable Mollusks of the world are stealing what we do and loading it into their AI profit centers, baby. Redistributing income up the ladder is the operative ethic.

In a Musk send-up, you knew we were going to get to AI. The Phantom boards the ship, has a look around, then rings up his pal, President Lamanda Luaga.

The Phantom discovers a machine Ian Mollusk had intended to land on the moon. It slashes and burns its way through the Bangallan wilderness.

As the Phantom mulls these questions, the machine targets him.

It runs him off with guns and mortars, then rings him up to read him the riot act.

The Phantom slips out of the kill zone and back to Skull Cave to figure out a plan for Round 2.

Diana reckons there is no operator, meaning no human operator.

When the Phantom makes his way back to the crash site, the rover unleashes a killer quadruped. Shades of our very own General Dynamics just up the road here.

Devil tangles with the tech monster, trees it, and the Phantom thinks he just might be able to turn the AI against itself. He tries to talk the machine into shutting down.

The quadruped feigns a shut down, then initiates a new attack.

The Phantom defeats the quadruped, tangles again with the rover…

Then he finally meets “the operator:” the Ian Mollusk bot.

Note the body language on the Ian Mollusk AI. Mike drew this image before Musk made a fool of himself on stage with a Long Island funeral director.

How’s that for life imitating art?

We take a trip inside the neural network and see the razed Bangallan jungle as the Ian Mollusk AI sees it: a sprawling lunar colony where everybody is Ian Mollusk, or, maybe the truer way to say it, Ian Mollusk is everybody.

Here we’re lost on the back end of the AI hallucination, somewhere in the neural architecture of the system itself. This image wasn’t scripted. It’s just another brilliant work of pure imagination by Mike Manley.

Yes, I made readers under 60 google Norma Desmond. A little bit of classic film education. You can thank me, kids, by putting Sunset Boulevard on your watch list; if only so you have a case-resting comeback when someone tries to tell you voiceover is a lame narrative cheat.

Back at Cape Grandiose, Texas, the flight engineer we met earlier is on the horn to the U.S Attorney in Houston. She tells him there was no malfunction on the Avarice Mission; that she had dropped a wrench into the works to sabotage her boss. She brought the ship down to prevent him from declaring ownership of something that belongs to all humanity. A person of conscience, she screwed her courage to the sticking place to prevent Mollusk from militarizing the moon to defend his claim.

To the rescue come officers sworn to uphold not the will of one man, but the law. How many of this sort will we see in power next year, do you reckon?

Then this happens & that happens & et cetera, et cetera.

In our denouement, the Phantom briefs Lamanda Luaga on how he left matters at the crash site.

We leave the Ian Mollusk bot sitting on a log by its ruined rocket, burning up in a shitposting loop on an imaginary device it holds in its hands.

Mike and I had a helluva good time turning out this story, despite that it is, grimly enough, the world in which we live and there’s really nothing comic about it.

Just keep repeating to yourself, America: Billionaires care about me. They care about me. They really, really, care about me.

Tony DePaul, November 25, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA