Reading The Power Fantasy #1: “Heroes & Villains”
Cover by Caspar Wijngaard, design by Rian Hughes.
The Power Fantasy begins with a conversation. The staging is resolutely mundane: two friends, enjoying a casual hang out, discuss what they want to do with their lives. They’re young, around twenty years old, so it naturally follows that the future would be on their minds. What makes this conversation unusual is that these friends are Santa Valentina and Etienne Lux, two people who each have the power to destroy the world. Where their conversation goes and what follows from its conclusion is the core business of the story.
Our… heroes? Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.
We quickly come to understand that both Etienne and Valentina share a common objective: they want the world to keep spinning for as long as it can. It’s 1966, the Cuban Missile Crisis is three years in the past, and Etienne has been busy thinking about the possibilities for a world where nuclear power is decentralized. This is pretty normal, seeing as thinking is what Etienne is all about. He’s what people on this world call an Omnipath: a telepath with enough mental power to touch every mind on the planet simultaneously. That’s a lot of responsibility, and more than a little scary, but two countries have the power of the nuclear bomb and ongoing political beef, so someone like Etienne existing is sort of like multiplying infinity by two as far as making the ambient existential dread worse.
More importantly for everyone who doesn’t yet know that Etienne Lux is a going concern in the world not blowing up is the fact that he is good friends with Valentina, whom the world knows as a strange savior figure with the express mission of keeping humanity from killing itself. She’s more of a woman of action, always eager to go with what feels most right in the moment. Everyone loves her, except for the nuclear powers, because she does Superman-type stuff and also apparently intervened in the Cuban Missile Crisis somehow. The fact that Valentina typically reacts on the spur of the moment provides the core tension in this first scene.
Valentina finally realizes things are serious. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.
To be brief, Etienne has gamed out the possibilities from nuclear proliferation and concluded that the only practical choices are world domination (with him and Valentina as the semipermanent diumvirate at the top) or an exponentially more precarious balancing act built on the mutual agreement among all parties with world ending power that none of them will ever exercise this power.
Neither option is good, but Valentina is violently opposed to the idea of tyranny, so Etienne quickly agrees that it will have to be the balancing act.
In the course of this ten page scene, readers learn a lot about the first third of the book’s main cast, the state of the world, and the stakes of the story. Etienne and Valentina exist in tension, both united by their common goal but clearly uneasy with each other’s approach to the problem. The world is apparently much like ours, but Valentina’s existence has altered the course of history in ways that have elevated global tensions. If we are to trust Etienne’s assessment (and we should in this scene as he functions as Kieron Gillen’s mouthpiece for setting up the parameters of the story), the world could end for absurd reasons at any moment. His casual proposal is fully serious, and Valentina’s aggressive response signals that things could escalate on any given page turn.
In short, this is a comic story that aims to supercompress all of the most typically spectacular aspects of superhero fiction to focus instead on the moments of tension before the first punch is thrown because one punch is always one too many for the world.
Friendly reminder that much of this series is about gazing into the abyss. Design by Rian Hughes.
Following Etienne’s mic drop about the nature of the world, Gillen presents readers with a rare data page in the style popularized during the Krakoa era of Marvel’s X-Men comics. It’s a small formal touch in this first issue that Gillen uses sparingly throughout the rest of the series to cue readers on the metatextual conversation he’s inviting us into about superhero fiction writ large. To put a button on this point, the data page, which Rian Hughes designs as a double page swath of black void, contains only a series of definitions for the term “Superpower”: the real world definition for nations that are major players on the global stage, the in-universe definition for people like Etienne and Valentina who can effectively operate like independent nations because of their innate destructive potential, and the comic book definition of extranormal abilities that are a standard feature of superhero fiction. This third definition, marked “archaic,” signals that while TPF is in conversation with and bears the trappings of superhero fiction, it is not a superhero story.
What a lovely day in New York! Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.
The second half of the issue flashes forward to 1999. Because TPF is in many ways a commentary on the Cold War and takes inspiration from Andrew Hickey’s A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which as a project is designed to conclude at the end of the 1990s, the bulk of the action in the story takes place at the conclusion of the twentieth century. Our focal character remains Etienne, although after thirty-something years, he’s far less brash than during his initial proposal to take over the world with Valentina. History has carried on, and crises have arisen that required exceptional intervention, although most of these incidents remain deliberately vague at this point in the story. This older Etienne is still witty and charming as he gives an interview to Tonya the Atomic journalist, but it’s clear that he’s been worn down a bit by the intervening decades. He’s full of regrets for what he perceives as his failures to protect the world from these mysterious disasters. Additionally, since 1966 several other Superpowers have emerged, and Etienne has taken on the task of being a self-appointed representative for the destructive class. Life has only gotten more complicated, and Etienne feels weighed down by the increased complexity of his personal mission.
Weight isn’t a concern for the series’s third Superpower. Ray “Heavy” Harris enters the story with lots of flash but relatively little substance. Heavy is the leader of an independent traveling nation-state, Haven, whose purpose is to provide refuge to members of the Atomic family (“Atomic” is the term for people with innate extranormal abilities). Atomics experience some considerable discrimination because most of the Superpowers are known Atomics, and this understandably makes people uneasy about the destructive power of any person with abilities. It’s a dynamic that plays a fair bit off of readers’ presumed familiarity with similar concepts explored in X-Men. In that same vein, Heavy operates sort of like Magneto, but if Magneto were a stoner hippie who never had anything actually bad happen to him before he became a public figure. Ostensibly Heavy is a radical leftist who advocates for Atomic rights, but the American government views him as more of a rogue state who is carelessly aggressive. The appearance of Haven (which Heavy flies around using his gravity powers) near New York City reads like an act of aggression, and things escalate quickly as the American president opts for a first strike against Heavy, much to Etienne’s chagrin.
The strike on Heavy sets the series paradigm for on-page violence. It will be rare and decisive and happen with minimal preamble all because Gillen wants to underline how catastrophic any overt aggression among the Superpowers will be, much like the very real world analog of nuclear strikes. Wijngaard’s job during these rare moments is to sell them as spectacular but brief eruptions that fail to offer any catharsis or alleviate tensions for the survivors. That things only get more dire after it becomes clear that being cut in half isn’t enough to kill Heavy is a strong testament to Wijngaard’s skill as a visual storyteller.
Instead of a release of tension, the finale of the issue has Etienne forced to negotiate with Heavy how harshly to punish the American government to keep him from launching Texas into space, a thing that he can very casually do, apparently. Etienne’s role in negotiations reverses from his earlier conversation with Valentina. In 1966, he was proposing a proactive strategy for world safety; in 1999, he’s on the back foot, figuring out on the fly how many lives he needs to concede in order to keep Heavy from causing a cascade of actions (because all the other Superpowers, whom we briefly meet as Etienne is coordinating his response, must react to Heavy whether they want to or not) that will destroy the world. That idea is worth keeping in mind, because Etienne deeply dislikes reacting, and there’s an ongoing implication that he’s stuck in this mode because of his agreement with Valentina.
Once all the bodies have dropped, peace is temporarily restored, but it’s clear that nothing is really okay. Heavy backs off of his posturing, but only because Etienne committed mass murder on his behalf. No one is happy, and as Etienne succinctly puts it as he walks away from Tonya, no one is safe either.
Pause for dramatic effect. Art by Caspar Wijngaard.
Both halves of this issue conclude with Etienne decisively ending a conversation with a bon mot about how bad things are. In many ways, it’s classically Gillen to be winkingly clever while pointing at the grim reaper standing just off panel, so this is nothing substantially new, but the usual dash of humanistic optimism (we’re all doomed, but at least we have each other) is absent. The Power Fantasy asserts that things won’t really be okay, but as long as we can keep the conversation going we’ll at least have a small bit of comfort, if we can bear it.
Some years ago I wrote about comics I liked very regularly on my personal blog, Catchy Title Goes Here. I did it a lot, and I think I was generally pretty good at what I did. All my old writing should still be preserved there, although because comics is a visual medium and I used my now deleted Twitter account to host images, all the pictures are broken, so it’s a sad state of affairs over there. Given that, moving these thoughts over to Tumblr is a bit of a shift, but I think it will work out for the best.
The impetus for this particular series is straightforward: someone on the internet annoyed me, and I decided that instead of complaining about it, I should just make the thing that I wanted to see: a close reading of The Power Fantasy issue by issue. The purpose of this series isn’t to be comprehensive; I know that I have blind spots and limited knowledge, and I fully expect that folks who are looking for insight into the things they care about regarding TPF may not find it from me. That’s okay! If I miss something or gloss over a thing you really want to discuss, then let’s talk about it, or even better, write up your own thoughts. I love thoughtful discussion of stories, and TPF is exactly the kind of text that demands to be turned over and considered from as many perspectives as possible. Some of my friends on the Power Cut Discord are already planning to do their own in-depth read along, and more voices can only serve to make the experience of the story more enriching for everyone. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next issue.
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