“Mr. Lux, is everyone safe now?”
“There’s six people with Superpowers on the planet. Of course not.”
When I heard that volume one of Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy had been nominated for a Hugo award, I picked it up. After reading it, I immediately picked up volumes two and three.
And then I put off writing the review for weeks because as much as I loved it, there was something about it that bothered me that I was having trouble putting into words. Eventually, so much time had passed, I needed to reread it to review it correctly.
That ended up being the key, and I highly recommend doing it. The second read-through, knowing what you know, is much more likely to blow your mind.
(I’ll avoid major spoilers in this review, but I’ll be dropping some important pieces of info, so you may want to read the series first and then come back.)
I wanted to start with Caspar Wijngaard’s artwork, which didn’t need two read-throughs to blow my mind, I fell in love with it within two pages. It’s so precise but expressive and flowing. I love the faces best of all (the expressions are fantastic), but everything about it is gorgeous. The colors just pop off the page, and it’s equally beautiful in bright sunshiny landscapes, intensely gothic scenes, and unimaginably violent events.
It’s impossible to pick a favorite image, but just about everything to do with the arrival of “The Queen” in 1989 blows my socks off.
My only quibble with the art is that sometimes a couple characters would appear so similar I wasn’t sure who we were looking at. Is that Masumi’s girlfriend Isabella or a younger Valentina? (Their skin tones are totally different but if it’s a quick view in shadows I sometimes mixed them up.) Is that a flashback look at Eliza’s husband Dev, or cult-leader Magus, or present-day egomaniac (and also cult-leader) Heavy? (Mind you, for plot purposes there’s a reason behind that confusion.) It helps to keep track of the timestamps though, because the story jumps around, and if I was paying better attention I probably wouldn’t have been confused. And the second time through I knew exactly who I was looking at of course.
And paying attention to the time stamp is vitally important to knowing what’s going on. The story jumps around from the 1940s to present day (1999) and frequently mentions events that it won’t explain for several issues (The New Mexico Festival Massacre, The 1981 Tokyo event, The Second Summer of Love), each one of which could have been the end of humanity if a majority of the six superpowers hadn’t fixed it.
Throwing out these names without explanation definitely made me feel a little lost, but it was worth it when the info finally dropped. And on the second readthrough it made everything much more ominous.
As for the main characters, to way way oversimplify things: Valentina is like Wonder Woman if she was literally an angel from heaven with the power of a god. Etienne is a telepath who makes Professor X look like a dinner theater magician, and has surgically removed most of his empathy in order to make better decisions. Heavy has an ego the size of a planet with the superpowers to back it up. Magus is an anarchist cult leader with several big secrets that even Etienne hasn’t figured out. Eliza is so freaking doomed it’s not even funny.
And Masumi is…Masumi.
A sad, sweet, quietly narcissistic woman playing at being an artist. The first time she told Etienne not to bother her because she was working and didn’t want to be upset, I thought she was being selfish.
Ohhh no. That’s not what’s happening at all. Whooo boy.
I wouldn’t say it’s a happy series by any means. But it sure is a pretty one. And one of my only reasons for having trouble recommending it is that I found it so intensely cynical, because it asks the question: how can you wipe out suffering while allowing everyone free will? I’d never assume this is what Gillen meant, but the answer I inferred is that you can’t. You can’t even come close.
If there’s free will, you can have all the best intentions in the world, but humans are by and large motivated by fear, and that fear will cause suffering in someone, somewhere, 100% of the time. To stop that fear from causing damage you have to control them, and to keep powerful people from hurting people you have to take away their power. But you can only do that if you’re the most powerful. And now it’s you that’s hurting someone. And around and around we go.
Free will leads to suffering. Power leads to suffering. Free will plus power leads to unimaginable amounts of suffering.
And it’s not that people with power are inherently bad, they can just be human with human emotions that cause them to act impulsively and hurt everyone in their orbit.
Maybe it’s Heavy’s massive ego needing to crush the slightest resistance. Maybe it’s Valentina deciding of course this extraterrestrial has our best interests at heart. Or maybe it’s Eliza deciding that literally anything is better than what she’s looking forward to.
Her story was the other reason I find it hard to recommend the series, because it has one of the hardest story tropes for me to read: someone staring down the barrel of a horrifically awful fate that they absolutely can’t avoid.
For readers of Kieron’s Wicked + Divine, remember what Ananke was afraid of, and how that terror motivated her every action for centuries? Eliza is easily that terrified, and her desperation causes more destruction than Ananke could ever dream of. It’s fascinating, but dear lord is it dark.
And yet on the second read-through I found myself looking forward to that part, because it’s so impressive when an author and an artist can trigger that kind of bone-deep horror when you read it.
So yes, I recommend the series, with the warning that it’ll break your heart. And that you need to read it twice so it can break your heart more efficiently the second time.