“They just want to make money,” Victor Eresko observes of a classroom full of students in the first issue of Jonathan Hickman’s The Black Monday Murders. How one interprets this statement, out of context, depends largely on personal worldview. “Money isn’t everything” is a popular adage that serves to curb materialism, as is the more puritan “Money is the root of all evil.” This is all to imply that greed, understood as the desire for wealth in itself, is not a worthy human pursuit. Yet it is a perfectly relatable vice; to have wealth is perhaps the most common fantasy for those who do not possess it.


In the context of The Black Monday Murders, however, this is not the sentiment carried by the professor’s observation. As a member of one of the most wealthy and powerful families in the world, Victor is lamenting his students’ lack of vision. For them, money is the end in itself, with little thought given to its use, unless it is as investment capital to produce even more money. Opponents of unrestrained capitalism understand the profit motive in the same terms: greed, plain and simple. Its material effects are the limits of discussion.

The genius of The Black Monday Murders, and its central motif of wealth as the expression of black magic, is how it forces the reader to ask the question: what is the goal of accumulating wealth? What are the ends of capital? A phrase repeated by several characters is “Wealth is the physical manifestation of power.” It is implied that this “power” is the magic employed by the aristocratic families to manipulate the world economy, in which case wealth is only a side effect—or, at best, a catalyst. This in itself has sinister implications for the super-rich, casting them as a literal super-race with superhuman powers—unnatural longevity and hypnotic suggestion are shown as explicit examples. In the real world, working people may call out the upper class for believing they are superior, but the book shows in no uncertain terms that they are.


Yet the presence of magic is a MacGuffin—remove the panels with occult imagery and supernatural goings-on, and the story would still be largely coherent. The motives of these aristocratic families could still be gleaned. Without this otherworldly element, however, the reader could still misinterpret the motivations of the characters as greed, plain and simple. The metaphor of magic shifts our attention from wealth itself to what wealth represents.

For all of our desire for money, it has no purpose in itself except to be exchanged for commodities. Great wealth is understood to be capable of buying many things, but greed does not concern itself with specifics: it is the abstract potential for buying that holds its allure. Yet buying means different things for different classes of people. For the poor, money is a solution to every problem one has: food, housing, healthcare, childcare, education, a reprieve from wage-labour. Once those needs are met, money represents luxuries: a bigger house, a better car, extravagant meals, endless leisure time.


What can we desire beyond these things? The super-wealthy are an enigma to the lower and middle classes. They easily afford luxuries, even generating markets for new luxuries that have never existed before. This class of people can possess more than they will ever make use of, yet there is still a drive to accumulate more, more than generations of their descendants could even need. Even if they invest in political games, the practical result is loosening regulation and cutting taxes to accelerate the accumulation.

Like the contrast between classical and quantum physics, the laws governing greed behave differently depending on the scale of wealth one is observing. Victor Eresko derides laws against fraud and corruption, saying “That is for them.” The Black Monday Murders shows that wealth in itself is not the motive of the wealthy; the division of rich and poor, rulers and subjects, us and them, is the motive. They wish to transcend the laws that bind humanity, whether social, legal, or even physical, but in order for there to be winners, there must be losers. This leads us to the next metaphor, introduced in the opening pages of the first issue: the blood sacrifice.


One of the interesting aspects of modern currency, which the world economy was forced to reckon with in the 20th century, is that capital growth eventually exceeds the ability of mineral deposits to back it. The Black Monday Murders acknowledges this, stating that real wealth is “pulled from the earth.” What’s more, as Dr. Gaddis cites the use of slaves in expropriating of silver from South America by Spanish colonialists, we see that this mineral wealth can also be expressed as the human cost in extracting it.

Real wealth has a blood price, but the world economy increasingly operates on “unreal” wealth: complex webs of debt and interest spread across the globe, backed by equity that only exists in paper or digital records. A crisis arises when banks fail to guarantee everyone’s assets, and the web of debts collapses. Lower income debtors are the first casualties in such a collapse, and many of their lives are legitimately ruined. While not as literal as the arcane sacrifices depicted in the book, the destruction wrought on people’s lives can lead to tragedy.


In the book, however, the blood sacrifices are reserved for members of the ruling cabal, those who have accumulated this store of manufactured wealth. This seems at first glance to be an oddly high stake for such an elite class, until we consider that they are stand-ins for specific sectors of their respective economies, and in every crisis there are those that fall hardest, even from the top. Those left standing reap their share of the “real” wealth that remains.

The point of this metaphor, however, is not to illustrate what the rich stand to lose. It is to show the fate that the most privileged have ultimately escaped. The ruling families of the Western School, leveraging the desperation of oligarchs in the failing Soviet Union, make a pact in which they can permanently escape responsibility for future economic crashes, in exchange for a share in their wealth during periods of growth. Thus, with the collapse of communism and the birth of globalisation, a safety net is created for the highest concentration of capital, at the expense of lesser nations. Even among the elite, there is a ruthless drive to push the cost of power onto someone else, someone governed by different laws.


The central question of The Black Monday Murders is: “If money is the physical manifestation of power, then what is power?” Power is visualised as magic, but only to draw attention to the fact that it’s something different than money itself. Power is living differently—and living better—than someone else, someone who bears the cost of your power. Power is knowing other people’s rules do not apply to you. Most importantly, the nature of power requires that for you to have it, you must deny it to someone else.