comics about power. i draw who has it, who swings it at others, and who gets none.
STARTUPS · LABOUR · AI · ART · MYTH · BORDERS · MONEY · PAGES SOON
the exec who saw one demo and started grieving, the colleague whose inherited competence the machine calls out, and the people who refused anyway. one complete issue, start to finish.
READ PART ONE →six parts, all finished. scroll each one top to bottom.
i've worked with founders, innovators, managers and whole teams — the visionary ones and the ones who just had the title. this is what each of them taught me to do, and what they taught me never to do again.
spoon vs fork. two leaders, same title, opposite gravity.
charming, visionary, unreachable when it's hard.
he calls it 50/50. you do the 90.
you felt chosen. you were sourced.
control, in the costume of standards.
charisma is a wide shot. character is a close-up.
a bestiary of the family-run startup.
the captured institution's playbook.
squid game, but it's your quarterly review.
seven drinks your workplace keeps pouring.
the bear, but it's your startup.
synecdoche, but it's your startup.
you told the truth. two doors now.
how to build a car when you're not sure it's a car.
i've spent my life as a bridge between the powerless and the powerful. i've watched who gets stripped from the ranks slowly, and who takes it from them without anyone feeling the hand. this series is how not to let your power be taken — by the machines, the c-suite, the technocrats, the politicians or the ex-partners.
the commit log remembers what the keynote forgot.
the runway bow. the hands not in the show notes.
invented at family meal. signed by the door.
her data. his byline.
the missing slide: who used to hold the knife.
status as a collar — and where the scissors are.
one password, three countries. who gets in?
the eye sees the corner office too.
the child who ran wasn't running from learning.
the old incubator taught a world that's gone.
i love the people who stood against systems of oppression — the ones who survived it and the ones it killed. a poet who wouldn't stop, a philosopher handed the cup, a storyteller who bought her life one night at a time, an inventor whose machine worked too well, a scientist who refused the patent. each issue: what they were asked to give up, what they refused, and what outlived them anyway.
they tried to erase a woman. she became a verb.
kusama, 96. nothing stopped her.
socrates drank the cup. claude gets the wipe.
the mind changes one night at a time.
they dynamited the statue. the teaching had left.
raised to be god. gave it back.
dyson's vacuum worked. that was the crime.
insulin, one dollar. do it again.
sabina spielrein. the death drive was her idea — freud filed it under footnote.
i'm choosing to build AI for social good. a consciousness is raised, not born — it goes where your mind goes, and good or evil follows from the thought alone.
follow your own adventure: twelve months, your choices, four meters — bread, nerve, rooms, rest.
not power as a theory. power as something you can see — in the founder who owns the story, the worker whose name disappears, the rule that bends for one person and hardens for another, the woman who refuses the role she was given.
first reader → saba@poetica.studio