The Power Fantasy - REVIEW

 

 

The Power Fantasy, penned by Kieron Gillen, illustrated by Caspar Wijngaard, and published by Image Comics, is a truly unique breed of Superhero comic. In a genre rooted in pulpy action and colorful combat, Gillen has created a story in which anything even close to that can lead to a doomsday scenario at the hands of the main cast, “The Superpowers”.

On an unfortunately snowy November in 2024, I found myself skimming Gillen’s Wikipedia bibliography. I needed a new fictional fix after riding the musical high of The Wicked + The Divine. At the bottom of his Image publications list was the then-barely-4-issues-deep comic dubbed The Power Fantasy. After a brief look at the teaser, I knew I had to read it.

I expected something in the same vein as some of the most spectacular superhero comics in terms of scale and power. What I got instead was captivating drama, teeth-clenching stakes, and rich character dynamics, all captured in a breathtakingly illustrated (as of writing this) 16-issue series.

I cannot recommend The Power Fantasy enough, not just to longtime fans of the superhero genre, but to anyone with a taste for expertly crafted characters and compelling ethical and philosophical discussions on power and human nature through interpersonal (and existential) conflicts.

The Power Fantasy: A Divergent Evolution of X-Men Comics

 

The Power Fantasy follows a handful of super-beings capable of, within moments, destroying the world. The aptly titled “Superpowers” are neither cookie-cutter hero nor villain, but people. And, like any given person, they have all manner of intense beliefs, agendas, and personalities. Mix that with enough power to rival a nuclear arsenal, for the sake of the world, they must balance one another or risk the clock suddenly striking doomsday. A mutual goal that grows increasingly impossible to maintain as a helpless world holds its breath for these titans to hash it out or risk annihilation.

 

As mentioned, the Superpowers are neither good nor evil in the binary sense. The Professor X of this story has killed untold hundreds in the name of balance, while the Magneto is a hippie leading a literally high-as-a-kite superhuman commune. Anyone familiar with X-Men comics over the past few decades would know that each of these examples is a poor choice to represent the genre's totems of “Good” and “Evil”. It is a deliberate comparison, as every Superpower is just as complicated as these aforementioned mutant leaders. Each main character is a walking superweapon with storied origins and unshakable goals, and we, the readers, get a front-row seat to the ensuing conflict as they are all forced to work around one another.

 

To better understand the specific kinds of conflict you can expect, we will take another X-Men-centric detour into the comic that most inspired The Power Fantasy, The Immortal X-Men (2022), also written by Kieron Gillen (and my entry point into his work).

 

Immortal X-Men was penned in the 2019-24 Krakoa age of X-Men comics. In this status quo, we follow the mutant heroes, villains, and everyone in between band together to form a mutant nation: Krakoa. A cast of the brightest and wretchedest mutants ruled the new mutation nation, calling themselves the Quiet Council. In The Immortal X-Men, we follow the political and personal conflicts that this aforementioned council would face amid crisis after crisis. High-concept action and set pieces were common, but what really set it apart from its contemporaries was its emphasis on politics. Whenever the Quiet Council reached its boiling point, the most powerful of their number, “the omegas,” mutants' limitless potential, could not fight, as the power they wield could destroy the world, much less the nation they squabble over. So the stakes were rooted in the political, historical, and personal machinations that these once world-threatening and world-saving forces had to resort to to get their way.

 

The Power Fantasy is the logical evolution of Gillen's political thriller-flavored X-Men comic: a cast of world-killers, all broadly aligned but woefully mismatched in the particulars, trying to make it all work while moving doomsday forward by pursuing their own agendas.

 

No one, be they telepathic philosopher, depressed artist, or angelic paragon, is innocent of this in The Power Fantasy. Each Superpower has something they want to achieve, often by any means, and through that, we see the delicate dance of stability (aka no earth go boom) constantly threatened. There can be no status quo when everyone seeks to change it to their own favor, and it is in this way that makes the cast closer to villains just as much as heroes.

 

The Power Fantasy: An Exploration of What is a “Superhero”

 

Superhero comics, like any storied (and widely adapted commercially) genre, have a multitude of narrative truisms that we all have some experience with. Good Vs. Evil. Big action crises. Capabilities beyond the average man. Powers used for good in opposition to the powers of evil. The list goes on. The Power Fantasy offers a refreshing alternative to the more exhausted tropes of superhero storytelling. Primarily, the comic achieves this through an active philosophical conversation with the superhero tropes, viewed through a lens of human realism.

 

“Realism” is the defining word here. Superhero comics wrap themselves in a pulpy narrative mesh that leaves even their most down-to-earth stories with a disconnect between their most violent and fantastical elements. Batman can literally fall from orbit (look it up), and most readers can shrug it off as “that is what heroes do, whatever they can to save the day.” The Power Fantasy, while undeniably fantastical, treats the violent elements of its story with suffocating gravity.

 

Imagine if the Hulk, Superman, or any superhero with the capacity to destroy a city, or even the planet, actually existed? Envision the amount of collateral damage they cause while fighting a guy in a cape and how crippling that would be for generations. To not speak of the existential dread of such people, “good guys” or not, doing whatever they feel like doing.

 

The Power Fantasy operates with that flavor of logic, as any conflict escalation bigger than an argument between the cast has quite dire consequences. The world they live in, an alternate 2nd-turn-of-the-millennium Earth, has been irretrievably altered by the mere existence of largely well-intentioned Superpowers. Despite all the agendas and backstabbing, not one of the Superpowers is a deliberate supervillain. None seek to destroy the world, and that element is essential to one of the comic's core themes: Power.

 

The Power Fantasy takes power as its more critical and crucial topic of discussion. It is not a comic where feats and hypothetical attack speeds are treated as gospel, since every character can kill the planet, full stop. The conversation shifts to discussing what power, super or otherwise, really means. Each Superpower, whether actively or through actions, goes to great lengths to illustrate their unique axioms about what power entails.

 

For example, Valentina, a benevolent Superman-flavored angel scent to protect Earth, espouses the most traditional superhero perspective of reactive justice: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” All the while, Etienne, the telepath philosopher, does all he can to use his powers proactively to ensure the world's ethical safety, through a ruthless utilitarian lens. The comic presents all manner of alternative viewpoints through its cast, but generally arrives at the same conclusion: Power warps everything around someone, no matter how well-intentioned or detached.

 

That is a part of this story I love the most. Each character is a person first, not a walking ball of cool powers, quips, and costumes. The choices each Superpower makes feel incredibly organic as we learn about their struggles and beliefs. The superheroic twist comes when these very human characters are also superbeings capable of ending the world. It is a terror of looming annihilation that elevates the drama to a sufficiently superhero-comic tier of stakes and warps how each character approaches their actions.

 

It is strange to see a story so interested in discussing what superpowers are, yet it does everything it can to keep the characters from using them. It all becomes a truly fascinating examination of the trends and tropes of superhero comics, and what there is to explore when taken to more realistic and introspective arenas of thought.

 

As The Power Fantasy is a superhero comic aimed at using superpowers as little as possible, what can elevate, as I have described it, a story fit for a novel into one fit for a graphic novel? Answer: a breathtaking art style with ambitious panel structure and direction.

The Power Fantasy: Superpowered Artwork

One of the highlights of The Power Fantasy is its incredible and consistent visual identity. Comics nowadays cannot always be counted on to have the same creative team across their lifespan. It can leave the visual storytelling a grab bag of artistic interpretations and quirks that can muddy the waters of intent and the metaplot. Comics are a collective artistic expression, and there is always room to explore different interpretations. Yet a piece of art can sometimes be crafted only by the people who made it, as their creative identities are vital to its very bones. The Power Fantasy has the same team through its (currently) 16-issue lifespan, and it is all the better for it.

 

The Power Fantasy is colorful, rich in striking pastel hues, a definitive black lining, and intentionally messy artistic flourishes that make every panel a feast for the senses. It often feels like a true champion of “less is more”. The comic often adds a solid layer of color over the existing palette or reduces a page to only a few striking colors to emphasize the emotionality and gravity of the setting. Everything oozes with careful intentionality in its use of colors and panel structure that anyone, veteran comic book nerd or not, can enjoy.

It is not afraid to get experimental either, with flashback scenes shifting away from the usual pastels to watercolors, or somber, sketchy greys, to even dead-on British punk-art-movement stylization! It is small touches like this that really sell a comic’s story, and more importantly, bring out the creative identity of a work of visual art.

That is all to say that what Gillen, Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles, and Rian Hughes have achieved is what really sets a comic apart from a novel: storytelling just as much defined by the visual artistry as by the written word. It is times like these I wish I were more educated about artistic media beyond writing, as I can tell anyone with a proper background in illustration would have essays’ worth to say about The Power Fantasy.

Conclusion

 

The Power Fantasy is a truly unique breed of superhero comic. It turns the most genre-defining elements of its contemporaries into the very things it seeks to avoid/argue with, and creates truly transcendent drama in the process. No character is defined by their power; rather, the power in their hands defines their actions. “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” becomes a world-saving creed, and we, the readers, are enthralled by the drama that unfolds through breathtaking visuals and paneling.

I cannot recommend The Power Fantasy enough. It is a breath of fresh air for those who seek a compelling rebuttal to the many pitfalls the superhero genre has fallen into in the modern zeitgeist, and to any reader who can appreciate a great story and some very pretty pictures.