The Power Fantasy is my new favourite comic

30 Apr, 2026

“Of course, the ethical thing to do is take over the world.” - Etienne Lux, 1966

Reading Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard’s The Power Fantasy is kind of like watching a group of people play Jenga.

You start with a tower that’s already fragile, and as the game progresses that fragility only grows. Pieces are moved, holes form, the tower begins shaking as new blocks are placed and it reaches ever-higher. The question is not if the tower will fall. That’s a foregone conclusion, the tower will collapse. The questions are how long the balancing act can last, and who’s hand will be the one to finally knock the tower to the ground.

It’s a comic so good that this blog post was damn-near impossible to write.

I’ve read and reread The Power Fantasy maybe a dozen times over the past week, each time considering it from new angles and getting something new out of it. It’s exciting and tense and thrilling, and it’s incredibly thematically dense. None of these rereads have left me tired of it. I could probably read it another dozen times and still not get bored.

So, what is The Power Fantasy about? Well, it’s about the Superpowers, six walking WMDs who could each kill everyone in a day and who know that any fight between them would destroy the planet as collateral damage. It’s about power, and the philosophies that guide how that power is used. It’s a deconstruction of the powerscaling culture so prevalent amongst comic book fans. It’s a horrifyingly tense thriller about trying to live a life while a walking doomsday clock looms in the skies above.

It’s about six people who’ll kill the world if they get into a fight. And they really, really want to fight each other.

Before anything else it’s worth bringing attention to Caspar Wijngaard’s phenomenal art, which I tragically can’t show because I can’t afford the site upgrade that’d let me put images in my posts. It’s fucking incredible. The ways it plays around with colour, like the sequence in Chapter 2 where Etienne and Masumi have an international psychic call, with Masumi in vibrant manga-esque colors and Etienne in a shadowy, rainy film noir New York. The stylistic shifts such as the Chapter 5 flashbacks to Jacky Magus founding Pyramid in a black-and-white punk zine style, complete with sketchier characters with thick white outlines as if they were cut-and-pasted from other sources, or the way each Superpower is introduced with a slightly different artstyle that reflects their characterisation in Chapter 1. Those two pages in Chapter 14. This expressionist style is what makes The Power Fantasy and it is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most visually striking comics I’ve ever had the joy of reading. I could go on, but at a certain point words can’t really do it justice.

So, who are the six Superpowers? Valentina is an angel sent from Heaven¹ to prevent nuclear devastation; she’s the most like a traditional superhero and wants to protect humanity. Etienne Lux is a near-omniscient telepath whose main concern isn’t necessarily what’s good, but what’s ethical to the point where the literal first scene of the comic is a flashback to the 60s where he tries to convince Valentina that they should take over the world together. Heavy is a gravity-manipulating leftist revolutionary fighting for Atomic² rights around the world who rarely thinks through the consequences of his actions. Jacky Magus is a magic-using³ anarchist punk who’s had to drift further and further rightward to keep control of magic through his cult, Pyramid, and to stop it from falling into the wrong hands. Eliza Hellbound, is a former Pyramid member and devout Catholic who sold her soul to Hell to stop a catastrophe. And Morishita Masumi is a troubled and somewhat narcissistic artist who swaps places with a colossal kaiju, Deconstructa, whenever her mood dips too low⁴.

I can’t remember the source, but there’s this old writing advice that a good set of characters can guide the plot by themselves, just by nature of their conflicting goals and clashing personalities. The Power Fantasy lives by this principle; it’s just that the characters coming into direct conflict will be completely catastrophic. The comic is made up of the tension from the ways they negotiate their way out of open conflict while also trying to make sure that they can achieve their respective goals. The comic’s greatest strength is its restraint. Tension comes from the threat of violence, not from the enactment of it. Where something like Man of Steel uses the obliteration of Metropolis and the deaths of millions as a setpiece, The Power Fantasy is a superhero comic where open violence is a complete fail state. That tension, that threat of world-ending violence, and the six characters who the comic revolves around are what makes The Power Fantasy one of the most gripping comics I’ve read in a while.

In conclusion, go read The Power Fantasy! You can find the Chapter 1 for free here: https://imagecomics.com/read/the-power-fantasy.