Brother Ray “Heavy” Harris is floating around in his airborne fortress. He’s talking with a journalist. She knows that she’s talking to someone with the ability to do great damage to a great many people and possibly destabilize the entire world. She needs to get his story, though. She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into in The Power Fantasy #6. Writer Kieron Gillen continues a deeply engaging dark superhero drama with artist Caspar Wijngaard. Gillen and Wijngaard do a strikingly clever job of rendering a very complicated and intricately-designed world that mirrors contemporary anxieties with brilliant clarity.

They say that Santa Valentina could kill 6 billion people per hour if she really wanted to. Right now she’s just getting dressed. And she’s having a conversation in her head with someone who might be every bit as powerful as she is under the right circumstances. She doesn’t really know what her peers are up to. Magus is talking with someone at the Pentagon. Magus wants followers to amplify his power. He’s working with someone who just might be willing to help him out.

Once again...it’s really apparent that Gillen has done the work on his world. Though the plot is clearly focussed on all of the action in the foreground, there’s little doubting that Gillen has thousands and thousands of words of notes on what’s going on in every single panel of any given issue of the series. It’s a very big world with a hell of a lot going on in it and it all feels so completely clever. There’s a real sharp sense of progression as he moves characters around each other...characters who clearly have a very intimate understanding of each other. They’re gods that only have a fraction of understanding of who their power is capable of destroying.

Wijngaard has a tendency to fill the panel with little details that add quite a bit of characterization around the edges of the central drama. It’s sharp stuff that is well-rendered without feeling unduly cluttered. Gillen’s world delivers superhero drama in a casual, socially approachable way that still manages to be mind-crushingly overwhelming. Wijngaard does a brilliant job of bringing the full visual reality of that to the page without incessantly pounding the meaning of it into the reader.

Alan Moore came-up with a way to classify CIA-sponsored massacres by how many swimming pools would be filled by the blood of the dead. (That was in Brought to Light.) This issue opens with a comparison of various heroes and how many people they could kill per hour. That’s a disturbing little bit of information that really drives home the total horror that Gillen is working with. In Watchmen, Moore considered the possibility of Dr. Manhattan...a human metaphor for a nuclear warhead (among other things.) With The Power Fantasy, Gillen imagines a group of different Dr. Manhattans...which is a disturbingly clever tool for understanding the nuclear threat under which we all still live.

Grade: A+