Review time! with ‘The Power Fantasy’ #12-16

“You think it’s kinda sweet, the stammer and the tremble in my voice, but don’t mistake it for weakness or some kind of incompleteness”

Well, the third arc of The Power Fantasy wrapped up in February, and hoo-boy, it was something. Let’s take a quick look (because I don’t want to spoil too much!) at this groovy series, which is written by Kieron Gillen, drawn and colored by Caspar Wijngaard, lettered by Clayton Cowles, and edited by Katie West. It’s 5 issues at 4 bucks a pop, so it costs $19.95, and this arc is 105 pages long.

It’s always difficult writing about this comic, because Gillen is so good at coming up with totally organic shocking twists, ones that both come out of nowhere and make perfect sense, so if I write too much around those twists, I’m going to give the game away anyway, and I don’t want to do that. I guess I can spoil the end of volume 2, because the trade has been out for a while and it’s kind of important, but at the end of volume 2, our nominal protagonist (definitely not hero, although he generally tries to do altruistic things), Etienne Lux, was killed by the other superpowered people in the world. Why they did this is something you’ll just have to read about, won’t you? Well, it turns out he’s not exactly dead, because Lux is a genius and he had contingency plans. This doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory, as more bad things happen in this arc, and we reach a point where Gillen has to (well, he doesn’t have to, because he’s the writer and he can do whatever he wants, but you get my drift) circle back around to issue #1, providing some nice closure to this 16-issue arc. Gillen always plans ahead quite well, so nothing in here is too shocking when you think about how he has set up the characters, but it’s still shocking to see how far he pushes things, because while things might not have been great in issues #1-11, in this arc, things get really bad. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but Gillen does a nice job showing how everyone’s actions have consequences, to a horrific degree. The comic is going to continue, according to Gillen, because the sales are good and Wijngaard is on board (Gillen does say it might take a bit, because they want three issues in the can before they solicit), but what’s kind of neat about this arc is that it technically could be a decent ending to the series, even if it would be somewhat ambiguous. Still, I’m glad we’re getting more.

As I don’t want to write too much more about the story, I suppose I’ll turn to the art, because Wijngaard continues to absolutely kill it. He has to be epic in this arc, and he nails it, as Eliza — the most supernatural of the superpowered individuals — goes through it during this arc, and because her power stems from, possibly, Satan, Wijngaard gets to draw some very gnarly stuff. When she’s wandering around her “church,” Wijngaard gives us the fun décor of skeletons and chains, and when she’s trying to find God, he gives her a nice sado-masochistic nun outfit that reflects both an actual nun’s garb but is also, well, pretty creepy. When Eliza can’t handle what’s going on anymore, Wijngaard transforms her into a terrifying monster, but then he gets to draw something even scarier when things get even worse for our characters. Wijngaard, like all very good artists, can shift from the small and personal to the large and grandiose easily, and that’s what we get here, as he handles the sadness of the characters as their world kind of falls apart and the epic scale of the destruction that follows from the actions they take. He makes the characters real and relatable — they don’t all look the same, they don’t all have the same body types, so while Gillen makes them interesting with their personalities, Wijngaard makes them interesting by the way they look and the way the interact with each other — and then puts them in horrible situations, and it works beautifully because we’ve been with them in smaller-scale times, so when the stakes get big, we’re right there with them. This is a trick that all good superhero artists should have — the ability to make us care about the characters, because the big shit is always coming — and Wijngaard pulls it off beautifully.

There’s a LOT more I could write about with regard to this series, but I won’t — maybe down the line I will do a deeper dive into it, but it’s a lot of fun to read it almost cold, because Gillen is just so good at creating these characters, which makes the twists all the more devastating. I’m glad it’s continuing, and I hope they can finish it the way they want to. For now, I would suggest hunting down the trades or the single issues — I don’t know if the relatively fun backmatter makes it into the trades, but I doubt it — and jumping right in. It’s a very cool series.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆