279: you cannot moderate the unmoderatable
Hullo.
The Power Fantasy
Links
Bye
So, the big news from Emerald City.
Let's open with the teaser, as with any luck, it'll tell you everything you need to know.
You can stop now, if you want. It's out in August. Talk to your retailer to get them to order a copy. It'll be good.
If you want some more, here's the press release. Let's pull the two quotes out...
“The Power Fantasy emerged in a similar way to The Wicked + The Divine,” said Gillen in an exclusive scoop with The Hollywood Reporter. “I was doing a book at Marvel, and became aware of exactly the sort of things I could do with the reins taken off. As The Wicked + the Divine was to Young Avengers, this is to Immortal X-men. It’s a comic informed by superheroes, but one where a fight is the absolute lose state, for everyone. It’s set from 1945-1999, and so is 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, Die’s social group drama hyper-charged by genre…”
Wijngaard added: “Once Kieron had pitched the basic outline for The Power Fantasy I knew this was the story I felt comfortable most telling. We’ve been able to create some incredible characters, each with their own vibrant personalities and worlds in which they inhabit. If you are a fan of my most recent image titles Home Sick Pilots and All Against All, you’ll see a lot of its DNA here. 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.”
This is Caspar and myself back together, with Clayton roped into the mix. We've been chewing over doing a book together since Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, and this one felt right. I had the idea, and saw Caspar's pages for the beautiful mode-switching Swan Songs #2 and realised he'd be perfect. What we're doing is much more fluid than Peter Cannon. There's grids, but not regular grids, and the colour is a lead instrument – Caspar self-colours and has a vision on the page. It's a book set across 45 years, and one of our main ideas is making each period feel like the period's art. Not comic art specifically – art generally. The sixties burn bright on the page, the seventies glower, the eighties' have that cocaine pastel haze...
It's an ongoing. Like most my creator owned work, I consider it a novel. I've an amount of story in mind, and we'll see how long it is. There's a potential that I'll decide to go a shorter length, but it has the potential to be somewhere between Die and WicDiv. Or Uber, if I ever get to finish it.
They're three good comparisons, as I say in my quote. That's an overlap of my interests – genre as a way to increase the intensity of drama in a social group, an alternate fantastical pop-culture and an interrogation of power through genre. I'm a little twitchy over the superhero genre elements to the book. They're higher up in the pitch than they were in WicDiv, but it's still not the core. At least part of the reason I namecheck WicDiv above is to nod towards it really being like YA to WicDiv. Most don't clock WicDiv as a superhero book, despite the DNA. I suspect the pun alone will get more people saying it's a superhero book with The Power Fantasy, but I wouldn't come expecting anything from the genre (no-one fights crime, for example. No-one wears costumes.). It's not a “if superheroes were real” book – it's a book about what if 6 people had an unimaginable level of power. One of the shorthands I'm using is “Watchmen, if there were 6 Dr Manhattans” - but the thing there is “how on earth do six world-ending people come to terms with one another?”
(It's also about power generally, and there's obvious metaphors. You know one human who has the power of the nuclear arsenal of the USA? The President of the USA. What happens if random people were given the nuclear button?) Basically, the book is driven off that. No-one should have that power, yet they do... now, what do they do to try and avoid destroying the world? If you have a “What happens when...” thought provoked by the concept, that's probably part of the book.
We're mainly talking about the ideas and the structure at the this stage, because there's ages to go until release, and we'll be teasing more details of the characters later. It's mainly a character led book, like WicDiv was. For now, we think it's fun to just have those images and let folk wonder what's going on with Pink Hair or Dungarees.
(One of the best bits of the panel was when someone asked us to just make up some lies about all the characters. Nola live-skeeted the whole panel here)
The above is also tonally useful – this isn't Uber. The “The Eternal Fight Against Fighting” in the advert does a lot, not least leaven it. It's a serious book, but also a playful book.
It's also a big swing book. I said previously that I had plans to launch a line of books at once, and then decided they'd autocanabalize . Instead, I wanted to throw myself entirely at a book. Put all your eggs in a basket, and try not to destroy the world with nuclear fire. Kriss asked me about what I've been researching for this and – like WicDiv and DIE and Uber, even – it's been designed to shape my reading for a while. This is me thinking about the 20th century, and what we can draw from there – and, basically, how we got here.
We're still working on the book's design – Rian Hughes is with us again, and we want to have something suitable. “The Power Fantasy” is a title where you can hear the quotation marks hovering around it. It almost sounds like an academic treatise, right? Trying to find a way to square that element of the book, and the febrile life of the other half is very much the core of it.
I've only done a little press so far. Popverse covered the panel if you want a write up of that and I did one quick interview outside the con, where you can hear me feeling out my thought patterns on this, while trying to avoid revealing too much. I'm not good at that. If you corner me in a pub, I'm within two drinks of telling everyone the whole story. Let's pull out a quote...
MW: You’ve written a superhero book where they must never, ever fight.
The older I get, the more that’s interesting to me. 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 rest is here. Good to be yabbering again.
Finally, here's the work in progress playlist...
...which will be growing. The gimmick is that it's chronological, starting with the earliest point in our timeline. There's one exception, but it's Prince, and Prince writes his own rules.
That's enough for now. Out August, from Image Comics. It's good to be back.
- This on the 1970s Flash Gordon game as a proto-storygame interested me. When I was a game critic, chasing down those weird precursors to modern ideas was one of my fave things. One of the things which is a catchphrase of the 500 songs podcast is that there's never a first anything, and while I don't quite agree with that entirely, it's also much more true than not.
- As it's a light links week (I've been travelling, so not reading enough) let's plug the latest A History of Rock Music In 500 Songs string of episodes, on the Byrds in its Gram Parson's period. All the Byrds episodes have been fascinating to me, in all their incarnations. They've never been one of my bands, so this has been a chance to explore them better (though I have listened to a bunch of Parson's solo-LP stuff). However, I have been amazed and delighted that – in a history with some genuine monsters – how the Byrds manage to be a band with fascinating arsehole concentration. There hasn't been a band I'd less like to have been a member of. Except, perhaps, Creem.
While I did do the library event in Philadelphia at the start of 2020, Emerald City was the the first time at a US comic-con since 2019. I wanted to go to announce the Power Fantasy, but I also wanted to go so there was at least one con during my second stay at Marvel. Four years at Marvel, without ever actually meeting any of the fans? That felt weird, in a “I'll take your money, but I'm not going to hang” way.
It was also my first west coast trip in a long time, and I'd almost forgotten the physical grind of it. Set off at noon, a 10 hour flight... and it's still only 3pm by the time you land. The zombie trudge to a reasonable bedtime was a lot. I could handle the jetlag (mostly) but it is a lot. It was also basically the longest I've been away from Iris (Gencon felt shorter, somehow?), and has made me question how often I want to do this... or how I can shorten trips. I went from Tuesday to leave on Monday. Coming in on Tuesday is to help with Jetlag, and Leaving on Monday is about having the full Sunday... but I could say “fuck jetlag” come in on a Wednesday and leave Sunday Night and get 2 days back. I don't need to be out late as much any more. As much as I loved seeing people, it was hard to be away, and I'd like a better balance.
We also threw an announcement party at the wonderful Comet Tavern in Seattle. It was an open door thing, so it was a mix of people we'd invited and the Saturday night Seattle crowd. A Bachelorette party was particularly ecstatic over some mid-set choices (my typical Call your Girlfriend → Call me Maybe → Shake it out) and I am proud to know that my inner aesthetic remains “20-something drunk girl”.
I was sharing the decks with Jazzlyn Stone and Tini Howard. Jazzlyn and I have teamed up before,, but Tini had never stepped up. Our gothic queen of LA seemed to have unlocked something in her, which was a joy to see. Also, catwoman mask! Perfection.
Neither Tini nor Tini's catwoman mask pictured.
The con was great, basically. Dinners with friends, random chats, seeing folks. My spotlight panel was great and my moderation of Chip's... well, put it like this: you cannot moderate the unmoderatable. I actually took a chunk of the audience next door to the image panel to cause trouble at one point. By Sunday night I'd lost my voice, so at dinner with Chip and Juliette Capra, and could only communicate by mime.
Also Clayton sent the first lettering draft of the Stephanie OGN, which seems to be holding together pretty well – always a huge relief. It's my first graphic novel, so it's unusual to be working on that schedule. Everything is done way in advance, so to have a completed book a clear half year (at least) until any of you will read it is unusual. And even that is somewhat accelerated over most of the book trade.
I think it's good too. Stephanie has done intensely beautiful things on the page, at the least, which always helps.
Jetlag is lagging hard now, so let's stop. Work for the week is basically catching up with what I missed. By this time next week, I should have cleared my decks of everything of any big work on things which aren't Creator Owned. That feels good, and petrifying, which is how I like it.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
6.3.2024