Power Fantasy #10 // Review
Manchester. 1999. The Pyramid is going to hell. There’s some kind of war in some kind of heaven and there are a ridicullously large number of lives that are hanging in the balance. Things aren’t likely to be very pleasant moving forward, but the people involved in the big decisions ARE taking everything very, very seriously. That doesn’t mean that what they’re about to do isn’t really, really stupid. Time will tell in The Power Fantasy #10. Writer Kieron Gillen continues an absurdly dense narrative with artist Caspar Wijngaard.
He’s asking a whole bunch of people to enter a pyramid to potentially die for him. If that sounds at all like a cult, that’s pretty much what it is. If it helps, y’know...his intentions ARE to save the world, so it’s not like his heary isn’t in the right place. It’s just that he’s not telling anyone everything that’s really going on. It’s a pyramid scheme in the worst way, but he wasn’t exactly being secretive about it. He DID decide to call his cult “The Pyramid” after all. So either he was stupid or lazy. Either way it worked.
The narrative nearly gets so dense that it almost seems uninteresting, but Gillan keeps throwing-in buts if wit and extreme cleverness that keeps the momentum going through some pretty heavy gravity. The contrast between the passion of love and the passion of destruction feels a bit heavy-handed, but Gillen delivers enough narrative connective tissue around the edges of everything to keep it from feeling too stark and simplistic. Gillen’s dissection of the nature of power feels a bit like peering behind the curtain of contemporary reality. You don’t want to see it ,but you can scarcely look away. It’s all so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time.
Wijngaard does some beautiful things with color and framing in an issue that deal with ridiculously powerful things like love, sex and mass murder. It really shouldn’t be working as well as it does because the subjects that Gillan is using are way to over-the-top to be able to be satisfactorily represented in any fashion at all. And yet...that’s exactly what Wijngaard manages in another really dazzling visual package for the 10th issue of the series. The color feels cool and inviting...a bit like a night at. dance club you didn’t specifically want to go to on a night you’d rather forget. Yet somehow...somehow it’s all so beautiful.
Once again it’s apparent that GIllen is working with big ideass in a hopelessly complex world and one gets the feeling that only like...10% of what’s going on in the world of the series is actually making it to the page. So it feels like weird glimpses of som strange dream that doesn’t want to fully commit to being with the reader. Makes it a fun hunt to try to get close to the central premise of the series without making it run away for another 30 days. It’s weird. It’s fun.
