The OTHER Post-Krakoa X-Book: "The Power Fantasy"

[numeronone]

You can stop reading Immortal X-Men and then jump over to this new book, which takes it further. - Kieron Gillen

From Kieron Gillen and artist Caspar Wijngaard (Home Sick Pilots), this series has been described as expanding on the material from Immortal X-Men much as The Wicked + The Divine did with Young Avengers. It also seems to be an extension of themes played with in Uber, as Gillen describes 'superpowers' within The Power Fantasy as being closer to the classic definition of the word:






This intrigues me largely because it seems like a major component of Immortal X-Men was the 'quiet war' between Destiny and Mister Sinister. Part of that was their shared, though fractured, war against the Enigma Dominion, in which every time either became aware of even the possibility of his existence, he would instantly kill them (or in Destiny's case distract her with a seizure-like prophetic vision).

This bore some similarity to Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, the sequel to The Three Body Problem (both of which I recommend,). In The Dark Forest, four individuals are chosen by the UN to save the world from invading aliens but cannot ever reveal their plans outside of their own heads for fear of alerting said aliens, who are constantly watching. From the description, TPF seems to follow a similar dilemma: how to act when using your powers will mean everyone else using theirs?

Gillen describes the book taking place over a 54-year period starting in 1945, with the six core characters, born at different points in the timelines, approaching their power levels in various ways at various times; the pitch is "What if Watchmen had six Doctor Manhattans?":

"Superheroes are fight comics. There’s certainly a lot of violence in TPF, but there’s not a lot of fighting. Violence is the enforcement of political will.

The subtext of the book is, “What happens when an individual has too much power?” If it’s true of these 6 characters, it’s also true of billionaires. It’d be clearly better if these people didn’t exist; however, they do exist. If you find yourself as one of them, what do you do? Especially when you’ve got these other assholes who’re doing this other stuff.

The core idea came from me, in the last 10 years of superhero comics, thinking the power creep has gotten out of control. It’s priapic, almost. I looked at them and thought, “These people just shouldn’t fight.” If we wrote Storm or Thor or Hulk seriously, they would destroy the planet any time they fought...there is no reason why the Flash should ever lose a fight.

This isn’t a bad thing. You write the poetry of it. But this is what I mean, when you take the idea and think, “A nuclear weapon isn’t good for anything. Using a nuclear weapon ends the story.”

I gotta say: of all the books coming out "Post-Krakoa", this is the only one I'm looking forward to. Especially because, when asked if it was made out of materials that Marvel had rejected, Gillen clarified: "Oh, no no no. I wouldn’t pitch them at Marvel. It’s very important to stress that...I would never pitch this at Marvel. It’s not the place for it."

Since what we're currently expecting from Marvel is a near-total erasure of the Krakoan age, I'm intrigued to see what a non-Marvel/Disney-owned extension of it would look like. 

It's launching in August. I'm so excited I may end up pre-ordering in singles rather than trades.