#tpf 4

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.