Peter Frase

The new issue of Jacobin is [out](https://www.jacobinmag.com/issue/ours-to-master/). It's about technology, a longstanding preoccupation of mine, and I have the [lead editorial](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/). Check it out, along with all the other great stuff in the issue.

I also wrote something for the newest issue of the New Inquiry, which is themed around "futures". My essay is [here](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-future-bubble/). In some ways it functions as a companion piece to my editorial, although it's generally loopier and weirder. It was retitled from my editor's original suggestion, "The Time Bubble", following the Fantastic Four storyline I reference in the text.

The above is an image from that [storyline](http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/timebubblegalactus.htm), showing the FF penetrating said bubble on their "time sled". Which is named Rosebud II. I loved this series of comics when I first read it as a 10 year old, and I still have fond feelings about it. Walt Simonson was great on that run, which he both wrote and drew. He has a wonderfully angular and abstract art style, and he's a witty writer with a good science fiction mind.

So I'm glad I got to build an essay about Marxist political economy around this story. Not that I'm the first person on the Internet to build an elaborate and vaguely ridiculous theory around these comics. For a far more ambitious and absurd attempt, you have to check out [this site](http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/index.html). The author argues that the 1961-1989 run of the Fantastic Four actually constitutes the "Great American Novel", an unmatched examination and synthesis of all the big questions that confronted American society during the cold war.

The site's coverage of the time bubble story can be found [here](http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/ff-Franklinverse.html). The author makes a bunch of metafictional arguments about the relationship between the stories and the upheavel in Marvel's editorial direction at the time, which was of course totally invisible to me when I was 10. The time bubble, he argues, represents the end of continuity and permanent change in the Marvel universe. It is about "all powerful beings"---i.e., editors---"who prevent the world from moving into the future" by dictating that writers cannot make permanent changes to the characters and worlds that they are writing.

Later on, there's another funny series of comics riffing on Marvel's internal bureaucracy, with a dimension of infinite faceless desk jockeys standing in for a directionless editorial team. It's all hilarious and wonderful. But really, just go read the [comics](http://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Four-Visionaries-Walter-Simonson/dp/0785127585).