The Power Fantasy #1 // Review
A couple of people are standing on a street corner in New York in 1966. Etienne suggests that the only moral course of action might be to simply take over the world. Considering this, Valentina says that she should kill him. She’s not going to do that, though. She’s going to stand with him on the corner eating pizza and discussing the fate of the world in The Power Fantasy #1. Writer Kieron Gillen and artist Caspar Wijngaard open a deliciously fun superhuman drama with clever bits of philosophy that reaches in directions superhero stories don’t often aspire to. It’s a captivating opening for a new series.
The two beings discuss matters further. A soul is laid bare. A decision is made. Maybe they go out to see The Lovin’ Spoonful afterwards. Maybe they don’t. The narrative shoots forward to New York, 1999. Etienne is being interviewed outside of the Vineyards Cafe. He’s in town because Brother Ray is coming in his massive floating structure...The one called Haven. It’s a world where the only superhuman powers could wipe-out all life on the planet, There are six people on Earth with the destructive capacity of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. All they have to do to save the world...is get along.
Gillen crystallizes some of the more intense ends of the superhero genre into an infinitely sharp ensemble drama. It’s all drama. No action here, but the threat of it is overwhelming. And all they’d have to do is get into some kind of serious argument and it would be the end of the world. It’s a strikingly clever look at the larger geopolitical world that still dominates everything to this day. It’s not something that often gets a close-up in superhero comics--partially because Moore did such a brilliant job of addressing it in Watchmen. In the first issue of a new series, Gillan shows that there’s still something important to be said about the fact that the human race is still capable of turning the planet into one giant, irradiated crater.
It can be really, really difficult to display ridiculously massive superhuman power casually wielded by normal-looking people. Wijngaard does a brilliant job of this with clean lines and simple renderings that occasionally find fantastic visual framing. Nowhere is this more apparent that Wijngaard’s execution of Etienne’s power. He’s an insanely powerful psychic who is capable of casually killing anyone anywhere with a single thought. The perfectly detached coolness with which he’s capable of doing this are contrasted against the sudden and massive death he’s capable of causing. Wijngaard’s greatest strength in this lies in simply allowing the moment to play-out without amplification. It’s powerful and sinister because it looks perfectly normal.
Wijngaard’s work is brilliantly muted. Gillen’s script is cleverly concise...nonchalantly delivering the surface tensions of a very intricate and complicated new superhero world without all of the nauseating exposition that usually entails. Oh...and designer Rian Hughes did a strikingly clever job on the issue as well. The back cover contains a hell of a lot of fine print in a bewildering array of different languages. The font for that fine print designed specifically by Hughes...who seems to have managed to get Gillen to write a bit of text that’s buried in that fine print. Fun stuff.
