292: there's always spite.
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Caspar cut a trailer for the Power Fantasy. If it's not showing in the client, click through.
The trailer for "The Power Fantasy" from @kierongillen and @Casparnova pic.twitter.com/Ia8EHSGhlk
— Image Comics (@ImageComics) July 2, 2024
Here it is on instagram, if that's more you speed.
It's a banger.
Our latest The Power Fantasy teaser is up on ComicsXF.
Go read the article for more details and art , but here's the quote I sent over.
"We're doing this slow unveil of the cast of the Power Fantasy, and the last two have been what we call Atomics (aka "The Nuclear Family"). These are people who emerged with impossible gifts in the world post-1945 (and specifically one day in 1945. You can likely work out which one.) They're a large community, the vast majority of who have no significant ability at all. They're basically party tricks, at best. The Superpowers who our story revolves are exceptional, on a whole different level even to the ones who do have abilities commensurate to what you'd see in another comic. Etienne Lux and Heavy are different in lots of ways, but there are similarities. They're both political figures, with their own goals in the world. They've butted heads, and had to compromises with one another to get what they want.
The third Atomic is different, in that her goals are simple.
She doesn't want to kill every single person on the planet.
Meet Morishita Masumi. Or, as she's known in the world of modern art, "Deconstructa"
I've said that part of the Power Fantasy's backstory was realising that once you reach past a certain level of power, a superpower would be basically worthless. An Atom Bomb is only really there to kill us all.
Masumi is the purest expression of that. Her gift is one which activates when her depression and alienation grows too much. She disappears. It arrives.
Her life is about trying not to use her gift. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she's been in therapy since the first event. Most of all, she tries to channel all these awful feelings - self-hatred, depression. shame, guilt - into her art. Many artists talk about how their art is what keeps them alive. Masumi thinks that her art keeps everyone alive.
That's horrible, but that's just the tip of that particularly awful iceberg. Imagine everyone else around you knowing that truth, and then imagine how they then treat you. Everyone knows Masumi needs to be kept happy... which means Masumi, in her heart of hearts, cannot trust anything anyone ever does for her.
She's probably the most depressing character of the Power Fantasy. At least top two. We haven't talked much about Eliza Hellbound, who petrifies me, but Masumi is just awful.
I think that means you root for her. Every page I've written with Masumi, I like her more. If Power Fantasy has any connective tissue from WicDiv (and it clearly does) it most clearly shows in Masumi. She's about art versus the end of the world - even her life contrast between the Bjork-isms of her in public versus her being hyper casual in private seems to have WicDiv notes? See what you think.
The Power Fantasy is out August 7th, and its Pre-order cut-off is July 15th. Talk to your retailer. Talk generally, even. When it's been in the oven this long, it's just good to start to talk to folks about it.
To help spread the word, there's a couple of master threads on Blue Sky and Twitter. Lots more details here.
This is a first. I haven't actually done any incentive covers for any of my Image Books – we make all of them freely orderable. However, comics seems to be in a different place right now, and it's part of almost every book, with the interaction between rare copies for collectors helping ameliorate getting more.
As such, we're doing a couple.
On the left is our Rian Hughes variant. He's doing one of these for each of the first six issues. It looks lovely, but this is PANTONE. Fancy glowy pantone, so should really be astounding in the flesh. It's a 1:50 variant.
On the right, is the divine Tula Lotay, doing Tula Lotay's take on Masumi, as introduced above. This is a 1:100 variant.
There's also a freely orderable blank sketch cover variant.
Speak to your retailer, though know these will carry a price-tag. Worth highlighting to collector friends, who may think they're nifty.
I did buy a Steamdeck, so did some quick capsule takes on things I've been playing – all basically a single Blue Sky post's worth. Of course, I'm cutting corners and balancing a ratio of facts, opinions and shameless trolling, and tagging them #steamygillen. Really, I've just mainly been dabbling and seeing some things. So I figured a tag from entirely irresponsible from the hip opinions with barely an hour of play.
FALLOUT 4: Not actually on the deck, but before it arrived. I realised I would not be playing very much when I first sat down and was forced to watch my character slowly take a seat. No. My life is too short. If I want to watch someone slowly sit down, I have mirrors.
HADES II: First game on the deck. Hades was one of the very few games I actually played in the last decade - completed it a few times. The rogue-structure applied to narrative download is very smart, and it's wonderfully done. However, I've played Hades. I'll likely come back later.
APERTURE DESK JOB: Oh, I lie. This was the first game on the Steamdeck. Glorified Steamdeck training system, but that's great - if you have a training system, glorify the living fuck out of it. Witty, playful, makes you wish Valve actually released games instead of Salinger-ing it.
VAMPIRE SURVIVORS: It's weird that I spent so long being mocked when I was a game critic for being obsessed by Robotron and actual Rogue games and now everything is Robotron and Rogue-likes. This doesn't quite go for the throat as hard as I'd like for the opening, but I like it a lot.
DOOM ETERNAL: I wanted something to see how graphically the little deck holds out, and reached for this. It's hard to believe that we're in the year of our lord 2024 and we still can't talk to the monsters. That would be something.
(Yeah, That's a joke for the heads.)
BALATRO: A game du jour, so I jumped on the Poker deckbuilder with roguelike bits, and it immediately gelled, and only got better. There was a moment when I looked up and saw the boss challenge absolutely would make my deck untenable was a "Clever girl" moment. I love this kind of stuff.
SLAY THE SPIRE: Another roguelike deckbuilder that a lot of folks have talked about, and while it's clearly full of really neat stuff, its pacing is a little languid to fit the time I have. It wants you to fall into its stoner-tactical rhythms, and I just can't.
ELDEN RING: Dropping Soulsborne into an open world really does make you realise "this is just goth Zelda." Nice to see Shadows of the Colossus' trick of putting its content across a wide space to making folks think its moody is still in play too. Clearly really good, won't fit my life.
INTO THE BREACH: I'd played this for an hour before, and suspected it would sing on a handheld, and it really does. Permadeath Advance Wars with saving people your main goal, every choice full of meaning. An accepted instaclassic that has me instantly saying it's a classic.
DISCO ELYSIUM: I'd clocked this as being on my old critical beat, but the differences are interesting - yes, it's Planescape T influenced, but it ejects the (iffy) RPG tropes in favour of the (superior) graphic/text adventure. My first thought however: Wait... did Spurrier write this?
(I posted that one as Disco Inferno, which was particularly bad, as I actually wrote Disco Inferno, spotted it, deleted it, and then just wrote Disco Inferno again. Probably worth stressing the meaning of what I said there, as clearly I don't mean the classic adventure is any good – No surrender to John Walker. It means that Planescape Torment was constructed of various elements, and the text/adventure hybrid stuff was really what sung. As such, a game which concentrates on that and minimises the D&D-y stuff is a making a strong choice.)
In practise, I've settled into actually playing things now – I'm bouncing between Into the Breach and Disco Elysium, depending on the time I have available. Which mostly means Into The Breach.
The second part of my DIE Scenario writing advice guide goes live, with added details and sarcasm from Chant. This one's on Persona Generation. Here's an example quote....
As such, this step is the heart of a DIE scenario. It’s arguably the most important part – really, get a good group of Personas and DIE almost runs itself. These are guidelines for collaborative world building, the questions arranged so players can orientate themselves to these fictional lives and build together in a meaningful fashion.
...and you can read the rest here.
- I was on TLDR Comics Podcast again, to talk what I've been up to – primarily about THE POWER FANTASY and WE CALLED THEM GIANTS. This was a lot of fun.
- I was interviewed about Krakoa over at Italian site Lo Spazio Bianco (The White Space). The questions were sent over well before the end of Krakoa, and I wrote the answers in the gap between me having finished writing it and it being published. I suspect this is the most I've said about the back end – well, at least until my Cerebro about Hope drops. Here's the English version, but here's the Italian one. Er... they translated me. I didn't try and do it in a feat of Duolingo fuelled arrogance. I keep on meaning to do a tips for gaming duolingo article. Maybe next time.
- I was delighted when news of this dropped into my Inbox. Fred Van Lente and Tom Fowler have been working on a comics history of role-playing game for years, and they're about to crowdfund it (KS. They sent me the work so far, and it's just great. I sent them a long quote, but the bits which are quoted in the Gamesradar article above are that I'm envious of them and it's “absolutely the most accessible and certainly the funniest” history of the RPG. I didn't even mention how beautiful it was.
- Oh – the Softback of Sins of Sinister is out, the berserk event Al, Si and myself plotted, and where I somehow talked Marvel letting me write Warhammer 40k X-men. AIPT has a review of the softback here.
- Aditya writes about comics-as-novels in their latest Newsletter, focusing on the first issues of A NICE HOUSE BY THE SEA and THE POWER FANTASY. “If I may be glib, a novel is something that acquires “aboutness” as it goes, rather than, like a short story, being “about something”. Elif Batuman in particular talks about the novel as a catch-all genre, something that isn’t limited by its spine. In a novel, you can digress to the point of leaving the story entirely, yet anything can belong in a novel by the simple nature of you having chosen to put it in there. The juxtaposition is in itself the pattern. The ideal novel, Borges-like, would be a novel that contained everything.”
- Seeing TPF next to A Nice House by The Sea is good company to be in. The first book was a triumph, and I read the advance of the first issue A NICE HOUSE BY THE SEA this week too, and did a quick skeet about it: “Comics premier holiday destination returns with a new wonderful locale for [SPOILERS] while getting away from [SPOILERS, INVOLVING SCREAMING]. Inverts the premise of the original to dazzling effect, paying off a promise you didn't know was made”. Pre-orders were over on Monday, but it's still worth talking to your retailer.
- When looking in Pantone covers for WicDiv, my lawyer forwarded this fascinating piece about mid-century pantone art fading and what it reveals in the work beneath it.
- Grant Howitt has just dropped his latest one page RPG, But There For The Geese Of God where you play geese in the fourth-century trying to instigate schemes to lead Martin of Tours to sainthood. That's a sentence I just wrote.
- Oh – the Wicked + the Divine: The Covers Version kickstarter is ongoing, is about the 70k mark, with 50 or so backers to reach the sweet 1000. If you haven't backed, go nose. It's a lovely book.
It's an Election tomorrow. I should say something, and I will.
Vote.
I was going to leave it at that, but I was just reading this little article listing the Conservatives policy disasters since 2010, and getting angry. It's not just that that they're ethically odious – they're also just really bad at their jobs. I always think of Cameron neither planning for or even believing it was possible that they'd lose the Brexit vote. That's the arrogance inherent in them. Of course they didn't think or plan for that. Why would they? They're going to be fine either way. They're rich. They'll cut social services they'll never use or need.
They're people who don't care about whether people live or die – just that they get to decide whether you live or die.
It's hard to be full-throated for Labour. There's stances that I'm more than uncomfortable with – the current shimmying up to TERFs is deeply upsetting, its treatment of its left, etc. But they're not identical the Tories. I'd critique the last Labour government hard... but we had a decade of increased social welfare infrastructure. The NHS worked in 2010. The Tories took that away from us, born of bad economics and a fundamental disdain for human life. As that link above shows, there's no end to it.
I don't believe in telling you how to vote, as that's between you, the box and your conscience, but I'll share my present thinking.
All elections are local in Britain. You're shaping the eventual government, but the specific meaning of your vote changes. You're giving an individual actual power.
For me, I'm in Lewisham, which is almost certainly going to go Labour. A protest vote against Labour's repositioning is something I'd more understand, as Labour has a tendency to treat their base for granted. For me, it's not worth the risk, but I get it.
By the end of the year, I'm likely going to be living in Bath.
As in, Rees Mogg's manor.
He's been there for 14 years. At the moment, it's looking he could lose to Labour. Rees Mogg is an embodiment of everything that's wrong with his party and, by extension, the country. You can't trust a man who's had 6 kids and never changed a nappy. That's not eccentric. That's someone who believes that it's someone else's job to do the dirty work.
I'd vote Labour there, even if Labour were literally identical to the Tories
I do it just to ensure someone like him was kept away from the corridors of power.
To be honest, if I lived in Bath I'd vote Labour just to make sure Rees Mogg had a shitty day.
If you're dispirited about the election, remember: there's always spite.
If nothing else, I think I should look at where you are, see which arsehole needs a boot and use your vote as well as you can.
And on the wider scale? We have a party full of them in charge. I wish them nothing but despair on Friday morning. They've brought this on themselves.
No, it's not the Democracy I'd wish for, but it's the one we've got.
Kieron Gillen
London
3.7.2024