Talking About ‘The Power Fantasy’ With With Kieron Gillen

Olly MacNamee: The Power Fantasy is your new series, with Caspar Wijngaard, series wherein you pose an interesting question about superpowers, who wields them and ethics. But who’s to say who gets to decide what’s ethical and what isn’t? It would seem, in your series, it’s the enigmatic figure, Etienne Lux. Surely, this is going to cause problems across this series, right?

Kieron Gillen: Etienne is perhaps the individual most aware of the questions the series is posing. He’s the person we see the most of in the first issue, and you see his various tactics of approaching the “what is ethical?”  We see that he’s explicitly referencing various philosophical schools, and he leans utilitarian – nothing matters if we all kill ourselves, and so an amount of immoral behaviour is ethical to that end. The absolute minimum of it. He won’t use his psychic powers to skip a queue, but he’ll make sure no-one sees who he is, as people knowing where he is endangers everyone near him. That’s one reason why he’s compelling. Ethics versus morals is one of the other themes, which I’m sure people will spot.

But in reality, Etienne is deeply aware that ethics only go so far. In reality, what matters is what happens, and what happens is what people in power decide. How folks will read Etienne will be interesting – is all his theorising just justifying whatever he wanted to do anyway? Is he trying to hold on something external to himself to orientate himself? Does he do it consistently or not? And an obvious answer to the last, is “probably not” – he may be able to kill the planet, but he’s human.

But, yes, Etienne’s actions early in the series are the snowball dropped at the top of a snow-covered mountain. Let’s see where ethics get us.

MacNamee: You don’t have to be a fan of Bertand Russell’s philosophy on American global hegemony, and the lesser of two evils, but it helps. True or false? 

Gillen: Well, it would help Etienne if people agreed with Russell in that period, natch.

Olly, this is going to be a very short interview if you’re going to give me yes or no questions. I mean, as evidenced by this sentence, a yes or no question isn’t going to stop me writing a paragraph.

MacNamee: And this is a piece of work, like some of your other creator-owned series like The Wicked + The Divine, that grew out of the understandable limits to working on IPs, particularly your writing on The X-Men, right? How so?

Gillen: Heh. Well, I think the first issue says exactly what the limits I’m crossing which would never fly at a Marvel book.

El Sandifer writes a little about it in her review of issue #1 – her joys when I dropped lines like Cyclops saying “What’s the difference between Iraq and North Korea? Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. And every time this team goes into the field, we remind the world that we do” and Xavier saying “There will never be a nuclear war. If the Doomsday Clock ever hit midnight, all those warmongers’ hands would hover over the red button and find themselves incapable of pressing it.”

There’s an implicit story those lines hint towards, and they’re not stories which could (or should) ever be told in the Marvel Universe. How does having a world with six people with all the power of the USA Nuclear arsenal change geo-politics? That’s the Power Fantasy, right there.

The core novum of the book was from working on Immortal X-Men (in the same way, the core of WicDiv came from thinking about Young Avengers). Basically I was doing a fight between two of these Omega X-Men – essentially people with power beyond limits. I realised that if I was writing in a more realistic mode, there’s no way these two could actually fight. They’re escalate and escalate, and whoever didn’t escalate would lose – and if both escalated, the world would die.

Now, the romantic mode for writing it is great… but thinking of how power creep has got us to a place where people in a genre which is basically about fights couldn’t really fight seemed really interesting. They’re basically nuclear weapons now, and all nuclear weapons are good for is killing each other.

And there was the Power Fantasy – this cold-war comic about power and people.

MacNamee: From the very first issue alone it’s clear you have a whole alternative timeline mapped out, from 1945 to 1999. The Cold War and the post-Cold War era. And the Millennium Bug! What’s the idea behind your characters’ stories starting and ending in this specific period?

 Gillen: Many, only some of which I can talk about. Some is practical, some is poetry, some is even commercial – as you say, setting a story around the year 2000 hasn’t been done yet in pop culture, so seemed an interesting place to set up camp.

I think the biggest bit was distance – let’s keep it in the 20th century, an area we can look back a bit. That the cold war was the major motif for that whole period meant there was a connection there – for older people, they’ll remember what it was like. For younger, I can try and show them what it was like when this was what you worried about most. It’s a period I haven’t written much about – it’s both my lifetime (75 onwards) and also my parents’ youth (which gives me a chance to think about what it was to be young and alive there.)

For more aspects? Starting in 45 seemed logical – let’s start the alternate history when the world was actually changed forever with the nuclear bomb. It makes it really clear what we’re talking about. When we’ve done that, we start thinking of the age of the cast. How many superpowers do we want? When will they be born? How old do we want them to be when the story happens? Equally, as it is an alternate history, how long can we go and have a world which is vaguely recognisable as our starting point. This is a bit of a Watchmen-set-up – as in that used 1985, but with some visible changes. We’re similar – we see 1999 earth, and it’s a lot like ours… but if you look carefully, you’ll see hints something is off, which we slowly reveal the truth of.

Let’s also not put aside the absolute basics. The clock ticking down towards the millennium. Time running out. That gives a little tension, just there.

MacNamee: As for the design of the characters, and through very different eras of fashion, who lead the charge on the design? You, Caspar, or a back-and-forth joint effort? I do know from his work on Home Sick Pilots that he does have a keen eye for period fashion.

 Gillen: “It’s complicated” is the best response. I had some core ideas for the cast, and threw them to let Caspar develop, which led me to making my own tweaks to the conceptions and so on. Caspar really feels out and explores what a charater is, and if it feels wrong, he heads into another place. Sometimes we talk about that afterwards, and back track, but more often, I see the point, and go with it.

Heavy’s a good example of the process – he’s our ageing 1960s MC5-esque detroit radical. Initial designs had him skinny, showing increasing amounts of damage across the years – he was missing parts of his body, speaking to the amount of assassination attempts on him. I loved the harm to him, but realised I wanted more of the gone to seed look – I used the shorthand of the Dude from the Big Lebowski meets Magneto. So Caspar starts working on that approach, with the big open gown he hangs in casually… but the gentleness of Bridges isn’t right. He starts pushing in another way, and it makes sense – he’s a hippy, sure, but he’s not that sort of hippy. He’s a guy who threw down with bikers or whatever. He looks like trouble – a retired boxer sort of heavyweight look, and we’ve still got all the scars.

The real gold though? I said in the script that stuff could be floating neary to show his gravity powers, and Caspar just had a huge floating spliff by him. Instantly, that was it. 100% Heavy, right there.

MacNamee: Your last collab with Winjgard was on Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt (2029). A far more formalist and more directly comparable series to Watchmen. Of course, this will also lead folks to draw comparisons, but this is a very different story, stylistically and narratively. I assume you will embrace – nay, dare I say it, be prepared for – these comparisons? 

Gillen: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a very different book in lots of ways – Peter Cannon was basically a critical essay in the form of a superhero comic, and often written in the mode it was critiquing. This just isn’t that – this is us telling a story. A story with heavy themes, and a story I’m sure people will be writing big essays on – but fundamentally, a story. What I think we’re most expecting is people noting that PC:T arguing we should move past Watchmen, and The Power Fantasy has a lot of Watchmen in the DNA. So what’s that about then?

Were I to defend ourselves  – and I guess I am, as I’m writing this paragraph – I’d say that’d be flattening what PC:T was saying. It was never about Watchmen being bad. It was about a monomanical attempt to repeat Watchmen’s card trick rather than learn its lessons had created firm limitations, and there’s many ways to progress, other texts than Watchmen to take from. What the Power Fantasy takes from Watchmen is things which barely anyone has done – for a start, it’s trying to do a novel with superheroes, with all that intellectual ambition. Watchmen is often talked about through a deconstructionary and formalist filter – but folks don’t talk about how it works as a creature of character. There’s a reason why it sells so much to people who’ve never read comics (and so won’t know the deconstruction bits).

Plus there’s also the other side – we use none of Watchmen’s tricks formally. This isn’t me doing an Alan Moore script. While Caspar and I are really tight and talk constantly, I also am not asking for roughs. We re-draw if it’s off, but Caspar is absolutely exploring what the story can look like. It’s not a writer first project. It’s very much this jamming book, and as I’m taking less of the formalism means I can spend more time on the depth of the timeline and all the novelistic aspects. It’s a book that aspires to be as good as Watchmen, but doesn’t aspire to be as good as Watchmen by being like Watchmen. That’s impossible, for a start. Being really good is in part about showing stuff folks haven’t seen before.

But I say all that, and it’s mainlt me reverse analysing the muse. I found myself with a story I wanted to tell, and this is it. You can’t overthink it. The heart wants what the heart wants.

MacNamee: Lastly, with Etienne’s ethics already challenged by the end of the first issue, what can we expect from the series moving forward?

 Gillen: Trouble. Etienne is our mover, and we follow the fallout, which is significant. No-one’s happy with what’s happened, including Etienne. What are people prepared to do about it?  Also, with a book with 54 years of history, there’s a lot of things moving around in the background. Everyone’s got secrets, and we start to reveal them. The end of issue 2 will upend the book as much as issue 1. And teh same as issue 3. And… well, you get the idea. We love momentum and power.

We want this to be the book they have to get the day of release, read instantly and have it living in their head for the month until the next issue, and ideally re-read a few times. We’re having a lot of fun with this book, and we want the readers to have fun too.

MacNamee: As ever, always a pleasure, and have a great launch week. I smell “sell out success” written all over this one. 

Gillen: Thank you. Rush to the shops and buy it, it’s the ethical thing to do.

The Power Fantasy #1 is out now from Image Comics