The Power Fantasy #8 // Review
The Queen is drilling a hole to hell. She’s going to drag everything into it. She’s going to collapse everything into hell. It’s London. It’s 1989. Someone has to stop the Queen. There’s going to be rather a lot sacrificed in The Power Fantasy #8. Writer Kieron Gillen continues a maddeningly complex look at the nature of power with artist Caspar Wijngaard. There are grat forces at work. There are disturbingly human emotions beneath all of them. This is the nightmare of The Power Fantasy.
It’s 1999. It’s Manchester. Eliza feels the need to confess. The place is nearly unrecognizable from what it once was. There’s a haze of pink on the water and a mist covering everything. And it’s been one day since Eliza’s last confession. Perhaps her greatest sin had been pride. She certainly feels as though that’s the case. Then pride turned to wraith. She had been humbled by a faithless man. Things are always complicated between two people who have feelings for each other. When those people happen to also have great power, things can get even more complicated for everyone.
Gillen really flits through the years quickly as everything is seen throguh the eyes of people who have great power...and as such don’t really have a very linear understanding of reality. On their level it is all so very, very small on so many levels. It’s fascinating stuff to follow. Gillen is really diving into the perspetive of those with power in a way that’s not often found in tradition mainstream superhero comics. There’s a grand sense of depth and form about it all that seems to be intricately constructed in so many different ways. What Gillen is attempting here is very, very ambitious.
Wijngaard manages some strikingly clever framing and layout. This is particularly impressive as so muc hfo the power of the issue lies in the interpersonal drama between all-too-human godlings. That can be a tricky thing to bring to the page in a way that’s compelling. Wijngaard manages to make the drama work with every bit as much intensity as the more horrifying dark fantasy stuff that lights-up the page here and there. Wijngaard’s use of color feels quite intense as well...amplifying the power of everything as it strikes page and panel.
And as sophisticated as the plot structure is, there’s very’ little that Gillen is exploring here that he hasn’t explored before in earlier portions of the narrative. That being said: what he’s covering here IS absolutely essential for the overall story to make any kind of sense at all. It’s just that...so much of the basic substance of the underlying themes being explored in the eighth issue of the series had been explored much better with much greater sohpistication in earlier issues in the series. The Power Fantasy IS a big and complicated organism, though. So the thematic significance of this particular issue might not become clear until Gillem makes it to later issues in the series.
