The Power Fantasy is a drama about six people with the power to destroy the world trying desperately not to do that. Which means it's a book about people, so it's been fun just slowing showing them off. We've introduced three of our cast - Santa Valentina, Eliza Hellbound and Etienne Lux. I've only aware that we're revealing the core aspects of the world of the Power Fantasy as we go. Valentina is an angel - or at least what we'd call an Angel. Eliza Hellbound has made a faustian pact. Those two imply something about our cosmology - that there's a higher and lower realm. Etienne Lux is what we called an Atomic, or "The Nuclear Family" - people with gifts of varying scale who emerged post 1945. But Lux is a singular figure - he's a guy who stands apart from the rest of the Family.
But to most the world, the face of the Atomics?
Meet Brother Raymond "Heavy" Harris. Most people call him Heavy now, if they're being polite. They're regularly not. The scars on his body are telling a story, right?
He's the radical. My working name for his role is THE FREE RADICAL, which speaks to my pun addiction, but also what he is. He wants to change the world and protect people - most of all, the vast majority of Atomics.
That's a key thing about our world - "Superpowers" doesn't mean what it means in ours. It means specifically individuals with the power of a nuclear superpower. There's a fair few people with gifts of varying scales, but they don't matter strategically. This is a story about the big kids, and Heavy is very aware he's the biggest kid on the Atomics' side. As our story starts, he's in his late 40s, and at the head of a large commune of Atomics, called Haven. You can see it floating towards New York in the preview pages. What's Haven like? It's this huge chunk of a floating city, having around a portable singularlity.
(Heavy's a Gravity controller, a power I've always felt weirdly under-represented in comics.)
What's it like aboard there? Well, the quote I nearly had on the teaser was "People treat us like us a sex cult, when we're a revolutionary movement. And a sex cult" but it was a bit too long.
The inevitable shorthand for him will be our Magneto to Etienne's Xavier. It'll do for a starting place, but the trajectories are going to spin off.
Not least, this is a world where change is possible. We're not tied to a status quo. We can genuinely change the world.
He's a 1960s MC5-esque Detroit radical with the power to crash the moon into earth and is stoned almost all the time. What could possibly go wrong?
Caspar's design is one of of my favourites. The initial starting place was basically "The Dude meets Magneto" - the gown, that general burned out hippy vibe and so on. That led to the genius stroke of him having a spliff floating around him at all times... but Caspar played with it, and realised Jeff Bridges is wrong. This is a guy who would throw down with bikers back in the day. He's a Hippie, but not that kind of Hippie. He's got the casual air, sure, but you can tell he's a guy who could handle himself even if he wasn't capable of throwing continental shelves around. And all those scars, right? There's clearly a lot of stories carved into his body...
The Power Fantasy is out August 7th, and its Pre-order cut-off is July 15th. Talk to your retailer.
On the off-chance you've missed the book, or want to help spread the word, I got around to making a couple of master threads on Blue Sky and Twitter. Lots more details here.
Perhaps not a huge surprise, given that I've been to it every year (with one exception), but Chrissy and I have just been announced as guests for this year's Thought Bubble in Harrogate in November 16-17th. It's always one of my favourite cons of the year, so I'm looking forward to seeing folks.
Probably a good time to quickly recap where I'll be in the next few months, in terms of public appearances. I think it's...
Gencon, Indianapolis. (August 1-4)
Forbidden Planet, London. (August 7th)
Worldcon, Glasgow. (August 8-11)
New York Comic Con, New York (October 17-20)
Thought Bubble, Harrogate. (November 16-17)
Yes, that rush from Indianapolis to London to Glasgow is going to be an interesting couple of weeks. Also, hard. This is the longest I'll have been away, and when I had been at Emerald City earlier in the year, I had decided that even one week was too long. This was booked before then, but in future, I'm going to be trying to trim days from con trips – not the con days themselves, but the days around it. Which will mean earlier nights to keep balanced, but frankly, I could do with some earlier nights.
This was amazing. The Origins Awards were announced last weekend, and DIE RPG won the best corebook award. Here's the statement I sent when I heard the news...
"I'm terminally British. As such, expressing sincere glee and thanks for something that's incredibly kind and moving isn't exactly my strong point. But here I am, glowing, and wishing I could have been there. DIE is a game about my love of RPGs, and for those who love RPGs to love it? That's magical. Thank you. Thanks to anyone who played it, and especially Game Daddy Grant Howard for beating me up, Zach for editing me (as in, further beating me up) and everyone at Rowan Rook and Decard for performing the act of alchemical transformation on the various drafts to make it what it is today. And, of course, my partner in crime, Stephanie Hans whose artistic vision is everything. Thanks again."
You’ll see that the scenarios have very specific groups leading to very specific worlds. By narrowing who the Personas are you can give very flexible guidelines for how to create a world. The scenarios normally give the Personas a shared experience which means the place they end up is meaningful to all the players. In Con Quest, the Personas all worked on a comic together. In the scenario, they arrive in a horror take on a comic con in a dimension where their comic became a huge deal. That is automatically relevant to all the Personas.
Kickstarter update! The Wicked + the Divine: the Covers Version launched last week, and has done really well. It funded in a few hours, and is shy of 65k at the moment, with just over 850 backers. It's been really interesting to see what levels people have backed on – the vast majority of people have gone for the deluxe edition rather than the standard one.
Lots of pieces on AI, but this one is especially good. “I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again” suggests the tone, and isn't incorrect, but this is detailed, born of experience in the field and a total despair at seeing people selling snakeoil again and again.
Pride month, and Maz RRD writes about Pride and the company. There's lots of reasons why I wanted to work with Rowan Rook & Decard, but this being their culture was absolutely high on the list.
Wyrd Science is my favourite RPG magazine of the moment, I think – it's got a real perspective, and a great vibe. Issue 6 is up for pre-order, but even if you don't want to thrown down electrum pieces for that, it's worth subscriving to their newsletter, which is always a great curator of links.
I re-read this classic RPG post trying to delineate the Six Cultures of Play. If you haven't read it, it's well worth you time – especially if you're someone who's played games and not even thought of the existence of play cultures.
I feel that I'm not being hugely productive, yet things are getting done, and they're things that need to be done. So I guess that means I have been productive?
This is mainly as the thing which is abstractly my Actual Work To Do isn't happening - I'm meant to be rewriting and expanding a scenario for the third DIE scenarios book, and I'm having trouble engaging my brain to the task. There's part of me which wants to just side-step and write a whole scenario from scratch. If I get a new idea when walking later I may just write that instead.
However, the other stuff I'm doing is just as essential. I've finally mastered my inbox, with things dating from Emerald City out – including the taxes, for example. I've been going through the first pencils for the new project with Stephanie. But most of all, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's been The Power Fantasy stuff.
We handed the first issue to image on Monday, which means that we've got our Complete Bar Whatever Final Tweaks PDF (there's a line which I'm sure I'm going to change) which means we're getting it out to more people than before. Yesterday I mailed it to a bunch of my peers. Later in this week, I'm going to be writing to retailers. Before writing this, I was doing the backmatter for issue 2, and after I finished this section, I realised I wanted to interview someone, so have just mailed to ask. Next on the list is writing a couple of things for retailers – now we have the various covers nailed down (including one which may have an actual fancy cover treatment that Rian wanted) it means I can have that chat with precision, which is what you need with retailers. This is business. Knowing the audience you're talking to, and what you need to say is part of the job. That sentence nearly made me seem professional. Ugh.
Oh – I also sent the issue to my mum.
She read it earlier and messaged me:
“Oh dear Kieron. Just read it. 😳.”
I probably should stick that on the back of the trade.
Kieron Gillen
London
26.6.2024
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