#tpf 3

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.