The Power Fantasy #14 // Review
Heavy tells Tonya that Etienne was manipulating her. Psychically. She could have had power, but Etienne used his power to cut her off from her. She wasn’t the only one. Maybe Heavy expects this to be something that would make her angry. She’s not angry. It’s more complicated than that in The Power Fantasy #14. Writer Kieron Gillen and artist Caspar Wijngaard continues a densely-layered allegory about life, love, survival and potential on the edge of destruction in the 20th century. The intensity of the story continues to mount as powerful figures try to keep it all together through another issue.
Meanwhile, Masumi is breaking-up with Isabella. It’s not like there aren’t emotions involved, but the both of them have to maintain composure. That much is extremely important. Masumi is an artist. Her work regards the end of the world. If she gets too depressed she just might bring it about. When her power fully emerged in 1981, Tokyo barely survived. So there’s a lot of danger tied-up in a break-up between her and her lover/personal assistant. Elsewhere still Eliza Hellbound prays in a church. Perhaps she’s asking God what Hell is like. She’s going to hold it together for about three months...
Gillen has a somewhat breathtaking talent for lovingly cramming a tremendous amount of story into tiny, little encounters that feel incredibly organic. The brief bits of text that open every issue deliver a little bit of the backstory so that the full weight of the dialogues don’t have to also carry all of the background. Read the issue without the background and it all feels so...Earthbound. The full knowledge of the intensity of everything makes it all feel so very, very intense from beginning to end.
Wijngaard could amp-up the visual intensity of the drama, but it would sacrifice the subtle power of the characters. They have to constantly keep their emotions in check and so they’re going to be largely stoic in the way that carry themselves. It’s not exactly easy to render that on the comics page in a way that feels every bit as intense as it IS given just how powerful everyone is. Wijngaard is brilliantly reserved in the way he’s executing the visuals. That approach makes the fina nine pages of this issue some of the most overwhelmingly powerful visual pages to appear on the comics rack this year.
The title of the series continues to make clever reference to the stuffy, old criticism of superhero fiction: that it’s all escapist male power fantasy. I remember thinking about how bizarre that was as a kid. I grew-up on Marvel comics in the 1980s. These people DO have great power, but they are suffering like you would NOT believe. With The Power Fantasy, Gillen takes that danger of power dynamic to the absolute extreme with gods who are born as humans who are reacting to everything the way that Earthbound gods WOULD. It’s horror. Above all it’s horror. And that’s something that begins to feel all the more overwhelming with every issue.
