The Power Fantasy #6-8 (part two)

Issue six of "The Power Fantasy" starts with this informational poster, ostensibly an in-universe document from the Pyramid's training materials. It gives us some interesting context for the story we've been going through.

Power being quantified by "how many people you could probably kill in one hour" is a very blinkered view of the subject, and a very predictable one coming from present-day Jackie Magus' organization. Anyway, by the look of things, Jackie believes that Santa Valentina, Brother Heavy, and Eliza Hellbound are each capable of sterilizing the planet (or even destroying it outright) in under sixty minutes. Brother Heavy's method of doing this would be self-explanatory, with the other two it's less clear. On the bottom end, Deconstructa could kill a couple of hundred million in that time, presumably by way of her kaiju form marching on the two or three closest major cities to it. Etienne Lux's potential bodycount is probably the most speculative of the lot, since nobody knows exactly how many brains he can fry simultaneously. Jackie Magus' own upper-middle-tier bodycount would, going by the text blurb, be accomplished by manipulating hell-portals in a similar manner as he did against the Fairy Queen.

A grim summary, as well as an informative one. Any of these people could conceivably wipe out the rest of humanity. It's just a question of whether it would take them a few weeks, or a few minutes. The relative power-scaling between them is academic in light of this. But, it's important to know this for the politicking that's about to take place.

...

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Brother Heavy and its aftermath, Jackie Magus has managed to bully and scaremonger his way into the United States government, and they're making no secret of it.

In a behind-the-scenes conversation with a Pentagon official, Jackie explains that working in public like this is actually the best way to prevent sabotage by the other superpowers. If it's all aboveboard and in the sunlight, any aggression from them will have to be performed as an attack on the United States rather than just an attack on some shadowy new agency headed by a foreigner.

Jackie also has to answer some questions about the, frankly, piss-poor performance that his magitech gave against Brother Heavy and Ettiene Lux during recent events. And god, it's just a find-replace of certain key words in a bullshit excuse from some tech-broligarch about why their latest shameless grift of taxpayer dollars government contract just shat itself.

"I knowingly gave you defective equipment hoping that you wouldn't actually use it. Since you chose to use it anyway, I guess I'm going to have to help for real now, but in exchange you need to give me a cabinet position. This time it'll work, for realsies, trust me bro."

The main thing Jackie wants out of this arrangement, meanwhile, is recruitment. Specifically, he wants to induct as much of the American armed services as possible into the Pyramid. They'll need to do some vetting, of course. Some occult procedures to make sure Ettiene Lux hasn't planted any sleeper-suggestions in the inductees. A lot of work, but the end result will be that the Pyramid will be more powerful than ever before, even larger than it was at its height before the Second Summer of Love. This time, when an alien fairy goddess shows up, Jackie Magus will have both the will to do what must be done for humanity, and - more importantly - the power to do it unilaterally. He just needs to also be Generalissimo of the entire US military, no big deal.

Anyway, the ball is in the other superpowers' court now that the announcement has been made in front of TV reporters. Lux knows it at least as soon as it happens, if not before. Valentina happened to be watching the news from her orbital abode, so she caught it live. The two of them quickly confer on who should contact the others and how.

Brother Heavy, it turns out, has been inside the informational dead-zone of his gravship's interior for some hours. Talking with his new reporter friend (and secret Ettiene plant) Tonya. And also having sex with her, because there's not much else to do aboard that ship all day and Tonya's investigative journalism career has taught her to adapt to new cultures quickly.

...

I want to take a moment here and comment on how tastefully horny this comic is.

Brother Heavy and Santa Valentina are both hypersexual in their own ways, and the latter is indeed played (and drawn) for titillation in some scenes. Deconstructa and her girlfriend have plenty of onscreen intimate moments. The flashbacks to the Pyramid's early days have a ton of casual sexual banter and flirtation going on in them. The Fairy Queen's short-lived reign over Manchester had a lot of sexual pleasure being advertised, as well as other kinds of pleasure.

The way it's all done, it feels like it's trying to give a nod to the horniness of the Marvel and DC comics it's inspired by. It isn't just more of the same, though, and it isn't a parody or "take that" either. It manages to indulge in all of this stuff without being weird about it. The sexiness never jumps in front of the camera, so to speak. It isn't gratuitous. It never feels inorganic or out of place.

It's not doing anything subversive or elevated with this; it's just being horny correctly for a story where sex isn't a main focus.

...

Anyway, Brother Heavy eventually comes out onto the balcony where Ettiene can reach him, and he finds out about the new Department of Magic and its secretary.

About what you'd expect.

For all the bad blood that Brother Heavy and Ettiene Lux have recently developed, they're on the same page about Jackie aligning himself with a nation state. Let alone an imperial power that's been not-so-silently plotting against them for decades. Seriously, that's two attempts on a superpower's life from the USA so far, compared to (as far as we know) zero from any other country. Then when you add in the shit America tried to pull when they were able to bluff them with a fake superpower a couple decades back, and yeah, this ain't good.

Meanwhile, Valentina flies off to Eliza Hellbound's temple to talk to her about this, reasoning that she's more likely to get a positive response than Ettiene would be. This is one of the stranger (and most interesting) conversations of the comic so far. And also the framing device for the Second Summer of Love flashbacks, as Eliza and Valentina reminisce about the roles they played in it. The way their meeting starts is arguably the weirdest part of it. Remember: Valentina is a literal angel.

To be fair, I'm not sure if Eliza thinks that the "heaven" Eliza was sent from is actually the real Christian heaven, or if she believes that the "hell" she made her pact with is the real Christian hell. If not, she might simply think that Valentina and her master are just powerful, benevolent aliens, so expecting them to confess before the true God is reasonable.

What's less reasonable is that Eliza herself thinks she has any kind of priestly status that would let her make such demands. Once again, Eliza is defined by genuine religious faith mixed with bottomless ego and self-centeredness.

Apparently, Valentina has had to do this every time she's gone to talk to Eliza. Eliza claims that reflecting on the same past sins over and over again - despite Valentina's insistence that this isn't healthy for anyone - is necessary to measure personal growth. The sins don't change over time, but ones' feelings about them do. She pulls out a lot of philosophical mumbo-jumbo to justify her obsession. However, it's hard to shake the impression that the real purpose of this stupid ritual is just to rub it in Valentina's face that, well…

I wonder if this is why Eliza is more receptive to Valentina than she is to Ettiene or Brother Heavy. Valentina is the one who she can hold this over and martyr at. So she's the one she most enjoys dealing with. Eliza confesses for her sins of pride and ego every day, but she never seems to do anything about them. The temple of penance she inhabits is really just a temple of herself.

...

Yeah, okay, she might have sentenced herself to a fate worse than death to save the world, but Eliza is absolutely THE most insufferable superpower to be around. Worse than Jackie at his cringiest.

...

Even after all that bullshit, Valentina isn't able to get a straight answer out of Eliza about whether she'll stand with them against Jackie. She just says she'll keep up to date on current events and follow her own conscience. Great. When Valentina leaves, we also get, um, this.

Now, you might be asking yourself "What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?" And, the end of issue 8 answers that question. I'll get to it in a bit. But first, on a lighter note, Jackie Magus is also making his own superpower outreach attempts. And this sequence is just a straight up comedy of errors.

Beginning with Jackie's attempt to soothe Deconstructa's hurt feelings over some disruption his antics indirectly caused to a recent art event of hers.

Followed by a video call he manages to work out with her, that goes like, well, this:

It's a much-needed mood lightener, coming alongside the Second Summer of Love loredump.

Also, this bit kinda forced me to like Brother Heavy a little, despite myself. Heh.

Speaking of Brother Heavy, he explains his own position vis a vis his son to Tonya. He has a pretty astute sense of what Kid Ignition's existence as a superpower means in terms of the nuclear politics analogue. With one faction in possession of two superpowers, they now have uniquely extensive second strike capabilities. If, for instance, the laser-satellite had been successful in killing Brother Heavy a few issues ago, a Kid Ignition who's come into his full power would then have been able to wipe out the USA (or bargain with Ettiene for a more controlled revenge) in his father's place.

Of course, mutually assured destruction only works if everyone is aware of what everyone else can do. Which is why Brother Heavy is planning to make the existence of Kid Ignition public knowledge in a few months' time, as his powers seem to be accelerating very rapidly. He just needs to keep him a secret a little bit longer, to make sure Ettiene or Jackie or someone doesn't try to nip this in the bud and make it look like a natural medical condition.

Pretty astute reasoning on Brother Heavy's part. Unfortunately, it's not been great for his son's quality of life.

He's never left the inner decks of the airship. Never even seen the sky that they're flying through with his own eyes, let alone the ground below. He's totally unaccustomed to the world he's destined to have a determining role in, having known nothing but artificial chambers and mutant hippies from the day he was born.

Yeah, this is not going to end well for anyone.

This section of the story ends with Tonya getting the information out to Ettiene, and the later secretly finding out about Kid Ignition several months before anyone else. Ettiene's response remains to be seen. But, speaking of things that he knows and nobody else does, the final pages of issue eight answer the question of what Eliza was talking about when she said she was closer to God than the possibly-literal angel.

She might have more raw power than Valentina, but Eliza's powerset apparently doesn't come with quite the psi-immunity that Val's does. It's unclear how vulnerable she is, exactly. Or if Lux has told Valentina about Eliza's conversations with "God." What we do know is that, back in the wake of the Fairy Queen's defeat, Jackie Magus told Ettiene that if Eliza ever lost her faith and accepted that she really will suffer in hell for all eternity, there's no telling what she might end up doing with her new power. So, Ettiene has been acting accordingly.

Ettiene has also been doing various psychic manipulations of the people around Deconstructa to keep her from going off.

And he was presumably doing the same thing to Brother Heavy, before the latter made his ersatz Brotherhood of Mutants psi-proof inside his gravship.

Ettiene Lux has been making the world awfully dependent on himself, is what I'm saying. Ethically or not, it's what his actions have amounted to. The only question is how much of it Valentina knows about.


The consequences of Lux learning about Kid Ignition are yet to come. The nonlinear nature of the storytelling makes it hard to tell when the timeline will actually advance. For now though, this was already a lot.

"What power does to a motherfucker: the comic." Not just in the sense of power corrupting. But just having to live in the environment created by the state of oneself having power.

Apart from the thematics, a lot is being done here to set up for later plot developments. Developments that seem likely to be highly metaphysical in nature. The cryptic hints the Fairy Queen gave about her own nature. The questions about what "heaven" and "hell" really are, and how the atomics relate to them.

On that last topic, the common capes being referred to as "atomics" is starting to seem more and more apropos. It didn't escape my notice that the Queen's initial manifestation in England was announced by an intense radiation spike. There's clearly something that links nuclear decay with the appearance of magic in the world, and the causation appears to run in both directions. Hmmmmm.

Lots of backstory filled in by these issues. I really, REALLY want to know what happens next.