The Power Fantasy Makes Superheroes Into an Arms Race

Sooner or later, modern superhero comics dig into what it means for people with extraordinary powers to exist in the world on a larger geopolitical scale. With the right team at the helm, those kind of stories can lead to compelling drama, and Image Comics is hoping you’ll turn up to see how that shakes out in its upcoming series, The Power Fantasy.

Written by Kieron Gillen (Immortal X-Men) and drawn by Caspar Wijngaard (Angelic), the book centers on six superpowered people, each said to be as strong as the US military’s nuclear weaponry. As such, everyone else in the world would really like for none of them to get into a brawl with each other, even more so since it’s set in an alternate history spanning from 1945 all the way to 1999. Gillen’s pair of teaser images below set the stakes for what’s to come, and introduce us to our upcoming sextuplet of leads.

The Power Fantasy was revealed at Emerald City Comic-Con on Friday, and is said to fit aesthetically somewhere neatly between Watchmen and The Boys. Talking to the Hollywood Reporter, Gillen said the idea came to him as he was working on X-Men books, not unlike how the initial seed for The Wicked+the Divine formed in his head during his last Marvel tenure. “It’s a comic informed by superheroes, but one where a fight is the absolute lose state, for everyone,” he said. “[It’s] a chance to really have fun with an alternate cultural history too. I think you can see it as an extension of my best work: WicDivian alternate-pop culture, a cold-war take on Uber’s realpolitik, [and] Die’s social group drama hyper-charged by genre.”

“Once Kieron had pitched the basic outline…I knew this was the story I felt comfortable most telling,” continued Wijngaard. He went on to praise the cast of characters they came up with, adding that fans of his previous work in Home Sick Pilots and All Against All will see shades of those books in this new one. I’m truly putting everything I’ve learned into this series, and The Power Fantasy is a large and beautiful canvas for me to operate on.”

Image Comics’ The Power Fantasy will begin in August.

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