Power Fantasy and the Power of Preorders
I start every newsletter swearing this is finally going to be the short one, but I mean it this time. I’m typing from [Googles altitude of commercial air travel] between 30,000 and 42,000 feet in the air on my way to San Francisco for a week-long vacation. I promised my partner I’d show him some very big trees for his birthday, and by god, I’m gonna do it.
Still, final order cutoffs and timed promotions wait for no one. Onward!
“It’s the Ethical Thing to Do.”
I’m the last voice to join the chorus, but Kieron Gillen was kind enough to send me an early copy of THE POWER FANTASY,* his upcoming Image Comics series with Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles, and Rian Hughes. Oh, surprise, surprise, surprise, Kieron wrote a great comic book and Caspar’s art looks drop-dead gorgeous.
Who would have guessed.
Seriously, though—I think it’s a vital part of the comics ecosystem to have a book, at least once every couple of years, that comes swinging hard at the fundamental idea of what it would mean to possess extraordinary powers in a grounded world.
I think Kieron’s already said that The Power Fantasy is to Immortal X-Men what WicDiv was to Young Avengers, and that’s bang-on—if you’re lamenting the loss of Krakoa and want to see what the unrestrained extension of the ideas of a mutant superpower might look like, you owe it to yourself to read this book. But—and I say this with immense love and respect for my beloved mutants—that also feels like a reductive way to pitch the book.
I was reminded most, in fact, of Morrison and Yeowell’s Zenith, in that it wears its pop-culture obsessions proudly on its sleeve while taking a sharpened ax to the face of the geopolitical climate of the last sixty years. This first issue hints at a vast world to be revealed in the issues to come, populated by Kieron’s most nuanced cast of characters yet—and announces Caspar Wijngaard as the absolute superstar many of us have always known him to be. This is a book that feels mad as Hell that we haven’t caught up to its level yet—the exact shot in the arm comics needs at this moment in time.
The first issue, which just got a bombastic new cover, is on Final Order Cutoff this coming Monday, which means that’s the final day shops can place orders for the issue. Series live and die by preorder support, and the creator-owned comic market desperately needs smart, well-executed books like The Power Fantasy on stands. Ask your retailer to reserve a copy (or two) now. It’s the ethical thing to do.
And Speaking of Preorders
Now through the 17th is the latest Barnes & Noble preorder sale, which is something of a major holiday for book-lovers. If you type in PREORDER25 at checkout, you save (wait for it) 25% on your entire order. This is the main way I stock up on books these days, and I pretty much always forget what I order, which is like gifting Future Steve nice little surprises.
A number of my upcoming Marvel collections apply to the sale, and I’d be remiss not to plug them here:
ALIEN: BLACK, WHITE & BLOOD TREASURY EDITION (featuring a good dog!)
EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE: SPIDER-SOCIETY (featuring Web-Weaver!)
INFINITY WATCH (featuring Spider-Boy!)
SPIDER-WOMAN BY STEVE FOXE VOL. 2: THE ASSEMBLY
VENOMVERSE REBORN (also featuring Web-Weaver…and Silk!)
X-MEN '97: GREAT X-PECTATIONS (didn’t think they’d approve this subtitle tbh!)
When you list it all out like that, it actually freaks me out a little. If you had asked me a few years ago if I thought I’d ever write for Marvel, I’d have said I’d be grateful if I ever got to do like, a three-page backup story one day. Anyway, I remain super grateful to have all of these under my belt and quite a few more on the way.
YOU BELONG HERE, a lovingly crafted and deeply real book I edited from Sara Phoebe Miller and Morgan Beem, is also up for the promo, and the team made these fun images for it. I wish I was that driven!!!
Before I Go…
I’m going to hold myself to keeping this one short—and airplane WiFi can only handle so much—but I did want to shout out X-MEN: BLOOD HUNT—PSYLOCKE one more time. I never check responses to my work online, but I am unreasonably happy with how this issue came out and I broke my rule for this one. Pretty stoked that the Kwannon fans all seemed to dig it too. This issue will definitely go down as one of my personal favorites, and I owe a huge debt to all the work Lynne, Ruth, and the rest of the team put into it. If you want to hear me talk more about it, I chatted with perennial pals Comic Book Yeti about this and…
X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE, the third issue of which just dropped. We’re narrowing down the candidates, with just four still in the running. I told you all Netho was something else, right? The final issue has some of my favorite X-sequences I’ve ever written, but I also wanted to call out one from #3. I pretty much never toot my own horn, but Emma Frost is one of my favorite characters. She was part of my very first exposure to the X-Men in Pryde of the X-Men and was core to the book that changed my life—New X-Men. You might think that meant I was champing at the bit to write her once I got in the X-office, but it was exactly the opposite—she looms so large for me, I was afraid I’d fall flat if I tried.
Anyway, I’m glad I got over myself and put her in Heir.
Now go preorder some books (pretty please).
xoxo
*Kieron couldn’t have known it at the time, but he also got me out of a pickle—I had just finished reading Peter Straub’s Ghost Story followed by Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie and could not, for the life of me, figure out how to complete my triptych of “reading things that are titled after broad descriptive terms.” The Power Fantasy in with the save.