Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy is one of those comics that’s attracted a tremendous amount of buzz upon its arrival, landing squarely in the realm of Next Big Thing, as the blurbs on the cover of its first trade paperback, The Superpowers, can attest. Of course, hype can be a double-edged sword, and my excitement about picking this up was mingled with some trepidation it would prove to be a clunker.
While I should stress this is only the first part of what’s clearly going to be a sprawling tale, I’m happy to report it looks like we’ve got a banger on our hands.
If you haven’t heard of it, The Power Fantasy is about as high concept as it gets. In the alternate world Gillen (with breezily colorful artwork from Caspar Wijngaard) creates, humans with extraordinary abilities began appearing after the detonation of the first atomic bomb. You’ll note I used the phrase “extraordinary abilities” to prevent muddying the waters; in the Power Fantasy ‘verse, people with those abilities are called Atomics, and of those people, there are six with the power to end the world should they ever fight one another. Those six are called the Superpowers.
We’ve got Etienne, a telepath, who manages to be likeable despite a considerable capacity for ruthlessness, ruthlessness that may prove justified. Etienne certainly thinks so, constantly calculating the ethics of his actions, ethics that will undoubtedly be stretched to the breaking point by the end of the series. There’s also Raymond “Heavy” Harris, a Sixties radical who can manipulate gravity and lives in a floating city, and whose impulsive actions kick the story into motion in shocking fashion. There’s Masumi, who can summon an eldritch being from the ocean, which would be one thing, except it happens in times of emotional upheaval, so everyone has a vested interest in keeping her on an even keel. We’ve got Magus, who possesses all sorts of arcane knowledge (at least, that’s what he claims) and can use his powers to create high-tech doohickeys he sells to the government, mostly ones meant to stave off errant Superpowers. We’ve got Eliza, who plays only a minor role so far, but who’s been ominously claimed to have made a “deal with the devil.” Last but by no means least is Valentina, the moral center of our Superpowers, and who seems to be… well, maybe it’s best you read and find out for yourself. (She gets a nifty scene involving the Cuban Missile Crisis that just screams for a needle drop in a future screen adaption.)
I doubt this will be for everyone, so I should probably throw out a few caveats. For one, the series leans harder on character development, suspense, and Big Ideas than on traditional superhero punch-ups; after all, the entire premise of the series is that our motley crew of Superpowers have to be prevented from fighting one another at all costs. Don’t let that put you off: while nobody likes superpowered mayhem more than I do, it didn’t stop me from getting sucked into the machinations of this dysfunctional family of antiheroes, and the fascinating alternate reality Gillen creates. And besides, after all the buildup, it’s hard to fathom that these walking WMDs won’t throw down someday, the entire series being basically one big Chekov’s gun.
Gillen doesn’t hold your hand, throwing a lot of information at you without much explanation, and you’re likely to be a little confused at the outset. My advice is to just go with it. Things will become clearer the further you go in the story, and the upshot is, this is the kind of series that lends itself to lots of theorizing. (What happened in Tokyo? Are there really only six Superpowers?) Neither is this a story with the kind of clear good and evil of more usual superhero yarns, with our Superpowers more akin to the scheming houses of Game of Thrones than the Avengers. Of course, that allows the reader to choose sides, which is always fun.
I wasn’t without quibbles; whether the Superpowers’ abilities come from science, the supernatural, or both, is ambiguous, and I would have liked a little more clarity about which subgenre we’ve found ourselves in. The biggest drawback is that all we’ve gotten is the slow-burning fuse but not the explosion, in terms of plot and character. Your mileage may vary, but I can’t wait to see the inevitable kaboom.
I know I’ve rambled here, but this is the kind of story you can spill a lot of ink talking about. Suspenseful and engrossing, if it lives up to its potential, The Power Fantasy has the ingredients to be the sort of grand epic that excites, disturbs, and pulls at the heartstrings.
