While reading a discount copy of "Strange Killings" featuring the the Warren Ellis creation, Sergeant Major William Gravel, I began to wonder about class differences.
You see, Bill Gravel is a magician. But he's a very particular magician, namely a combat magician. His skills to manipulate reality (including warping the path of bullets, visual illusions, and summoning demonic horses) make him an extremely effective killing machine. This allows him to succeed both as a private mercenary and a soldier in Britain's SAS. His abilities are even strong enough to grant him access to two societies of the most powerful magicians in Great Britain, namely the Minor Seven and the Major Seven. But despite his amazing abilities, William Gravel considers himself a blue-collar man. His main goal is to protect his country, accrue enough money to pay for his drinking habit, and kill a few wankers along the way. Modest goals to say the least.
In the first arc of Warren Ellis's ongoing "Gravel", Bill's meager life goals cause him some trouble. He is thrown out of the Minor Seven by the six other members of the group and replaced by a paranormal archaelogist who has a more aristocratic bent. The main reason for removing Gravel from the Minor Seven is very simple and very elitist: he's a peasant. Gravel uses his magical powers for meager ends and doesn't behave as is expected for one of the most powerful magicians in Britain.
Gravel's response? He kills the bastards, one by one. In fact the first arc of "Gravel" is just the systematic murder of the men and women who consider themselves to be Gravel's betters.
The point of this being that there is class warfare in even such a small bizarre subset of the world. If even the Magicians of Great Britain can be torn asunder by social and economic disparity, is there any hope for the rest of world?
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