Another week, another major release by a beloved author. It does feel like we’re getting more and more new series that feel essential to the medium as art and writing are in a near constant fight against the encroachment of computer generated slop. But then that’s what makes these series feel all the more special as audiences can see just what human hands are capable of making without using more power and water than a small country. Ironic considering the characters in Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, and Clayton Cowles’s new series, The Power Fantasy, can decimate a small country with barely a thought.

A person with power is nothing new. A person with a superpower is. And those six people individually have the power of a country’s nuclear arsenal. Since the 40s, these people have existed and bent the world around them as they walked. But at no point has any of them gone so far as to use their powers to their fullest extent. All of them know the consequences of that. Etienne Lux ruminates on the potential to wipe the minds of millions to achieve a kind of world peace in 1966—an extreme to prevent nuclear disaster. But the angel Valentina quashes that plan. There’s an ethical balance that Lux is looking to achieve with their powers. He has grand ideas on how to make the world a more stable place with so many earth-ending people in it. When we see him again in 1999, he’s still looking to keep that balance.

But a world with six people who each have their own brand of nuclear capabilities makes for a world where our leaders are even more paranoid than during the Cold War. A nuclear superpower has fail safes and lines of communication and the implicit understanding that a single launch will mean the end of the world should they push the button. But we’re now dealing with people who have none of that. They’re people. They’re impulsive, vain, and retaliatory. They retaliate to one mortal wound with the death of the president, most of his cabinet, and all of their families. The core of the book is the ethical quandary that Lux brings up in the first few pages of this first issue—that the existence of people who can destroy the world on a whim is immoral and that their death should be the first step to achieving some kind of peace. And yet, after posing that question, they’re all still alive more than thirty years later.

A book like The Power Fantasy is the kind of thing I’ve been waiting for without realizing it. I’ve been in a reading slump—as evidenced by the articles I’ve written about confronting my piled-up series—and from the first issue this feels like the hook I needed to want to dive into comics again. The considerations taken on every page by Gillen, Wijngaard, and Cowles makes this a series that we’re going to be writing about for the next decade. 

Get excited. Get ethical. 

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.