800 entries, 250 illustrations, 50 footnotes
Co-written with Allen Richardson. Illustrations by the Richardson brothers using craiyon.com, stablediffusionweb.com, and DALL-E 2
Contents
1. Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
2. Introduction: Superhero Exegesis
3. Index of the Duluth Superhero Community
4. Footnotes
Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
From the Journal of the Morphogenetic Field Technician: I am trapped far beneath the UMD campus in the Novelty Sphere as the global catastrophe intensifies. My team’s experiments in this underground lab are directly responsible for the apocalypse overtaking the planet. The quakes grow steadily. Portions of the lab visible through the Sphere’s cyclopean porthole have caved in. Soon the roof will collapse releasing tons of basaltic bedrock. If the Sphere’s integrity holds, I will have limited air. One thing I have an unlimited supply of: claustrophobia. It is as if I am in an untethered bathysphere sinking into the mounting pressures of the deep. The Sphere’s instrumentation confirms my worst suspicions: this is no mere global extinction. We destabilized probability itself, and the vertical line on the catastrophe graph indicates structural failure of the universal constants. Like a landslide, the cosmos races toward physical destruction. Gravity will be the first to fail, centered on the Sphere. The well of the Earth is popping like an old spring.
