The Power Fantasy #13 // Review
Etienne Lux has been killed. That’s not going to slow him down. The super-powered people remaining in the world can be separated into those who know he’s alive, those who think he’s dead and everyone else. The truth is that when they killed Etienne, they only killed his body. It’s 1999. Everything is more than a little complicated in The Power Fantasy #13. Writer Kieron Gillen and artist Caspar Wijngaard continue a thoroughly engrossing serial about the lives of all too-human gods who inhabit the planet at the end of the last millennia. Gillen continues to move through a satisfyingly dense super-powered ensemble drama.
Valentina is relaxing when she feels it. It’s a sudden pulse of gravity. A big one. It knocks her out of her chair. Before all that there was a tingle. Now she finds herself thinking thoughts intended for the psychic consciousness of Etienne. She knows he’s out there. He’s not feeling great about what he had to do. He’s left Heavy’s child in a vegetative state. He’s going to need to explain why...but as it is the case that his body’s dead, he’s going to need Valentina to help him explain things.
The sheer density of Gillen’s writing reaches something of a critical mass at the end of the 13th issue. There's a great deal of momentum going into the issue. The traditional dynamics between people with great power get twisted into something very, very weird on a whole bunch of different levels. It's easy to forget by issues and that there hasn't been a whole lot that's actually happened on a physical level in the course of the issue. Granted, an entire section of a meter metropolitan city has been catapulted into space and a large celestial body has been nudged in the direction of earth. But neither of these things are actually shown. It's all drama. And it's all very compelling.
The lack of over the top visuals ends up being kind of a challenge for the artist. Everything has to be drawn into the faces and the postures and gestures of the characters. We know what they're capable of. They know what they're capable of. Much of what they're talking about is in the dialogue. And it rests only in the dialogue. So the intensity of what needs to happen needs to be written across the faces of people who really can't afford to be too emotionally dynamic otherwise they'll lose control of what power they have. As a result, the drama needs to really be written in very subtle movements and maneuvers. There's an overwhelming sense of a powerful mood that's crawling across the page.
Once again, The Power Fantasy revealed itself to be one of the most sophisticated stories to haunt the comics rack in recent years. It's an acquired taste, though. Cause it's just a lot of dialogue. And that doesn't necessarily engage the page all that well in a way that's truly unique to it. There's no reason why something like this couldn't be done on a small stage in some out-of-the-way theater. There's a kind of power on the page, though. Even though the visuals aren’t overwhelming fantastic. There’s a weight and a gravity to the story visually even though it’s really just an issue-length conversation that happens to involve another death.
