So,
there's lot to mull over in that story.
For starters, there's the
obscenity of the wealthy's problems being caused by simply having too
much money.
Take that a step
further and the situation portrayed may more accurately – and
profitably – be considered as a systemic problem: The Riches
are plainly simple buffoons who don't know where their money is coming
from and don't know what to do with it beyond storing it away. It
is the tendency of money in a capitalist society to follow money and so
accumulate in unmanageable concentrations that is shown to be the
problem here. And
then there's the lurid Freudian
undertones of spurting cash and throbbing phallic symbols in need of
release all linked to this excess of wealth. And what to make of
the closing, concretization of the titular metaphor? On the one
hand it could perhaps be seen as the alchemical phantasm of a perpetual
motion machine, but that would be cheating ourselves of its more laden,
contemporary meanings: This comic was created in the wake of the
"Oil Crisis" in which the global intersections of wealth and oil (and,
of course, power - in both senses on display here) were linked more
clearly in the public mind. Thus the title of this tale
highlights the historical moment when the mechanical sense of power –
as in its generation and use to power modern civilization and its
attendant machines, including, of course, automobiles – rose to join
the traditional senses of the temporal and political that had largely
attached to the phrase "money is power" previously.
Add it all up and it
comes to... what exactly?
Certainly this
story tells us something about capitalism, the global economy and,
particularly, American society's (mal)adaptive responses to the
contemporary exigencies precipitated by the rise of global capitalism.
So, perhaps you would like to go
back and read it again with this in mind
and see if you can figure it out.
Or, just move on...