335: an incredible confession to make
Hullo
I want to be
Reassuring
Wizards
Links
Bye
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It’s a gap month for the single issues of The Power Fantasy in September. You’re probably forlorn, wondering what you’re to do with yourself. You could buy a comic from someone else, and spread your money, as all books are worth supporting and we should…
No, don’t do that. We’re releasing something else. Spend it on me. Only me.
(I’ve just sat down to write today, and the above came out, which makes me aware of many things – not least, I really should have got to bed earlier.)
Closer is out in September.
It’s a one off by Steve Lieber, Tamara Bonvillain and Clayton Cowles. It collects the 3-part short story we did for the Image! Anthology, which I wrote always with an eye for collecting into a single story. I really like one offs, as a concept. Just do a story and out. The only way these are done is if you launch an anthology series – which is great, of course, but also side-steps the “One off” a little. If you don’t have an anthology of short stories to write, you don’t write any of them. And short stories aren’t normally written like that in prose. You do enough of them, and eventually do a short story collection, right?
Anyway – I think this is worth pre-ordering. For a start, it’s good, and it’s a joy finally working with Steve, who I’ve adored forever. It’s always good to be with Tamra and Clayton too. But really, it’s something which won’t be collected for an indefinite amount of time, and perhaps ever – if you want it, you probably have to ask for it now.
Here’s the solicit details.
Closer #1
Arriving: September 3, 2025
Lunar Code: 0725IM293
Page Count: 32
Buy Cover price: $3.99It starts with birds materializing. It'll end with the death of the heavens. Cosmic horror you can dance to in a one-off apocalypse romance from KIERON GILLEN (THE WICKED + THE DIVINE, THE POWER FANTASY), STEVE LIEBER (THE FIX, Jimmy Olsen) and TAMRA BONVILLAIN (Once & Future).
If you’re a Phonogram fan, and like it when it works in its weird horror mode, this should be specifically appealing. While it’s its own thing, it’s easy to imagine me having done this as a Phonogram story if the book continued.
It’s also an apocalypse romance, and it’s been a long time since I wrote an actual apocalypse romance. There was a time all I thought I’d write was apocalypse romance.
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September may be a skip for the single issues, but it’s not entirely empty of all things Power Fantasy…
Here’s its solicit...
The Power Fantasy Volume 2: Mutually Reassuring Destruction.
Arriving: September 10, 2025
Lunar Code: 0725IM465
ISBN: 9781534333109
Page Count: 136
Buy Cover price: $16.99Imagine six people of such power that if they ever came into conflict, the world would end. Now imagine them never coming into conflict. Which is easier to imagine? The critically acclaimed series’ second volume continues to pull blocks from the Jenga tower of total annihilation.
Come dance to the ticking of the doomsday clock with KIERON GILLEN (THE WICKED + THE DIVINE, DIE) and CASPAR WIJNGAARD (HOME SICK PILOTS, ALL AGAINST ALL) in the second collection of this sell-out epic.
Collects THE POWER FANTASY #6-11
I think we tweaked “sell-out epic” for the trade, as it does seem like an incredible confession to make.
Pre-ordering trades always feels less urgent than the singles, but is still important - in the book trade, they seem to impact the overall orders significantly, and comic shops tend to order tight initially. Orders for the first volume were great, but the second volume will be the interesting one – you can start doing the math on the series’ finances properly with that datapoint. I suspect I’ll be able to work out how long the book can run when we get the orders for this, if I wrestled with a spreadsheet. But am I going to do that? I’m lazy.
Mask off: Yeah, I probably will. I like to plan and see what’s feasible, and how I should be structuring, because with a ship as big as we’re sailing, I need to decide well in advance how much runway we have. We also need to work out how on earth I got a ship on a runway.
There was a bit of talk about this on Blue Sky, prompted by Jamie talking about how “Knowing your show is going to end with Season 5 when you're currently working on Season 4 seems like a best case scenario for the writers of a TV show, tbh.” and me noting that “This is my basis of my basic Game of Thrones take - not that it ended too quickly, but it started ending too late.”
This also passes over into WFH comics, and the frustration with the limitations of it. I think we did the ending of Krakoa as well as we could, but it would certainly have been better if I was told when I started Immortal X-men “We’re rebooting the line in time for Uncanny X-men 700 so you have three years”. Of course, a company likely won’t do that – if it was selling, they’d have kept it going, and then you’re fucked the other way, having to spin a story out which wanted to end, and then when sales do colalpse you end up inevitably rushing.
(There is an irony – for all the difficulties of my first time on the X-men, that it had such a hard timeline meant (10 issues then Schism, 10 issues the AvX, 10 issues and then likely out) I could just plan it. I knew the size of the piece of paper. I was a supporting actor to the drama, but I knew the size of my role)
I don’t mind. It’s just the nature of the beast with working in commercial art for companies.
However, when we’re doing our own things, I will write the story to the space and will know the space.
With TPF, it’s going to be interesting. 16 is a great ending for the book. To make it worth going past 16, the math is going to have to work to got to… 30, maybe? I need to do some tighter plotting shortly to see what space things would take exactly. Perhaps something worthwhile could be done with a couple more trades, but I feel at least three more trades and perhaps more.
I don’t often talk about the specifics of this, which does feel odd – TPF is a successful book, as far as it goes – but it would be a disservice to make people think it’s not worth the effort to pre-order it. It is for all books, but for an ongoing like ours, especially so.
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I mentioned I was playing Jay Dragon’s in-progress game The Seven Part Pact a few weeks back? I wrote up a few thoughts about the experience. By which I mean, I wrote 2500 words and barely scratched the surface.
I was asked if I wanted to be a wizard for a week. I said yes.
It was a playtest of Jay Dragon’s the Seven Part Pact, where up-to-seven (we did six) players are all academic wizards in a fantasy realm (Think Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) Each has a title, and an area of magic that’s their domain (think the Wizard of Earthsea). Each’s domain is also an area of responsibility, to ensure it doesn’t fall apart (think, Sandman). They form a found-family of arseholes, each a being of almost unimaginable power, pursuing their own desires and schemes and often butting heads (think Amber). Each also takes a dual role, taking the tasks often reserved to the GM in a specific area – so, for example, the Faustian as a character is about demonic magic and preventing satan from escaping… but is also plays as the The Keeper of the Chains, who is called upon to make the complications in the world.
The Seven Part Pact is a GM-full game. I think it’s the only GM-full game.
You can read the rest here, and should. I think this is fun. Let the Wizard Madness consume you.
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Islands in the Sky Kickstarter looks really interesting and is worth backing. “A 112+ page, full-color comics anthology documenting Hurricane Helene through the voices of Appalachian survivors, co-written and illustrated by some of the most acclaimed names in comics. When Hurricane Helene devastated Southern Appalachia in the fall of 2024, it left both our landscape and our communities forever changed. But in the aftermath, something remarkable emerged: stories of survival, solidarity, and strength. Islands in the Sky brings those stories to life—pairing real survivors with award-winning comics creators like Brian Michael Bendis, Gene Luen Yang, Matt Fraction, Nate Powell, and more—to preserve what happened and help the region recover.” It still has some way to go to fund too, so fund and spread the link.
Over at Possum Creak, They’re crowdfunding Last Train to Bremen where some musicians have sold their soul to the devil and now have to play Liar’s dice. I paraphrase.
Ex-Comrade Walker writes about it being 25 years since Deus Ex was released. He quotes my review of it in here, which is one which folks still occasionally mention to me, as I was really going for it – in the context of a games mag circa-2000 anyway. Situationist name-drops weren’t as common.
I’ve been looking forward to this – Jim Crocker has released his beta for Ex-Capes, where he takes the Between engine and uses its narrative-forward flashback heavy structure to do a story about older heroes being dragged back into the game. I haven’t gone through properly yet, but it’s the first rpg about superheroes since teen-drama Masks that seems to be coming from an understanding of a specific part of the subgenre and mechanising it. That excites me.
Graeme Davis goes through all the injokes in Warhammer Fantasy Role-play. There are a lot. Self-indulgence did nothing wrong.
Strange Brain Parts does a quick video review of The Power Fantasy. Well, I say quick – it’s still 9 minutes. It’s not just going FUCKING ACE! Into a phone screen. I especially liked some specific engagement with what Caspar is doing here.
Seems to be a heavy RPG link week, right? This collates designer Rob Donoghue’s threads where he goes through the Crit-Roll RPG Daggerheart. This was really interesting – someone from a specific tradition, bridging several, really going deep about the specifics.
Top Level Canon do a two part exploration of The Power Fantasy so far. Part one and Part two.
This made me smile. CBR does a list of top 10 Image series ever, and Phonogram is at number 3 and WicDiv is at number 1. Now, I don’t think that’s true at all, but it’s very sweet. Clearly, Ludocrats should have been number one, in all lists, ever.
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I was away last week on an actual holiday. South of France, fancy villa, C’s Italian relatives, doing very little except trying to stop Iris enthusiastic attempts to drown herself in the pool and reading four of the Hugos’ Shortlist.
However, this week is squeezed, so I’m going to keep this one tight. I have to visit schools this afternoon. For Iris. Not me. I’ve been to school and sat my exams, despite what my stress dreams keep on trying to tell me.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
25.6.2025