Jason K Jones Art

Going

July 8, 2026

Cover by Caspar Wijngaard, design by Rian Hughes.

Gojira premiered in Japan in 1954, a little over nine years after the second wartime atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. A film about anxieties around the potential environmental impacts of nuclear testing, it was the first of what we now casually refer to as kaiju movies. In the years since Gojira, or Godzilla as it’s typically styled in western localizations, the genre of kaiju movies has ranged widely in tone, but the core from the beginning has always been to give definite form to cultural anxieties about the harm we cause to ourselves and to the planet now that we possess the technology of nuclear power. Godzilla begins as an avatar for the world’s rage at what humanity has done to it, and while its nature shifts over time depending on the narrative needs of any given story, the core concept of a manifest response to careless human stewardship is always hiding there beneath the surface.

I’m not a kaiju nerd. I’ve seen maybe a handful of Godzilla movies myself, so my read on Godzilla is largely gleaned from cultural osmosis, the occasional Wikipedia dive, and familiarity with the larger impact kaiju fiction has had on Japanese pop culture. Knowing about Godzilla just sort of happens when your formative years are also a golden age of Japanese cultural exports in video games, anime, and manga. I look at texts like Final Fantasy VII or Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I don’t have to have an intimate knowledge of every Godzilla movie ever made to understand that I’m looking at Godzilla’s conceptual descendants in the Weapons or the Angels and Evas. It’s all just sort of there to be seen by an attentive reader, mostly because kaiju fiction feeds into the larger fascination in Japanese pop culture with what you do in the wake of societal disaster. Catastrophe and its lingering effects is an inescapable theme for a country that was on the receiving end of the most overt demonstration of the American superpower’s might in the twentieth century.

If we step back for a moment to consider the influences that Gillen and Wijngaard are playing with in The Power Fantasy, it’s easy to see all the western explorations of anxiety around the atomic bomb. Most of the Superpowers hail from the Americas and Europe, and it’s clear that they work as meditations on the ways that the Cold War affected the global West. A presumption of rightful dominance stirred up this ongoing anxiety about the fact that other players had their own considerable bases of power, and none of these behemoths should exercise their full might for fear of a reprisal that could kill everyone. Meanwhile, Japan was trying to recover from a failed imperialist project that ended with violent humiliation. Within twenty years, these two experiences manifested in story in radically different ways: American comics produced the X-Men, heroes who in their initial conception received their powers because of mutation caused by ambient radiation; and Japanese cinema produced Godzilla, a morality tale about how atomic power produced monstrous effects that destroyed communities. The American anxiety is all about the costs of possessing the power, while the Japanese anxiety is much more focused on what could happen to people who are forced to live alongside the possessors of power.

So now we come to Morishita Masumi. Where Etienne, Heavy, and Valentina spring from a cultural paradigm that asks questions about what it means to exercise power responsibly, Masumi exists to explore how power tears down its possessors. The issue opens with a psychic plea from Etienne to Masumi after her powers have manifested for the first time, causing a kaiju that is larger than Tokyo to appear suddenly in Japan. We don’t see the monster clearly, and it won’t appear again for a very long time within the series. The two page scene works to convey to us both the threat that Masumi represents and the uncomfortable reality that she isn’t really in control of her own power.

God damn it, Etienne. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

It also demonstrates subtly that Etienne has been managing Masumi from the beginning, and his method of management is about making Masumi feel powerless. His final words to her in the flashback scene, “This isn’t you,” work to establish a divide for both the reader and Masumi between the kaiju and the person. One possesses the power, and the other is simply a gateway to that power, not someone with actual agency. We’re told repeatedly in the series and its related promotional materials that Masumi is the “dissociation kaiju,” and after reading through the series a few times, I question whether dissociation is the actual trigger or if that’s a coping mechanism that Etienne pushes Masumi to foster in order to keep her from doing the difficult, admittedly risky work of developing emotional resilience so that she doesn’t repeat the Tokyo disaster.

It’s likely a moot point whether Etienne pushes Masumi to develop a cognitive divide between her human self and her monstrous self, but Etienne’s interference at all also points to a theme that started subtly last issue and continues to build here around the problem of too much power leading to arrested development. Valentina presents with a childlike attitude that stems in part from her alien nature and in part from the fact that she’s literally invincible and has never had to contend with the fact of her own mortality as a guide on her psychological maturation. Further, her presence as a safety rail for humanity has also impacted how the global community develops and responds to major international crises. It’s a different world when America and the Soviet Union have their nuclear missiles destroyed by an external arbiter instead of mutually deciding that they need to take steps towards disarmament. In Masumi, this theme gets taken to a tragic extreme, as the issue emphasizes repeatedly that being in her orbit is stressful at best and terrifying at worst because she lacks the maturity and self awareness to balance her negative feelings against the impact she can have on the world.

This woman was just told that one of her guests won’t be able to attend her art show, and now she’s having an existential crisis. Art by Caspar Wijngaard.

I freely admit that I am a Masumi apologist. From the first issue of The Power Cut, I’ve been writing about her and her girlfriend Isabella, and I have more in the third issue, which should be ready to come out soon. It’s not really a secret that my first read on any scene with Masumi is “how badly does this suck for her, personally?” With some perspective, I can see that she’s a difficult character. In issue 4 she’s demanding, moody, throws a temper tantrum in front of a room full of people, and prioritizes her pride as an artist over the very real threat she makes towards the whole planet. If Masumi were real, she’d be terrifying. We’d all gawk from afar at how impossibly shortsighted she is.

What would be more difficult is considering how much of Masumi’s brattiness is an expression of her own dim awareness that her life isn’t right somehow. Isabella does most of the emotional labor in their relationship, but there are small glimpses even in this introduction that Masumi wants to be a better partner to her girlfriend. She knows there are more emotional depths that she can reach, but as the issue repeatedly reminds us with its use of water imagery, it’s dangerous for Masumi to explore who she is below the surface. When she sits in her bathtub and contemplates her other self, Isabella immediately drags her away from those thoughts. There’s no space in Masumi’s tightly controlled life for introspection. She’s not allowed to be a better version of herself because the pathway requires going through worse versions first, and so instead she’s only allowed to express her grief and rage in the most childish, impotent ways possible.

We know, Masumi. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

The title of this issue is “I Ruined Godzilla.” It’s a very personal, subjective statement, and it would be fair to ascribe the sentiment directly to Masumi. She grew up with kaiju stories, and then one day she was a kaiju, and now it’s just not fun to tell allegorical stories about a thing that actually happened to everyone. Etienne tells Isabella in the closing scene of the issue that Masumi is doomed never to understand true beauty, and readers understand this to be a personal tragedy because Masumi is an artist, and beauty is what artists strive to create. It’s also a societal tragedy. The world of The Power Fantasy moves seamlessly from one existential threat to the next, and the world is made poorer by the Superpowers robbing the rest of humanity of opportunities to improve itself and voluntarily back away from oblivion. Godzilla was a way for victims of nuclear bombing to examine their feelings about living in a world where that happened, and now Masumi exists, and that avenue of thought is cut off. There was one last kaiju in 1982, and although Tokyo rebuilt, the entire world has been forever flattened just a bit more by her.

July 1, 2026

Cover by Caspar Wijngaard, design by Rian Hughes.

If you are the kind of person who has spent the last two years obsessing over The Power Fantasy, you likely have listened to the series playlist at least once, but it’s worth taking a moment to make sure we’re all familiar with the Tornados’ single, “Telstar.”

“Telstar” begins with the whoosh of a satellite flying overhead, heralding the beginning of something new and exciting before it launches into its main theme on otherworldly keyboards. The keyboards carry the main melody for most of the song, occasionally handing off to a smooth electric guitar playing a slightly less manic, but no less intense, counterpoint. It builds steadily towards climax before the satellite whooshes off, and the fantasia that the piece is designed to evoke comes to a close.

It’s a record that feels, looking back from sixty-something years on, more remarkable for what it represented as a cultural turning point in the twentieth century rather than as a piece of music. It points towards a gleaming vision of the future that we now think of more as “retro-futuristic” than indicative of anything that actually happened in our timeline. The song evokes the spirit of innovation that tinged so much of the Atomic Age in the moments when people weren’t worrying about the potential imminence of bombs falling from the sky. The world’s two superpowers were building rockets to deliver all kinds of payloads, and a communications satellite, the eponymous Telstar, was a much happier vision than the warheads that were the real long term goal of rocket science.

“Telstar” arrived with a bang, promising a new exciting horizon that would be sustained on the force of hope alone, a herald for a shining future. It’s a shame that the fall of 1962 brought with it the grim reality of the promised Space Age and a sort of watershed for what the twentieth century might be in the popular imagination.

Anyway, let’s talk about Santa Valentina.

Giving messianic all kinds of new meanings. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

If you are inclined to think about the ways that TPF plays with and hearkens to the tropes of superhero fiction, Valentina exists as our Superman analog. She’s the first Superpower, the strongest, the most iconic in the popular imagination. Valentina is an extradimensional alien, something akin to an angel, and she arrives with a mission to save everyone. She knows virtually nothing about her home reality, and so is wholeheartedly committed to taking care of her adopted home. Distilled sunshine with an intuitive knowledge of why she’s here and what she’s about. More specific to Gillen’s own work, Valentina also recombines some of the traits he explored in his run on Young Avengers in the characters of America Chavez, the interdimensional bruiser with a vague-to-everyone-but-her mission for saving the universe, and Noh-Varr, the happy-go-lucky manchild adventurer who falls in love with Earth culture through pop music. Valentina’s all of these character types, but she exists in a world where superheroes are archaic fiction from a time before her. How could someone with Superman’s moral clarity operate in a world where the business of preserving the planet is eternally cast in shades of gray?

The third issue of The Power Fantasy explores this question with a guided tour through key moments in Valentina’s life. She’s born at the moment of detonation of the first successful atomic bomb test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and her entrance is just as explosive. Valentina’s descent into linear time from what she and other folks think of as heaven triggers the cascade of events that lead to working magic and presumably the first manifestation of Atomic abilities. The TPF timeline exists as it does because of Valentina, and while there are still open questions about some things that follow, it’s undeniable that she is the catalyst for all the horrors of the proceeding fifty-five years. At the same time, Valentina is totally committed to protecting the planet from destruction. Her self annunciation encompasses this tension in her nature perfectly. A fully articulate floating baby, covered in the viscera of new life, having just exploded violently from her mother’s womb, declares her mission to a room full of panicked medical staff. This is something both deeply wrong and incredibly compelling.

It’s an ongoing motif through issue 3 that Valentina frustrates everyone she speaks with via her obtuseness, a trait that at this point remains totally ambiguous in regard to its sincerity. Jacky Magus, who we’ll talk about more when we get to issue 5, is frustrated that Valentina seems unconcerned about the shifting landscape around Etienne, whom he realizes has grown much stronger since the last time he had the opportunity to assess the omnipath’s power level. Etienne, upon first meeting Valentina when they are both still children, struggles to get straight answers from her about her nature and constantly tries to clarify his meaning because he’s not able to read her mind to make sure she understands what he’s asking her. Valentina’s default stance in all of her interactions is that of a naive child, although when she’s angry she quickly switches to something more paternal, although even then her general tone feels like a child playing at being a parent rather than an actual parent.

You’d think Etienne would be used to this schtick after forty years. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

In 1962 Valentina receives a copy of “Telstar” from Etienne as the Cuban Missile Crisis plays out. The scene is remarkably mundane until it isn’t. Teenage Valentina, sitting in her ordinary room full of records and other markers of a normal teenager, tired of listening to the dire news, decides to put on the new record her friend from across the world has just sent her. It doesn’t matter that she’s the reason for the crisis because she’s still a kid who needs to have fun. She begins listening, and before the record has finished, Valentina has informed President Kennedy of her intention to act and summarily destroyed the nuclear bases in both Cuba and Turkey. Valentina is fully on board with the Tornados’ vision, and she acts intuitively to protect it regardless of the consequences. It’s the central scene of the issue, and it neatly summarizes who Valentina is: a being of immense power, excellent intentions, and limited understanding of the complex implications of her actions.

Valentina spends a lot of time looking down on her pet planet. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

I feel like up to this point I’ve been hard on Valentina. Part of that is just the nature of this analytical project. The Power Fantasy is a story about how catastrophic it is for individuals to have unilateral power to reshape the world, and Valentina’s position in the series’s cosmology lays so much of the fault at her bare feet. Whether she’s capable of true change as a character remains an open question at the end of issue 16, but aside from the larger harm her existence indirectly causes, she’s also a lovely person. She cares deeply about everyone that she meets, and she carries genuine regret for the moments where she got other people killed. She understands that the timeline is fragile, and as she ages she does come to act with more circumspection. The problem is that Valentina’s acquired wisdom only ever pushes her to act in subtler ways, but never leads her to consider that she could be a root cause of the world’s problems. The closest she gets is realizing that regular people aren’t safe from direct attacks on her made by anyone who fears what she represents. When she accidentally kills President Nixon while telling him that she’s relocating to space, there’s nothing in Valentina’s reasoning that leaves room for her to consider that she’s the problem. All of her collateral damage is a result of what other people do to try to stop her.

She’s so close to getting it. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

The issue ends with another conversation between Etienne and Valentina. Etienne chides her that she should have just killed Nixon instead of letting him and his men die from the radiation poisoning, and Valentina deflects. She’s visibly uncomfortable with the implication that she was at fault, and her petulant complaint that people still think she’s radioactive underlines how difficult this kind of self reflection is for her. Instead of thinking about how she killed people with her carelessness, she shifts focus to the fallout from the single largest failure she and the other Superpowers experienced: the arrival of the Queen and the wholesale destruction of Europe in 1989. The details of this event won’t be explored until the series’s second arc, but it appears here as the strongest single example of how things are different in an issue that’s already been subtly exploring how Valentina altered the timeline. Even so, Valentina still is only able to ask if she could have done anything differently rather than whether she was part of the problem from the start.

I’d hate flying over Europe too if it looked like this. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

The issue closes with a timeline of significant events that occur after Valentina’s birth. It’s both a guidepost for the reader to think more clearly about major divergences from the actual history of the twentieth century and a bit of a called shot from Gillen regarding the first year’s worth of comics in the series. I remember when the issue first came out being impressed that he was confident enough in his outline to give that much detail about what he intended to address in his alternate history. It’s like a mini “Telstar,” promising a vision for what was to come. Unlike the Tornados’ single though, Gillen’s timeline remained accurate. I guess it’s easier to see the future when you aren’t stuck living inside time.

Meatball Special

June 21, 2026

Cover by Caspar Wijngaard, design by Rian Hughes.

The second issue of The Power Fantasy is structurally unusual. The first arc of the series, which concludes with issue five, is built around a series of character spotlights designed to tell us more about our core cast in detail while unveiling the ways that TPF’s world differs from our own. Given that issue one was a character study on Etienne, and issues three, four, and five explore Valentina, Masumi, and Jacky respectively (Eliza remains relatively obscured until later for narrative reasons), it follows that issue two should be a deep dive on Heavy. And to be sure, there are several key scenes in the issue that tell readers more about the self-appointed Atomic savior, but it’s not a comic that is about Heavy the way that the rest of the arc is about the other Superpowers. Gillen has noted that part of this condensation is due to his realizing after he finished issue one that he needed to actually spend some time establishing what’s at stake in the series’s present after Etienne murders the American president. There’s a real danger of killing all the narrative momentum that the first issue’s finale builds up if we immediately go to a spotlight issue full of flashbacks without explaining that people in the present are reacting to the assassination of a head of state even if the perpetrator has functional impunity.

So when the issue opens, our spotlight on Heavy’s history as a political activist is truncated to a single page of archival footage and some exposition via news anchors who immediately pivot to talking about Etienne before Mr. Big Brain himself interrupts them to give a public service announcement explaining he had to do the murder because Heavy would have done worse if left to retaliate on his own. It’s all very unfortunate, but you simply can’t let Heavy be Heavy if you want the world to carry on.

Etienne confesses on live television. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

Following his confession, Etienne explains his reasoning to the world, and he cautions everyone that it was fear that led the United States to try to kill Heavy, and further fear is only going to make things worse. It’s clear at this point that we’re still playing with tropes common to X-Men comics, as increased resentment of Atomics as a class because of two very prominent Atomics’ actions is a perfect parallel to so many mutant stories. The pivot from Etienne “contextualizing the horror” to him helping Tonya out of a police interrogation that isn’t going well takes this concept and personalizes it by showing readers the immediate knock on effects for non-Superpowered Atomics. It’s an interesting scene that is something of a rarity later in the series simply because there’s no space to focus on regular people who aren’t in the orbit of the Superpowers. I also suspect that this kind of ground level scene is set aside in later issues simply because it’s been done many times elsewhere, and Gillen is trusting his readers to understand the bigotry facet of the world given the shorthand he’s using without having to dwell on it. This story springs from X-Men, but it’s not X-Men.

Etienne’s second conversation with Tonya serves to illustrate more about Etienne himself, particularly his strong commitment to maintaining Superpower kayfabe. Now that Tonya has been flagged as a person of interest, Etienne feels comfortable giving her a more frank assessment of current Superpower relations, particularly since he’s sending her to Haven for refuge. He’s still managing the flow of information (he’s extremely coy about the discussion of cop deaths and Tonya’s suspicion that a Superpower is doing it), but he wants Tonya to be wary of Heavy while she’s staying on Haven.

Time for the sidebar. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

Briefly, because I’d rather save a more in depth discussion of Masumi for issue four, this scene is the only time Masumi’s Superpower name, Deconstructa, is used on panel. I have complicated thoughts about the name itself and what aspects of Masumi’s identity to which it applies, but here it’s ambiguous how Tonya is using it. I think this use is similar to her mention of “Brother Ray” in issue one, where she’s using the name of a Superpower’s public persona as a journalist discussing a public figure. Masumi’s preferred mode of public interactions is as a celebrity artist, and I maintain that Deconstructa is her nom de plume instead of a reference to the monster she becomes when she disassociates.

Anyway, moving on.

While she appeared briefly in the first issue, we properly meet Morishita Masumi here, where we learn that she’s kind of self-centered, probably oblivious to her girlfriend’s unexpressed misery, and relies tremendously on Etienne for counsel. She’s anxious that Etienne will need to go into hiding and miss her upcoming show, but he makes it clear that attending is a priority for him regardless of the logistical difficulties that arise from publicly assassinating a head of state. It’s a small tease of just how bad things could get if Masumi isn’t properly managed, since Etienne appears to spend a huge portion of his time just keeping the Superpowers in a place of relative stability.

Finally, after all of the table setting is done and readers understand what Etienne’s next move needs to be, the issue pivots to Heavy so that we can get to know him in a non-fightey context. He begins with a charm offensive, but Tonya cuts through that to ask him directly about his half-baked plan to toss Texas off the planet. While bluster is his first move, it doesn’t take long for Heavy to demonstrate his most endearing trait: a willingness to admit when he’s wrong. We’ll see this cycle a few times over the course of the series, but this is the first clear demonstration. Heavy feels self-righteous anger over an offense and responds rashly with minimal foresight, and then once things are defused, he’s clearheaded enough to assess how he messed up.

What’s interesting about this interview scene is how it functions as a thematic mirror to Tonya’s interrogation earlier at the police station. Heavy is one of the most powerful people in the world, but when talking with Tonya he allows her to take control of the conversation. This is at least in part because Heavy espouses an ideology of Atomic liberation, and it naturally follows that he’d want to empower someone he knows was just victimized by anti-Atomic bigotry. There’s also Tonya’s status as a journalist; she just interviewed Etienne, and as the end of the issue reveals, Heavy has his own massive story that he’d like to tell if he can get the right framing on it. More deeply though, the move from powerless to powerful for Tonya is a way to distance TPF from its X-Men roots.

Heavy and Tonya discuss the implications of yeeting Texas into space. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

X-Men stories are always about systemic prejudice and bigotry. The mutant metaphor is designed to be flexible enough that it can stand in for a variety of marginalized identities, but as many capable readers note, it fails as a perfect analog for any one axis of identity. Setting aside the Krakoa era of X-Men stories, which are more about the kinds of resistance that emerge when marginalized people assert their right to build spaces intended for themselves, the X-Men franchise is primarily concerned with people trying to survive in a hostile social environment that they can’t really control. The Power Fantasy is interested in a different kind of story altogether. Tonya’s Atomic status is mostly incidental to her place in the story, but her job as a journalist gives her a huge amount of influence as she enters Heavy’s orbit. Heavy talks a big game about Atomic liberation, and it’s easy to infer that he allowed Tonya access to him because she’s an Atomic, but Tonya’s observations about who he would have hurt underline the fact that the biggest part of Heavy’s identity isn’t that he’s an Atomic—it’s that he’s a Superpower.

I think the main reason that scenes like Tonya’s interrogation ultimately fall away as the series progresses is because the fact of Atomics in the setting is thematically moot. Atomic status is just another axis of identity in the setting, and Gillen seems to be aware that he doesn’t have much to say about that beyond acknowledging that its significance as a marginalization is going to vary widely because of intersectional factors. The police imply they arrested Tonya because she’s an Atomic, but readers shouldn’t ignore the fact that she’s also a Black woman who was in proximity to a Black man who committed a crime. In a real world context, that feels like a much bigger reason for the arrest than Tonya’s light show fingers.

Ultimately, what we begin to see taking shape in this issue is a greater development of the unifying factor among our cast. Yes, half of the Superpowers are Atomics, and the general public likely doesn’t know or care enough to split hairs over Valentina and Eliza’s extradimensional natures, but Atomic solidarity is not what drives any of their decision making. Superpower status is conferred based on an individual’s ability to destroy the world, or at least catastrophically damage it. The real world analog for that kind of power isn’t a marginalized identity: it’s a billionaire.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg doing this. Art by Caspar Wijngaard, letters by Clayton Cowles.

I mean, Heavy even has his own unqualified failson waiting in the wings.

Angel Mode

June 13, 2026

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.

Personal Note

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.

Darkchild

The Pool Fantasy

Violet

Absolute Zatanna

Magik

“Illyana, you’re—“

Phoenix II

“Rachel, you’re a—“