The Power Fantasy Vol 1
The Power Fantasy Vol 1Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Caspar Wijngaard
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Designer: Rian Hughes
Publisher: Image Comics
Publication Date: January 2025
US Code Title 18, Section 871 states that it if one is to write “any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.” That is to say, it is illegal to write a work of fiction where the current or incumbent (Vice) President is killed.
This does not, however, preclude one from writing something where a prior President of the United States — like, for example, Bill Clinton — is murdered by, let’s go with, having his brains fried by a psychic being after giving the order to use Project Star Wars on another super powered being.
It would be easy to go after writer Kieron Gillen for not using this piece of reality in his work of independent superhero fiction, The Power Fantasy. That the material is nothing more than having real facts instead of a generic white guy president. But this would act as camouflage for the real problem at hand: Who was the President of the United States that got murdered in the pages of The Power Fantasy‘s first issue?
We know that he’s an older gentleman with grey (maybe white) hair. And that’s it. We do not know what this man stands for, what policies he ran under. Is he a Democrat or a Republican? He’s not third party since the only viable option there would be Reform Party and that sure as shit ain’t Ross Perot. These things reveal aspects of the world, even as both parties would be open to using Star Wars on their enemies.
In many regards, this lack of specificity to the worldbuilding of The Power Fantasy is the book’s greatest weakness. The base premise, as pitched and engaged with in the first two issues of the series, is that the world is being kept in line by a group of superpowered individuals. These individuals range from working class Brazilian women gifted with the power of Angels to tech cults out to ascend with right wing idealogues. In practice, the world is extremely similar to our own, to the point where technology and culture are largely unchanged compared to the real 1990s.
Helped by Caspar Wijngaard’s dreamy art, there’s an air of nostalgia to the world of The Power Fantasy. Backgrounds are often drawn with an eye towards expressionism rather than realism, overlapping one another in style and implication. Frequently, panels will fade into view with splotches of paint. Characters will blend into the scenery, becoming more furniture than people.
This would be a perfectly fine approach to a work that is acting as a nostalgia piece for superhero fiction. One where heroes and villains are engaged in a never-ending battle. Think a version of Astro City made by a much better artist. But this is not that kind of story. This is a work of Historical Fiction, and Alternate Historical Fiction at that. As such, there are certain principles to consider.
Mainly, one does not have all of Europe and some of Asia obliterated by a superpowered being without things becoming radically different. Especially in 1989.
To provide the fullest amount of disclosure, I have not done much research into the year 1989. It’s certainly the year the Berlin Wall fell, cementing what many consider to be the end of the Cold War. But there’s a stark difference between a rot stemming from systemic failure and the inability to withstand the death of a strongman and the obliteration of an entire continent. Surely India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and the various nations hosting American nukes would have opinions on an entire continent being obliterated.
One could work under the assumption that the superpowered beings trump the nuclear powers fueling the Cold War. Except, in an admittedly stylish sequence, the Cuban Missile Crisis still happens. Richard Nixon is still President of the United States. The vast and unspeakable implications of the history of the world are still churning as if these Superpowered beings did not exist. One could argue, as the book does in its opening pages, that the point is that these characters are preventing themselves from changing the world.
Except the Cuban Missile Crisis ends differently. Where in our history, the kerfuffle ended with a series of conversations and negotiations regarding the placement of Nukes, in The Power Fantasy, the day is saved thanks to a superpowered being destroying all of the nukes in Cuba and Turkey. The actions of an individual actor unaligned with any particular nation would surely have some impact on history. At the very least, having a path of history where Richard Nixon isn’t President.
In many regards, the vision of history presented by The Power Fantasy works under the assumption that the past is fixed. At most, events can be added to the timeline, but they can never be allowed to truly change the outcome of historical events. Not even Richard Nixon being given radiation poisoning can change the path the world is hurdling down towards.
This is perhaps best highlighted by the timeline provided roughly midway through the trade. Here, we’re presented with a series of events that highlight the changed history provided by the presence of superpowered beings. But aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis, there’s no meaningful engagement with the actual history occurring at the same time. It treats history as if it’s another Fantasy Setting in which the finer details don’t always matter.
Hence why the President who got assassinated in the first issue was a generic president rather than Bill Clinton. Sure, Richard Nixon can die of radiation poisoning, but he’s dead and no one liked him. For all his acts of sexual pestilence, Bill Clinton remains a well-liked President. He’s no Jimmy Carter or John F Kennedy (the latter making an appearance in the book), but he has some fondness as the cool, saxophone President as opposed to the man who sold out leftism for the dream of an election like 1984 that Democratic Candidates have been yearning for ever since.
And even if we allow things to slide on the historical angle, there’s simply a lack of grime and uneasiness to the world. Sure, we have some characters alluding to an uneasiness. Lux frequently mind wipes Isabella to be fine with her genocidal girlfriend. But there’s a justification and a consensual nature to the mind wipes. It’s as clean as Wijngaard’s character art.
In many regards, this is a byproduct of the main issue of the series from which everything extends out of: it feels way too online and not lived in enough. It’s tempting, and not too inaccurate, to say that having a successful X-Men run often breaks a writer. Out of all the Big Two Superhero comics, the X-Men are the ones that most drain the souls out of those who write them. There’s a degree to which its overstated status as the Progressive™ superhero team causes writers and artist to become drunk on the smell of their own farts.
As a result, coming out of an X-Men run where one is successful often results in work that is rather presumptive about its own importance. Either that, or the most mediocre work ever produced. I should note that The Power Fantasy is not the most mediocre work ever produced. But it is rather online in the way a modern X-Men comic often is. It feels like it’s reacting to the criticisms Gillen would write about the book rather than engaging with the ideas its interested in.
Consider, for example, how the characters talk. Take, for example, Etienne Lux, the ostensible main character through whom most of the actions within the story are seen through. He reads like a lot of Gillen protagonists who aren’t complete shitheads. Less David Khol and more Duncan McGuire.
The problem is that Lux is a black Frenchman and not a white Englander. He doesn’t read like he comes from a French background. His syntax feels extremely English. His engagement with the superpowers feels extremely English. This is not a man who grew up in the wake of occupation by Nazi forces in a nation that would see several revolutions up to 1968, two years prior to the opening scene of the book. Lux reads more like an English man who grew up in the wake of the Cold War who got into video games and pop music before starting a career as a comics writer.
This is perhaps best highlighted by the ending of two of the issues. The first being the second issue, which introduces us to a new character in an Akira homage. There’s a sense that this is supposed to mean something within the larger context of the world, but we aren’t given that context. As such, it ends up coming across confusing and incoherent to the larger scheme of things. Even within the context of the five issues collected within the trade paperback, the implications of what this character is meant to mean aren’t even implied. It just assumes it’s important because it’s the end of an issue.
The second comes at the end of the final issue of the trade, wherein one of the baddies who supplies weapons to everyone declares his intention to become President. While here, the stakes and implications are clear, there’s a lack of impact to the moment. Simply put, the moment doesn’t go hard enough. Even the word choice feels insubstantial compared to other alternatives. One can imagine the line delivered in a Mark Millar comic with all the crassness and punch implied. Like a fist covered in barb wire and excrement.
Instead, the moment feels like some nerd trying to show off without any experience with real people. And that could work. There are plenty of Tarantino villains who fit well in this mold of villainy, let alone the modern landscape of neoreactionary losers. But the framing of the moment highlights the power of the baddie, not his pathetic nature. The issue goes to great lengths to legitimize if not his point of view, then the experiences that have led him to hold this point of view.
In many regards, it’s perhaps worth looking at the ur-text lingering beneath the surface of The Power Fantasy: Succession. Highlighted as a main influence on the precursor series to The Power Fantasy, Immortal X-Men, Succession explores a power fantasy outside of the genre trappings of being able to fly, shoot lasers out of your eyes, or transform into Godzilla that nevertheless retains the core power fantasy of being the most powerful people in the world. Moreover, it explores an eclectic group of pathetic losers whose sole connection is their familial relationship to one another, not that it stops them from stabbing each other in the back.
This is the typical model of the prestige television show formula, wherein what seems cool and edgy turns out to be extremely lame. Walter White reveals himself pretty early on to be petulant and pettily vindictive of everyone around him. Tywin Lannister is a cold hearted bastard of a man twelve steps ahead of everyone, but he is so blinkered by his vision of how the world works, he frequently misses the bigger picture and ends up dying for it. And Kendall Roy is the kind of white boy who publicly gangsta raps to seem cool.
To be clear, these people do some truly monstrous things. The Roys in particular basically bring about the abject horrors of the 21st century. But their horrors stem from just how utterly pathetic they are. Their insecurities, their pettiness, their self-loathing. There’s a specificity to them that is sorely lacking in The Power Fantasy (and, subsequently, Immortal X-Men) because these works hinge on a degree of coolness to these characters. A coolness extenuated by Wijngaard’s crisp artwork.
Even Masumi, the character with the most crippling anxieties and self-hatred, has a degree of coolness to her. She’s a struggling artist whose whole world has to be constantly adjusted to fit her ego. But, as it stands, she’s a supporting character at best. Less a Tony Soprano and more a Silvio Dante. Everyone else is cool. They’re giants who get to topple empires.
Perhaps the defining moment of Succession’s first episode is a scene where the Roys are out playing baseball. While playing, a working class kid approaches them and the family decides to make a bet with the kid: Hit a home run, and we’ll pay you $1,000,000. The boy fails to do so, and the family is extremely sore about winning. But what makes the moment defining is that at the end of the episode, we see the young kid’s homelife in contrast to the opulence demonstrated by the Roys. It’s not a rundown little shack or anything like that, indeed the family seems to be doing pretty well for themselves.
But it’s the fact that we return here that’s key. Moreover, we end the episode here. It places us outside of the petulant dealings of America’s richest family and instead contextualizes their inevitable rot and decay through the lens of the people who are going to be hurt the most.
A similar moment occurs at the end of the first issue, where Lux mind crushes everyone involved in the space laser that shot The Heavy. Among the people was a woman who was just having breakfast with her daughter. We have two panels with this family, interrupted with a panel demanding the death of all the families. The purpose, here, is to show the potential threat to these people’s lives.
However, once the threat is resolved, we never return to the family. Instead, the issue ends with a hero shot of Lux walking away, saying a cool line that works wonders in a trailer. The family of ordinary people only works here to highlight the threat of The Heavy’s demands. Once the threat is gone, they don’t matter.
It certainly works as a moment in the narrative. We get the hero shot, the cool line for the trade, and everything. But by making this decision, the limitations are revealed. This is a book that’s only interested in the specificity of life when it concerns its giants. To portray otherwise would require getting messier than this clean book will allow.
At the end of the day, The Power Fantasy is fine. It’s nothing to really write home about, and you’re probably better off doing anything else with your time. If it was by some mediocrity, then a lot of these issues would be forgiven, if not ignored because no one would actually touch the book. But because it’s Gillen, the book is nothing short of a disappointment.
The Power Fantasy Vol 1 is available now
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