The Power Fantasy #7: Love Spreads

For anyone who wondered how long it would take for The Power Fantasy’s writer Kieron Gillen to make an extended reference to the music scene in the North of England in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, the answer is seven issues. The Power Fantasy #7 specifically focuses on the Second Summer of Love in 1989, a time that saw the surging popularity of acid house music, psychedelia, and illegal MDMA-fueled raves across the UK. In Manchester, where the issue is set, it’s also a time associated with the “Madchester” music movement, when bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays fused the sounds of the Second Summer of Love with indie rock. And in The Power Fantasy, it’s also when the world almost ended. 

During the Second Summer of Love, there was reportedly a decrease in football hooliganism because the people who would normally have been rioting after matches were instead listening to music, clubbing, and getting high. As with all things, The Power Fantasy reimagines this historical moment in its most extreme form. The Power Fantasy’s seventh installment introduces a mysterious figure called The Queen. Altering the mindsets of everyone around her and bathing the world in lurid rainbow, the Queen wants just one thing: to make everyone everywhere blissfully happy. A counterweight to kaiju-controlling Masumi’s self-absorbed depressive nihilism, the Queen’s drug-trip Utopianism seems in its own way equally dangerous. Caspar Wijngaard’s artwork is suitably psychedelic, blending trippy rainbow visuals and horror elements in a way evocative of Marcio Takara and Arif Prianto’s recent work on Poison Ivy. 

The extended flashback to the summer of ‘89 is told from two perspectives. One is that of Isabella, bringing her amnesiac girlfriend Masumi up to speed. The other is the angelic Valentina in a lengthy confession to the demonic Eliza Hellbound outside the angsty Gothic cathedral Eliza calls home. The narration and dialogue are hard-hitting, though the lack of visual distinction between disembodied narrators sometimes makes the volleying fragmented narrative a tad disorienting. The fragmentation is made all the more striking—and easier to follow—by the distinct visual flavor Wijngaard gives each era, whether it’s the psychedelics of 1989 Manchester or the monochromatic pinky blood red palette of the cathedral. The Power Fantasy #7 also contains some of the series’ most captivating splash pages yet, making future rereads all the more rewarding.