What if your cold war was six people each with superpowers equivalent to a nuclear arsenal? And they're each of them a total mess of a person.
In his new graphic novel series, Kieron Gillen is once again interested in the ethics and morals of those with powers beyond the mortal. Unlike his previous explorations in that regard (The Wicked + the Divine, Die), he has saved us all the time in figuring that out by slapping it right on the first page of this bad boy, explicitly, in an ethical debate between two superpowered characters about the fate of the world, and their own responsibilities to it, the people in it and to each other.
"Of course, the ethical thing to do would be to take over the world" - so goes the first piece of dialogue in the story.
But, lest we worry this is going to be all mouth and no trousers, the rest of the volume - the first trade in what feels like will gear up to be a substantial series - serves not so much to back up the content of that debate but instead to problematise it, and no more so than if you're already familiar with Gillen's work. There are allusions in here particularly to The Wicked + the Divine that are, quite swiftly, undermined instead of built upon, or at least made more complex. This is, quite clearly, not going to be a series for easy answers or simple debates.
The world of The Power Fantasy is one of superheroes - people with extraordinary powers over minds, gravity, the usual set of strangenesses you get in any work of the genre. They can fly, fight, control, create. They began to appear in the mid-twentieth century, and the strongest of them, the Atomics, liken their abilities to the force of the bomb, and with good reason, as the legacy of their existence on the planet is shown to us mid-way through the volume, written large on the landscape in brutal form. They are, then, a threat, to the world and to each other. There are allusions to threads of X-Men too, of a United States wanting to control and harm those within its bounds with these powers, alarmed by the threat of external actors. All of this is incredibly familiar. Except... there are twists, here and there. There's an irreverence, or at least humanisation, of the powered characters that felt unusual even from the first page. They are not their powers, sensationalised by fantastical names (at least, not those first two we meet). They are two people, walking on a city street, having a conversation, wearing normal clothes, with normal names. When more do show up as larger-than-life personalities with nicknames and cults teams families associates, they are not united as a common force with a specified aim, they're not fighting crime or taking over the world. They are simply... there. Existing, with their power, and as a threat simply for that existence. Is that a subtle take? Not at all, but sometimes the good ones go in with a machete rather than a scalpel.
We do, eventually, spend some time with the family, as they are known, and the suspense of getting there is worth it, because there's already a sense that something is wrong with the way these people all fit together, and meeting them only serves to confirm that suspicion - Heavy, the man who seems to be leading at least some of the powered individuals on a floating island home, is definitely construable as a cult leader, an idea he voices himself, letting it play out firmly in the text as well as the implications. Heavy is impulsive, emotional, very nearly destructively, genocidally violent at that first meeting with him, forestalled only by Etienne, one of those two first characters shown in a moral argument. Etienne, who stresses himself as an ethical man. But the act he does to appease Heavy - an ethical act, as he says to himself and to others - is the point upon which this first volume turns.
Heavy would likely have levelled a whole US state in his anger, killing millions. Etienne, specifically asking Heavy what he wants to prevent that violence and carrying it out, kills hundreds. Anyone order a trolley problem lads? We've got a big one here to unload. But the ethics of it aren't so much the interesting part of how this is played out in the story. Instead, what I found lingering with me was the perceptional aspects - how is Heavy coming out of this being perceived as sympathetic after that interaction, but Etienne is the threat? Why is a surgical murder of a smaller number more troubling, more evil-feeling than that threatened destructive rage? Trolley problems have been done and done and done, but how people around them respond to the decision makers... well, at least that I've seen less of. If Gillen is tackling the price of power, he's far more interested here in other costs, and willing to tread more interesting paths than great power and great responsibility.
This is only more highlighted when we meet someone who, at first, seems well set up to be the villain of the piece. Magus, with his green-blue colour palette and masked face, is instantly evocative of Wōden from The Wicked + the Divine, who was about as uncomplicatedly villainous as that series got. Like Wōden, Magus deals in tech, and appears, at least at first, to be extremely self-serving. He, too, had something of a cult (and again, that nature is labelled straight on in the text, cluing us straight away that Gillen is messing us around somehow). But his cult, in 1978, is anti-fascist, anti-police anarchists.
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How he goes from this to tech-rich shithead... there are glimpses, but clearly more is to be revealed. So the allusions back to Wōden are both right and wrong - right about what we have on the page, but wrong about the depth, and the journey.
I could go on, because there are more examples, but none of the sides in this, even as a first volume are cleanly drawn, and no one is free from sin. There are sins of action and inaction, sins of morality and ethics, sins of accident and decision. This is clearly a world in which the Atomics have had long enough to muddy all the boundaries, to have seen some shit, fought some bad guys and be living in their own legacies. And I say "sin" with deliberate choice, because there are some tantalising hints of verrrrrry interesting worldbuilding that I hope to see more of in future volumes, and which shift things away from a lot of existing mutant or other pseudo-scientific superpower scenarios. As a first trade, it is to be expected that much will be hints without resolution. But there's enough substance alongside them, and the substance lies firmly in all that undermining, that outward referencing and then complicating, that's very clearly setting out a stall for some interesting thoughts on how someone can exist in a world with that kind of phenomenal power. The answer, I suspect, will be some flavour of "with deepest, unresolvable regret", amongst other things.
Gillen is at his best, in my opinion of his past work, when he's deeply in his references, pulling on multiple threads in other works and forcing the reader to confront something about them that they may not have considered before, quite possibly something with uncomfortable implications. Volume 1 of Die did precisely that with its Tolkienian allusions, and the series went on to do it for D&D with bells on. Once and Future was all over it for the Arthuriana mythos. There's a perfect line between obvious affection for sources and clarity of thought and incisive critique that I find intensely appealing, and makes me come back for more of his work again and again, and I have absolutely no doubt that The Power Fantasy will be doing that, if anything, harder than ever. This first volume has already taken a thesis of problematising the found family, and that alone is selling it to me as an interesting line to take.
But it's not all Gillen. Caspar Wijngaard's art also has a strong part to play in why this story is beginning so effectively. There's a distinct colour palette overhanging the whole story - the majority of it is slightly sepia-ed pinks, peaches, and dusty purple, giving it an aged vibe, even for the segments not told in the past with respect to the narrative. When you have a setting that is distancing superheroes from a sciencey underpinning, pulling it away from the crisp, blue-toned futurism of some of the contemporary superhero comics feels like a pointed decision. Likewise, several sections occur at different times and places, and the art plays around beautifully to reflect that - from the black and white, splotchy, made-in-someone's-garage feel of the 70s anarchists sections, to the crisply-green modern hub of Magus, to the red-toned hellscape of a past atrocity, this is art that states its case very clearly for the mood of each scene, and isn't afraid to switch it up when needed. Colour also helps tell the story panel to panel - when characters are pulled into telepathic conversations, the colours pale along with character eyes, distancing the reader from the physical body. As with some of the storytelling - it's not subtle and not trying to be, but it is effective and it is interesting.
One can never be certain with graphic novels from the first trade how things will go in the long run - too many get lost in the weeds of middle issues - but The Power Fantasy has a great deal of the promise one wants from a starting point, setting up interesting themes, worldbuilding and characters, and especially character dynamics, that I am keen to see play out into something special.
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The Math
Highlights:
- Nuanced and unusual approach to superheroism
- Who cares about the trolley problem, how does everyone feel about the trolley problem?
- None of you is free from sin
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10
Reference: Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers, [Image, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
