You know how a lot of people think Superman is a boring character because he’s overpowered - nothing really hurts him besides the green rock and he can do whatever, whenever, however, effortlessly. Because he’s Superman. But it’s too much and makes it really hard to get people invested in a character so wildly unrelatable. Now imagine the entire cast of a series were ALL Superman. That’s The Power Fantasy.
God it’s boring. Multiplied multiple times.
In Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard’s new Image series The Power Fantasy, superpowered beings are literal representations of superpower nations (ie. those with nuclear capability) who police the globe and each other to stop humanity from ending - because they individually have the ability to blow up the world and yet, despite not being quite human, have all the frailties of the human psyche (insecurity, depression et al.) and might do something apocalyptic if they feel slighted.
Most of this book is dreary characters - or “Atomics” as they’re called - standing around gossiping about one another, how they’ve got to watch out for that one, oo-er, and what about that one, hmm, and warbling on about ethics and egos. It’s the most tedious dialogue. Even the one interesting event that happens in the first issue is rendered neutral by the immediate return to the tedious dialogue of one or two of these Atomics talking about another Atomic and what they’re going to do with them if, blah blah blah…
Caspar Wijngaard’s art is nice to look at though I kept being reminded of Cliff Chiang’s style - not a bad style to mimic - but it’s not enough to offset Gillen’s utterly flat and unexciting script. Hated the characters/the non-story/the concepts being batted around, and wasn’t the least bit entertained at any point - no idea who would find this worth their time but The Power Fantasy, Volume 1: The Superpowers definitely wasn’t for me.
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