The Power Fantasy #12 // Review
Valentina is looking for Etienne. He’s out there somewhere, right? It’s not like a guy like him would just...die. So he’s got to be out there somewhere. He’s way too powerful to sumply...die like that, isn’t he? She’ll find out how right she is about that in The Power Fantasy #12. Writer Kieron Gillen and artist Caspar Wijngaard continue a deeply nuanced and sophisticated exploration of the nature of human power. Things continue to unravel, and the nature of the world begins to become just a little bit more clear in another work of engagingly dramatic interpersonal complexity.
Melbourne. 1999. Valentina is telling Masumi that she’s going to be alright. They’ll look after her. Of course...they were supposed to be looking out for each other. And now as Masumi says...Etienne has been turned into modern art. It was an awful situation and it’s only going to get worse.. Valentina knows that Etienne is out there somewhere. She just has to find him. And when she does, she’s going to find him...changer. (If only in the physical.) He actually looks drastically different than he did before..but now he’s getting a very tender warning from Valentina.
Gillen is wise to focus the better part of an issue on the relations between these two characters. It's very sharp stuff. It seems to go across the page with a kind of grace. Gillen casts a clever focus on a couple of people who are extremely powerful that happen to be very human. So much has waited in the drama. So little actual action is meeting the page. Perhaps it's just the call before the next big storm. But maybe it's something else altogether. Gillen has managed to find a very clever way of keeping things from being too terribly predictable.
Wijngaard engages the drama from a safe distance. The distinct locations that the drama is playing out in our well rendered. There's a sense of space and immersive miss about it. It's nice to see the artist working on a visually interesting things that expand the world of the story just a little bit in their own way while maintaining a very solid focus on the central conflict in the center of what it is that's going on. It's all very well executed. The density of the drama fuels very compelling, as it is brought to the page deeply and meshed in the peripheral matters that seem to inhabit the corners of the page.
Gillen suggested that it's possible that the entire series could end in three issues. And certainly there would be ways to wrap up the current conflict that would be reasonably satisfying that many issues. However, it just wouldn't feel right given the amount of space and time he's been building with. There's so much more that needs to be told in order for it to really feel like a satisfying world. As it is, he's done a really good job putting it together with Wijngaard.
