The Power Fantasy #5

Recap
Last issue, Etienne made it to Masumi's art exhibition (while on the run from the police) and saved Tokyo from potential annihilation-by-kaiju by telepathically controlling an art critic. And now, a new face comes into focus: Jackie Magus.
Review
As the old saying goes, opinions are like arseholes: everybody has one. And The Power Fantasy has a great deal of both. While last month offered a meditation on artistic anxieties via the kaiju-controlling painter Masumi, the newest installment shifts focus once again: to the magician Jackie Magus and the allure of mysticism and MLMs.
Magus has, until now, been hidden behind a Daft Punk/Tron-esque helmet rendering him alluringly unknowable. The Power Fantasy #5 quickly puts a charmingly roguish face to the mysterious magician—an American-hating anarchist-turned-cultist Londoner and self-described Total Arsehole. A diagram early on lays out The Pyramid’s cult hierarchy: Initiates at the bottom, followed by Ascended Initiates, Lower Initiates of the Greater Third, Higher Initiates of the Greater Third, Arseholes, Fucking Arseholes, and Jackie himself, the Total Arsehole, at the top. The cult’s name and the fact that their base is a massive pyramidal superweapon also make it more than clear that The Pyramid is a pyramid scheme before anyone spells it out.
The Total Arsehole, beyond Jackie, is a recurring archetype in Kieron Gillen’s body of work, a man (usually) whose profound prickishness and misogyny rises above that of his peers, even when they themselves often prove to be Arseholes of lesser degrees. Jackie shares the most resemblance to the similarly masked Woden of The Wicked + The Divine, a reincarnated Norse god, music producer, and generally insufferable sort who hides in a faceless Daft Punk-style helmet. And like Phonogram’s music reviewer protagonist David Kohl (a self-parody of a younger Gillen) who calls himself a cock on page two, Total Arsehole a designation worn with pride. One only hopes that like the rest of his ilk, Jackie gets his comeuppance.
As a new face and voice come into focus, and with it visions of a horrible potential future, artist Caspar Wijngaard reflects it in his work. While Masumi’s spotlight issue was crammed with massive expressionist canvases jostling for space, The Power Fantasy #5 turns to punk. Flashbacks to Jackie’s past read like a grungy ode to recycled paper zines and Jamie Reid. While Jackie is more tech bro than techno, his roots in 1990s Brixton and accompanying punk visuals nonetheless reflect a recurring sentiment in Gillen’s work about the singularly magical alchemy of the British music scene in the ‘90s. And Jackie is a sellout, as punk bands are often said to be. He is a figure of capitalist hegemony clad in alternative aesthetics. These aesthetics are effectively contrasted by the consistently punchy pop art-esque palette of the present. The alternate reality The Power Fantasy envisions may be sickening, but it’s drop-dead gorgeous too.
Final Thoughts
Reading The Power Fantasy #5, one is struck by the sense that it could only have been made by this creative team. In a comics landscape saturated by superhero subversions and deconstructions, The Power Fantasy remains refreshingly unique.
The Power Fantasy #5: The A***hole Behind the Mask
- Writing - 10/1010/10
- Storyline - 10/1010/10
- Art - 10/1010/10
- Color - 10/1010/10
- Cover Art - 9/109/10