From the introduction:
Playing this game is only, and ever, about creating a comics title of your own. It’s not planning it, it’s not promising it, it’s not dreaming about it, it’s not pitching it, it’s not promoting or marketing it. This is it – do it now, as awesome or schlocky as it may be. As with the great superhero comics, it will probably be a mix.
It doesn’t have a fictional or textual setting, no ‘Verse. You’re working off “Earth Now,” meaning, the world as you know it and how you think it works, used as the backdrop for super-powered conflicts. Anything about it can be tweaked and truly bizarre made-up nonsense can be popped wherever it might be needed, but you also stay authentic about those real-world things you care about most, the politics and locations and values and people that fuel the conflicts of today.
The immediate problems and emergencies of play arise from the heroes and villains – their goals, their problems, their relationships, and their efforts. They include a rich supporting cast full of opinions and actions. You can be ready with what everyone is doing at the start of the session; but a few events into it, you have to play what they’re up to now, prior expectations be damned.
The rules of play proceed by two overriding principles: first, that the fictional qualities of all those powers and super-stuff feed into the mechanics in striking ways; second, that complicated and dangerous situations can swing one way or the other quite drastically. You can’t predict how a fight or crisis will turn out, not in every way, and often not at all.
There’s no planned epic; arcs emerge organically. Situations shake out into resolutions, relationships break up and re-form, and heroes undergo crises, transformations, and conclusions. By playing, you ride the wave-front of fiction in action, and the path you’ve traveled turns out to be comics authorship.
The heroes themselves change in unexpected ways, so that you find that you didn’t build who he or she “is” back at the start of play, only what he or she seemed like at the beginning. Who are they really, and what have they become? You discover your hero through play - and by this point it’s too late. He or she is already becoming even more than that.
I hope you can see it. Now what will happen?