Comic Book / The Power Fantasy

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The Power Fantasy is a 2024 comic penned by author Kieron Gillen with art by Caspar Wijngaard. The comic is creator-owned and published via Image Comics.

In this Alternate History, the Trinity nuclear test was followed by some people manifesting superhuman abilities. However, most of them only have very minor abilities. The term 'Superpower' later took on a new meaning: a Person of Mass Destruction who can devastate a continent, with powers on a par with a political superpower's nuclear arsenal.

As of 1999, there are six known Superpowers in existence: telepath Etienne Lux, Gravity Master Raymond 'Heavy' Harris, Eliza Hellbound, Morishita Masumi (aka "Deconstructa"), master magician Jacky Magus, and the literal angel Santa Valentina. They're not a team, and they're not all heroes. In fact, the world's safety relies on their disagreements never escalating into open warfare...

The first issue was released on August 7, 2024.

The Power Fantasy provides examples of the following tropes:

• Aliens Are Bastards: Zigzagged. The two known "aliens", the Signal and the "Queen", come from wherever they came and each inflicted (or tried to cause) devastation onto the world of their own volition. However, this stems from either desperation or their own Blue-and-Orange Morality, rather than outright malice.
• Aliens Love Human Food: Santa Valentina, an angel sent by a higher being she calls God, clearly loves the slice of pizza she's eating while talking to Etienne in 1969.
• All for Nothing: Or, perhaps, for worse.
  • Jacky and Eliza go to great lengths in their attempt to assassinate Etienne, believing that doing so will free the other Superpowers to actually grow and not be under his thumb; however, though they successfully avert a continent-killing mind plague being unleashed when the deed is done (assuming it was primed to happen to begin with), not only do the duo alienate all of the other Superpowers, who're disgusted and horrified by seeing it done right in front of them with no probable cause, but Etienne isn't even dead, having been controlling a proxy while his true self stayed underground in New York for the last several decades, and now knows they have designs against him, which leads him to take the otherwise-unwanted step of lobotomizing Heavy's son to maintain the balance of power. As a transparently furious Valentina warns them before leaving, they have no idea what they just set in motion.
  • At the end of Issue #16, Valentina is able to stop Eliza, but the aftershocks of Eliza's death causes millions to die around the world...including Masumi's girlfriend. This causes Masumi to release Deconstructa, who destroys the planet and everyone on it within moments, rendering every sacrifice throughout the story pointless. Valentina tries to undo this by returning to the past against her creator's wishes to try to make everything go a different way by working with Etienne to control the world for the greater good.
• All-Loving Hero: Valentina loves all of mankind without exception, as an "angel" sent to protect them from nuclear hellfire. She doesn't care about politics or creed, only trying to preserve as much of the "miracle" of life as possible. Even after the Nixon administration tries to kill her with a nuclear bomb, she does not attempt to retaliate against it, only declaring that she will still save them all even if they're making it difficult.
• Alternate History: From the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945 onward, the world undergoes some significant shifts. A timeline at the end of the third issue covers some of the key points, but as of issue #4 the most significant is Europe (from Lisbon to Moscow) being completely destroyed by an extradimensional entity in 1989, which the Superpowers failed to prevent.
• Always Someone Better: According to Magus, both he and Eliza are opposites, and due to her source of power, she can shut him down easily as she’s stronger than him. That’s why he’s hoping to either get her onboard or not ‘want to’ dismantle the Pyramid. Meanwhile, the other Superpowers hoping to bring her on their side, making it a race to see who gets to her first.
• Amazonian Beauty: Valentina is built more like a powerlifter than a supermodel, but is presented as being no less attractive than more typically svelte women like Masumi and Eliza. Issue #4 has Masumi note that several people come to her art exhibitions solely to gawp at Valentina.
• America Saves the Day:
  • Mostly subverted. America has repeatedly failed to assassinate the superpowers; two of the three attempts depicted on-screen resulted in the president who ordered them dying as well. They touted The Major as a loyal superpower, but once it was revealed that he wasn't as strong as they claimed, Heavy instantly killed him, removing the only leverage America really had. The Second Summer of Love was stopped by Eliza, Magus and the Pyramid, not by conventional weaponry. Magus spells it out to the President in Issue 5 directly: everyone knows that America is powerless to defend its people against any of the superpowers or an equivalent threat, including the American people. Which is why Magus joins and, as he puts it, make the 21st century American again, seeing it as the best option for everybody.
  • Played straighter in Issue 15, when the Pyramid, which mostly consists of American soldiers by this point, pulls an Anti-Mutiny to help Valentina save the world when Magus/Dev refuses to fight Eliza after she goes mad. Though Dev is also American, and contributed a lot to the situation to begin with.
• Apocalypse How:
  • The premise of the story is that the six Superpowers each have powers equivalent to the nuclear arsenal of a major world power, and if they come in conflict with each other, it may end the world. The Pyramid estimates their power via "megadeaths" (or 1 million deaths) an hour; the "weakest" Superpower can "only" do 250 megadeaths an hour, and the most dangerous Superpower can kill every one on Earth in the same amount of time.
  • Etienne can "only" kill everything with a conscious mind, which would be a Class Four apocalypse. He threatens a continent-killing contingency should he be killed by the others. When he does get killed, he chooses not to trigger the contingency, as it violates his ethics.
  • Valentina, Deconstructa, and (presumably) Magus can destroy all life on the planet, which is Class Six. In issue 16, Deconstructa does precisely that.
  • Heavy and Kid Ignition can crush or detonate the entire planet, which is Class X. Heavy threatens to do so when he thinks Magus put his son in a coma before he is stopped by Valentina.
  • Eliza and the Queen can open a portal to hell, causing all of reality to collapse. This is an omniversal metaphysical annihilation, or Class Z. Both attempt to do so and are stopped just in time.
• Arc Words:
  • "Ethical", mostly coming from Etienne, but it's also a word that roughly describes the themes of the story. What is the ethical thing to do?
  • "I am me, you are you" and variations repeat often, usually to highlight how the Superpowers have very different views and how even though they share the status of the most powerful people alive, they aren't any less lonely in their ways.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Masumi gives Etienne one in issue 13 after he suggests his "perfectly peaceful" plan to use his telepathy to eliminate humanity's potential for evil and "leave everyone a lot happier". He concedes that he does not know what makes people happier, and offers the others a chance to debate him, which for Etienne is saying a lot.
  Masumi: What makes you so sure you know what makes people happier, Etienne?
• Armor-Piercing Response: Tonya gives Heavy one in Issue 2 as they argue about his response to the assassination attempt in Issue 1:
  Heavy: They knew the cost and rolled the dice. The shot at me was a step towards genocide of the whole Family. Including you. You're welcome.
  Tonya: Texas is a red state, yeah, but it's got Atomics there. Dead. You're welcome. Poor people. Black people, too... and you'd have had to kill them all as a result of your egotistical, fly-by bullshit.
  [Heavy pauses]
  Heavy: It was a mistake. I didn't believe Etienne when he said they were so scared. I didn't expect that. I'm pushing fifty. I'm not just that guy anymore.
• Assassin Outclassin':
  • Heavy has survived numerous attempts on his life, stitching himself back together with his powers before inevitably destroying whoever tried to kill him. The main conflict of the first issue involves Etienne trying to mitigate the fallout from the latest of these attempts, namely a Kill Sat controlled by the U.S. government.
  • Valentina pulled an unintentional one after Nixon's government attempted to kill her with a hidden atomic bomb, wiping out thousands of innocents in the process but merely leaving Valentina herself upset and burning with radiation. She walks right into the Oval Office (more specifically, the wall behind the Resolute Desk melts to allow her entrance), and while Valentina's giving a stern lecture to Nixon and his aides, they're being given acute radiation poisoning that results in some painful deaths within a couple weeks. For her part, Valentina regrets losing her temper and not thinking clearly in the moment, as deserved a fate as it may have been.
  • In Issue #11, Dev and Eliza assassinate Etienne during a meeting between the Superpowers over where they stand on Heavy's kid. They do this by having the Pyramid secretly convert the entire stadium everyone is meeting in into an anti-psychic cage in order to prevent Etienne from pulling a Taking You with Me on anyone outside the cage. Once the roof of the stadium is closed and the field is up, Dev signals Eliza to teleport in and atomize Etienne. But as it turns out, as revealed in the next issue, the "Etienne" everyone knows and is familiar with is just a braindead body piloted remotely and the real Etienne is a Brain in a Jar hidden far away, rendering all of Dev and Eliza's extensive efforts to kill him completely moot.
• Barrier Maiden: If Masumi dies, or fully gives into her negative emotions, then Deconstructa will manifest, possibly permanently. Heavy is clearly scared and disturbed by the scenario. After Isabella dies, Deconstructa manifests from Masumi's despair and makes it abundantly clear why it was so crucial for Masumi to keep her emotions in check as it wipes out the planet in Issue #16.
• Batman Gambit: Issue 10 reveals that while Etienne did not mind control Tonya to sleep with Heavy, he didn't have to, because he knew that Tonya was just Heavy's type.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: As noted by the man himself, Jacky Magus is an anarchist who became the leader of an authoritarian secret society and cult policing and controlling the use of magic around the world. He hates what he's become but sees no better way of saving the world.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Valentina is the only one Etienne trusts with the knowledge of his true form and its location because she shed sympathetic tears when he first showed it to her during their pivotal conversation in issue #1, something he's always appreciated from her since pretty much anyone else would be freaked the hell out by it.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Valentina is a sweet, compassionate angel and an All-Loving Hero sent down to Earth by a higher being to prevent mankind from blowing itself to pieces. But she can also be ruthless in her duties and is fully prepared to kill Etienne, her first and best friend, if it means protecting humanity from him.
• Beware the Superman: Although other people have minor superhuman abilities, for someone to be called a 'Superpower', their power must equal a nuclear arsenal. In the first issue Etienne directly states that the world would be better if they didn't exist at all, but as the first two superpowers (Valentina and Etienne) are benevolent, he fears that if they died there would be nobody to counter a future, less ethical individual with similar power. By 1999 there are six known superpowers and the world depends on a fragile peace between them. It's implied that incidents in the past have caused large numbers of deaths when their powers were used.
• Bittersweet Ending: Issue #16 ends with the world saved through the efforts of Valentina and Heavy, with the Pyramid locking up Eliza, who is now damned to Hell while the world is saved but with many still dying. Then Masumi awakens and discovers Isabella is dead... Leading to Deconstructa manifesting and in despair destroys the planet. Valentina, seeing all of this, is then told to return to Heaven but refuses and instead decides to disobey orders to go back in time and see if she can make a better choice now. She returns to where Etienne first proposed to rule the world and she fully agrees, as the two set off to hopefully make the world a better place and ensure all survive and are happy. The post-issue author's notes makes it clear that this is the start of the second half.
• Black Dude Dies First: Etienne Lux, the only Black member of the first six Superpowers, is the first to be taken off the board by Heavy in Issue #13.
• Blinded by the Light: According to Heavy, thanks to the unique Singularity that powers Haven, Etienne is prevented from scanning people for information and identification. And while he could still kill people, he’d be doing it blindly.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The entity known as 'The Queen' came to Earth seeking to make a paradise for everyone. Why she did this was unknown, but when she realised that she'd hit a limit as to how good things could be, her reaction was to start tearing reality apart.
• Body Horror: A flashback reveals that Etienne's original body was a downplayed example, possessing a noticeably enlarged cranium. By the present day, his "body" now resembles something akin to a massive tumor due his continual brain growth, nearly five tons of immobile flesh that floats inside a large tank.
• Bond One-Liner: In 1981, Heavy compresses the Major to a small ball of flesh, instantly killing him. The remains get kicked off Valentina's porch with a "that's for the last three years of Vietnam" quip. Magus directly calls it out, saying how American it is to kill with a one-liner.
• Bookends:
  • Issue 12 begins with a flashback to Etienne as a baby, with the doctors noting that he's alive, but unresponsive. The same issue ends with Kid Ignition being put into a coma, with Tonya saying he's alive, but unresponsive.
  • The first page of issue 1 is Valentina and Etienne in 1966's New York, with the latter having just explained to the former why they should Take Over the World. The last page of issue 16 is the exact same scene, only with Valentina—who just traveled back in time—proposing it instead, to Etienne's delight.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good:
  • Etienne has repeatedly made small changes to Isabella's mind to help smooth and sustain her relationship with Masumi, conscious that Masumi's depression can manifest her power. Importantly, this was at least partly at Isabella's request, although also covered by Laser-Guided Amnesia afterwards.
  • When Masumi realizes that an art critic has positively reviewed her latest work without ever seeing it, Etienne discreetly changes the critic's mind to provide a plausible truth that will appease Masumi, a claim that Masumi's work is powerful, but will never outweigh Masumi's deeds and the fear of potential for disaster ("your work could never be worth what you cost"). She actually thinks Masumi's only mediocre.
  • This turns out to be Etienne's ultimate endgame. Due to his firm belief that Humans Are Bastards, he wants to use his evolving telepathic powers to eliminate humanity's ability to commit evil against one another at the cost of essentially eliminating mankind's free will.
• Breaking the Fellowship: Etienne, Valentina, Heavy and Jacky used to be on very good terms. After the Second Summer of Love, they fell apart, with Jacky in particular distancing himself from the others. Because Jacky died in the Second Summer, and his replacement was both wary of the others finding out that he wasn't the real thing and not inclined to play ball, especially since he didn't have Jacky's power.
• Brick Joke: In issue 5, during their time in the Pyramid, Eliza's husband Dev makes a joke while imitating Magus' voice about "taking [Eliza] up the shitter." In issue 8, before Dev is transported to the hole in Hell during the Second Summer of Love, he and Eliza embrace each other and she says they should've tried anal.
• Broken Ace: To a degree, many of the six Superpowers have problems in spite of their vast power, ranging from Etienne, who Heavy claims is slowly becoming more distant, through Heavy feeling like he has nothing without his family, to Masumi and her very big issues with her alter-ego. Not even Magus and Eliza can escape their own problems. Valentina is relatively the most stable, though she has few friends she can confide in.
• Captain Patriotic: In 1971, the United States announced The Major, an Atomic soldier who they claimed was of Superpower level. In 1981 Magus reveals that he's not as invulnerable as he seems, at which point Heavy crushes him into a ball of compressed flesh before he can retaliate.
• Cataclysm Backstory: Perhaps the single most important event in the history of the setting is the "Second Summer of Love" in 1989, in which an alien named the Queen arrived on Earth, claiming to make it heaven before going insane and nearly taking down the entirety of reality. It is considered the Superpowers' greatest failure as before the Queen was stopped by Eliza Hellbound, who made her debut as a Superpower by selling her soul to Hell, she claimed the lives of nearly every member of the Pyramid including Jacky Magus, whom a fellow acolyte has been impersonating since as well as the entirety of Europe, setting up the status quo that continued to 1999.
• Cast from Hit Points: In 1989, there were 250,000 Pyramid members. Jacky "fried them all" to fuel an attempt to save people and minimise the Queen's damage. In the aftermath he tells Eliza that rebuilding the Pyramid will be almost impossible if new members are aware this may happen again.
• Christianity Is Catholic: Averted. Valentina manages to prevent the Vatican from being destroyed along with the rest of Europe during the Second Summer of Love, setting it down in Ethiopia. It's mentioned that Ethiopian Christians are not Catholic, though the Pope continues to serve his usual role from the new location.
• Closest Thing We Got: The reason why Jacky chose Dev to replace him? Because he was the closest to looking like him and just needed the mask and a slight change in speaking to pull it off.
• Colony Drop: In the third arc, Heavy warns Eliza and Magus that he's nudged a comet's trajectory, pointing it at earth. If anything happens to him, he won't be able to redirect it and the impact will be apocalyptic.
• Connected All Along: Issue #5 reveals that Magus and Eliza knew each other during Magus' days as a cult leader before the Second Summer of Love. Eliza was a member of the Pyramid who reached a high rank, but not the highest; she eventually managed to sell her soul after getting information from her higher-ranked husband. Magus makes it clear he doesn't like that, but blames himself for it rather than her.
• Cop Killer: In Issue 2, Tonya and Etienne talk about how there's been a lot of cops who carried out acts of police brutality who later had strokes. Etienne points out that this could be entirely natural, but admits that nearly all of the Superpowers (except Masumi) could be responsible, without actually denying it himself. A line in Issue #10 reveals that Etienne did it at Heavy's request.
• Covered with Scars: By 1999, Heavy has a patchwork of scars on his face and torso. He's clearly very hard to kill, but attempts have left their mark.
• Crapsack World: The world is, essentially, under the thumb of six absurdly powerful superhumans, each of which has the power to destroy continents casually, kept only in check by each other and the fact that any open conflict between them will destroy the entire world. Even despite this system of balance, the world is at the brink of nuclear war and there are threats beyond even them that can render their efforts worthless, like a reality-warping alien whose defeat cost the entirety of Europe.
• Crazy-Prepared: In issue #4, Etienne Lux is confronted by Tony Herbert, an American soldier piloting a suit of psychically-shielded powered armor. Herbert's family is already in a Magus-shielded vault when they meet, and Herbert himself has been screened for telepathic tampering. Etienne promptly names Herbert's children and claims that he's already put a telepathic trigger in the families of all likely candidates for the suit: if they're isolated from telepathic contact with him for too long, they'll chew through their own wrists. Herbert backs down. This is subverted in a later issue though. The threat was real, but since the “Etienne Lux” in danger was a puppet body, the real Lux was simply describing his next actions. No prior trigger required.
• Credits Gag: The back cover of each issue is a black page entirely covered in credits and copyright statements, repeated in a dozen different languages. Buried in the middle of all this is some more whimsical text, which changes every issue.
  The Power Fantasy can't believe Rian has talked it into this, as it means it'll have to write something here every issue, and The Power Fantasy needs to sleep. The Power Fantasy loves you.
• Cult:
  • Heavy is the leader of one called 'The Family', who live in his floating city, Haven. It's entirely made of Atomics, and they freely admit that it's a sex cult.
  • Jacky Magus readily admits that the Pyramid is a cult, but insists that it's not a sex cult and he wants his members to call him out if he starts getting egotistical.
• Darkest Hour: Issue #15 is by far the most harrowing issue, where everything set up in the previous issues comes tumbling down. Dev tells Eliza that she can save herself by collapsing reality, which she resolves to do. Dev is gunned down by the Pyramid, who refuse to help him enable Eliza. Heavy sacrifices himself by going into space so that he can kill her, knowing that Eliza will immediately retaliate, and minimize the damage. Even then, Valentina will likely have to drag Eliza down into hell before the Pyramid seals the hole she made. The issue ends with three Superpowers seemingly dead and the world facing an extremely uncertain future as it's engulfed in Hell's red light.
• Dead All Along: Magus has been dead since 1989. In reality the Magus we have seen is Dev, Eliza's husband.
• Deal with the Devil: Eliza sold her soul in 1989, becoming one of the Superpowers as a result. She attained extreme power as a result — enough to defeat the Queen, at the cost of annihilating Europe — though Jacky Magus insists that the unthinkable eternity of torture that awaits her is too high a price to pay for any result.
• Deconstruction:
  • Of the concept of flashy, wide-scale Superpower battles. The central conceit of this series is that the Superpowers are SO powerful any fight between two of them risks the destruction of the world as collateral damage, meaning that even the most principled Superpowers will resort to committing horrendous actions to avoid direct conflict.
  • After many years of fan criticisms of the Krakoan age of mutants as being a lawless "sex cult", Gillen's follow-up is a project in which characters based on Magneto and mutants are living in a self-described sex cult:
    Heavy: People treat us like us a sex cult, when we’re a revolutionary movement. And a sex cult.
  • Of the Necessarily Evil that keeps the status quo in check. To ensure the world doesn't blow up from fighting, certain characters, especially Etienne, cause many discreet deaths all over the world. However, in doing so, this has caused humanity to become fearful and commit to paranoia actions to attack the Superpowers despite how bad the idea this is. And while Etienne isn't wrong that his acts have ensured the governments can't just push the nuclear option, his attempt to brainwash the planet and the fact that he's neutered or outright killed potential Superpowers has Heavy decide to launch his true body in space. This now gives the remaining Superpowers a chance to see if they can make the world better without Etienne's interference, but with no guarantee either that their choices will be better or worse.Unfortunately, it doesn't end well...
  • Of a normal person gaining immense power. Many different series, such as comics, manga, and anime, will have an ordinary person gain massive power and will usually have them perhaps do good things (or bad) to showcase their might which readers can insert themselves as. The concept of the series makes clear that an ordinary person having the power to destroy an entire city and beyond isn't a good thing because humanity as a species are flawed. At random, someone could become a Superpower with no guarantee that they're a good person. Etienne mentions how one like the Devil tried taking over the world and could have done it, while the core Superpowers themselves, despite wanting to bring good, can and have caused massive numbers of deaths because they themselves are normal humans (mostly) who make mistakes, which makes it very difficult for other normal people to emphasize with them. Masumi, who winds up destroying humanity, is a basically normal person who couldn't control her power and was overwhelmed by grief.
• Demonic Possession: Santa Valentina is an "angel" sent down by a higher being to protect mankind from itself following the development of nuclear weaponry. She possessed the body of a human girl who was born in São Paulo, Brazil. She does not identify as human, but clearly has human-like interests in food, music, and dance.
• Destructive Romance: Masumi genuinely loves her girlfriend Isabella, who met her shortly before the Second Summer of Love. But Masumi's depression, the risk of Masumi going berserk if she gets too agitated, and the weariness that comes with keeping Masumi's High Hopes, Zero Talent work as an artist from her clearly take a toll on Isabella, who grimaces when she sees Masumi asleep in her studio. Etienne periodically makes small adjustments to Isabella's mind to help sustain their relationship and prevent Masumi from sinking even deeper into depression. While this is partially at Isabella's request, Etienne covers his tracks by subjecting her to Laser-Guided Amnesia to prevent anyone from learning about this.
• Devil, but No God: Heaven exists; Valentina came from there, though she doesn't remember what it's like. Hell also exists; Eliza became a Superpower by selling her soul, gaining the powers of hell. Eliza is a devout Christian and believes she can be saved, even getting assurance from God Himself, unlike Valentina, which Eliza takes great pride in. Jacky states, however, that hell is not the biblical version, but a dimension outside of time. Only those who sell their soul go to hell and Eliza's is eternally damned; when she dies, her consciousness will join her soul to be tortured for eternity no matter what. The "God" that Eliza speaks to is Etienne, who pretends to be God out of fear of what Eliza will do if she learns the truth. Though Issue #16 reveals there is a God, but is very neutral in how things play out.
• Didn't See That Coming: The idea that Magus would join America fully, aired live at that, shocks Etienne, Valentina, and Heavy utterly and they quickly contact one another to see what they should do.
• Didn't Think This Through: When the Signal first came to Earth, it was actually already dying. According to Magus, while their plan wasn't all that bad, they screwed up the execution, which wasn't helped by that whatever extinction their home world met, they had no choice but to turn themselves into a Mind Hive and launch themselves into the void of space with only the hope they'd find another world, but slowly disintegrating all the while. Their only chance, as Etienne realized, was taking over the bodies of humans, which they tried doing at some point after contact, forcing Jacky to kill them.
• Downer Ending:
  • The eighth issue makes clear that despite Eliza’s sacrifice, there is no saving her from Hell. The most the others can do is keep quiet with Etienne pretending to be the voice of God for Eliza so she doesn’t crack from realizing there is no salvation for her.
  • Issue #16 ends with the world being destroyed regardless, as while Eliza was stopped, Masumi replaced her by becoming Deconstructa in her despair that Isabella died with Valentina unable to do anything. However, refusing this end, Valentina goes back in time to avert this trope and hopefully make things better.
• Dramatic Irony: Despite tapping into the powers of Hell, Eliza is a devoutly Christian woman who is constantly trying to atone for her sins. Her faith is so great that she believes she's closer to God than Valentina, a literal angel sent down to protect humanity. Unbeknownst to Eliza, the voice of God she's been hearing during her prayers is actually Etienne penetrating her mind to keep her hope of salvation through faith alive, a fact that Valentina is aware of but keeps quiet about to avoid escalating tensions between them.
• The Dreaded:
  • Each of the Superpowers has the ability to rival an entire nuclear arsenal in terms of destructive capacity. This makes the populace terrified of them, as any disagreements between them could escalate into a war that will result in the deaths of millions. In the first issue alone, Etienne assassinates the American president and everyone who helped in the assassination attempt on Heavy with almost contemptuous ease in order to appease Heavy, who was ready to throw Texas into space. The fact that Etienne has to psychically contact the rest of the Superpowers and make sure they wouldn't pull the trigger too makes it clear that this was the least destructive outcome possible.
  • In particular, Deconstructa seems to be this to the rest of the Superpowers, as it was only rendered dormant in 1982 by Etienne just barely managing to reach Masumi through it — when their squabbling at Masumi's art show puts the Kaiju at risk of surfacing by upsetting Masumi (who's already having a not-great day), Etienne, Heavy, and Valentina immediately stop arguing, put their respective egos and agendas aside, and attempt to placate her before her mood gets any worse. Considering that Valentina alone is the resident Physical God who walked off a point-blank nuclear blast, that says a lot about what a threat Deconstructa is to them. However, we later learn that their fear is not necessarily because of Masumi's power level — she's actually the least destructive among them, being estimated to "only" be able to kill 250 million people per hour. Rather, when Masumi's mental health deteriorates to the point that she lets Deconstructa out, she's no longer able to be talked down... and unlike the others, she's implied to have no control over her Kaiju form, so she's unable to be less destructive than her full power. The other Superpowers can do damage and use their powers without ratcheting up to their full continent-destroying strength; Masumi cannot. Issue #16 reverts this to deadly straightness when Deconstructa wipes out all of humanity with a single energy blast in the aftermath of Masumi seeing Isabella die and completely losing it. By all accounts, only Etienne could have hoped to rack up that killcount nearly as quickly, and even then he would've needed more time to reach that level of power.
  • Issue 6 starts with the Pyramid's assessment of how many people each of the Superpowers could kill in an hour. The lowest count is Masumi's, with 250 million, and even then they admit that it's a tentative guess.
• Enemy Scan: A rare instance that requires Ability Mixing to work — Jacky's power lets him know every truth in reality when he has sufficient members in his Pyramid, and as an extension of this, he can work through an equation to ascertain the extent of a Superpower or other superhumanly powerful entity's capabilities, after which Valentina uses her divine capabilities to check the math and determine that it's accurate. This is what's allowed the six Superpowers to know where they stand with each other and what they're capable of at full output without causing any damage to each other with an actual test, as well as what throwing Heavy's son Alex into the mix means for the balance of power.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave:
  • Issue #5 has a flashback to just after the Second Summer of Love, where Jacky and Eliza sit in the wake of the destruction and talk about how much they've lost: all 250,000 members of the Pyramid other than them both, and nearly a billion other people besides.
  • Issue #16 sees Valentina being informed directly by God that all of humanity has perished in the wake of Deconstructra's attack, leaving her utterly distraught.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Etienne is prepared to assassinate the U.S. President and everyone else involved in the 1999 attempt to kill Heavy, saying that he offers a scalpel rather than the blunt weapon of Gravity Master Heavy's own revenge (which might annihilate a whole state). He draws a hard line when Heavy tells him to send a warning by killing the families of his attackers, though. If Heavy insists on that to spare Texas, Etienne's going to kill Heavy's own "Family", too. Heavy reluctantly backs down.
  • Having learned that Etienne was performing slight alterations on her girlfriend Isabella's mind to keep their relationship stable, Masumi amicably breaks up with her soon after, noting that their Destructive Romance is deeply unfair on Isabella and how selfish and narcissistic she's been herself. She later hires a man to work as her personal assistant/butler, strictly stating that his job will only be in business hours so that she can create healthier boundaries.
• Evil States of America:
  • America in this setting is defined by increasingly vicious and desperate attempts to recapture their fallen relevance and status as the world's most powerful actor. Heavy, their greatest opposition, is notably also American, but utterly despises America's imperial ambitions. It's suggested that Magus becoming president would actually be an improvement in some senses, presumably because despite Magus' antagonism towards the other superpowers, he wouldn't be regularly attempting to assassinate them with nuclear weapons.
  • In 1969, they attempted to assassinate Valentina with a nuclear bomb while she partied at a festival in New Mexico. Valentina survived (though she was lethally radioactive to everyone around her for a week) and retaliated by paying a personal visit to President Nixon and his staff immediately afterwards, giving them all fatal radiation poisoning.
  • In 1971, America deployed their own "Superpower," the Major, and proceeded to employ him in a campaign of brinkmanship against the other Superpowers, forcing them to make concessions and permit actions they would otherwise oppose on moral grounds. After a decade of this, the Major's demand that he be allowed a free hand to crush the Iranian Revolution finally pushed Magus too far, and he revealed the Major's vulnerability to Heavy who instantly killed him. In the aftermath, it's stated that America grew increasingly fearful and paranoid at the realization that they truly had no defense against the Superpowers.
  • In 1999, America attempts to assassinate Heavy using an orbital laser provided under the table by Magus. This predictably fails, and Heavy is only talked down from retaliating by murdering an entire US state by Etienne's counteroffer of decapitating the federal government.
  • As soon as Etienne is believed dead, the latest president puts in motion a plan to nuke Haven before Valentina can react, over the objections of Magus.
• Exact Words: Heavy briefly met an Atomic clairvoyant who told him that his child would be a Superpower. She never said that his child would wind up doing anything with the power he had...
• Excellent Judge of Character: According to Etienne, Valentina's "omniscient brown eyes" can see everything about a person if she chooses to look into them. While confronting him over his plans to Take Over the World, he tells her to look into all he is. This cools her anger enough to hug him out of sympathy for his situation as a gigantic brain in a jar while learning of all of his plans and safeguards. She then agrees to his second plan to preserve constant neutrality between the six people with Superpowers.
• Expy:
  • Etienne and Heavy are expies of Charles Xavier and Magneto, two champions of the Atomic Family, a subset of the superhuman population. Like Xavier, Etienne is an incredibly powerful telepath who styles himself as a major force for good; and like Magneto, Heavy (who controls gravity rather than magnetism) is the leader of a group of superpowered people who is fully prepared to kill a lot of people to defend his brethren.
  • Jacky Magus has clear influences of John Constantine, as he is a foul-mouthed working class British magician active in the Eighties. Except the current Magus is absolutely not British.
  • Masumi, who becomes a rampaging monster when in the right emotional state, is one for the Hulk.
  • Valentina, as a visitor from another world who showed up as a child, lived with human families, is generally a good person and wants to prevent nuclear war is arguably Superman.
• The Extremist Was Right: While Tonya doesn't state that Etienne was in the absolute right, she believes he was correct in ensuring certain people, including her, didn't become a Superpower, noting how if the wrong person gets such a power, the world could truly be doomed, and even a nice or normal person getting it might not help.
• Facial Horror: In the third arc, when Eliza starts to destroy reality, Heavy manifests a gravitational singularity behind her right eye. This leaves a spherical chunk of her head missing, and the next panel suggests that it's also tearing the flesh from her face. Despite this, she's still conscious and able to retaliate.
• Faked Kidnapping: The second issue sees Tonya arrested for her connection to Etienne, as she was interviewing him shortly before he assassinated the president of the United States and all people involved in the U.S.'s attempt to assassinate Heavy via Kill Sat. Etienne calmly walks into the station, brainwashes everyone in the way before telling Tonya to make it look like she is being controlled, in order to frame it as a kidnapping rather than a rescue mission.
• Fate Worse than Death: As a result of her deal to become a Superpower, Eliza will be tortured in Hell for all eternity. This is literal, as Hell exists outside of time, so part of her is in fact already being tortured. Jacky explicitly says that the Pyramid members he sacrificed got off lightly in comparison to Eliza.
• The First Superheroes: While not "superheroes", the first superpowered beings appeared in 1945: mutants with innate powers who are called "Atomics", and Valentina who is an angel in human form. Most Atomics have very minor abilities. By 1999, three Atomics (Etienne, Heavy, and Deconstructa), as well as Eliza, Jacky, and Valentina (falling into different categories) are considered Superpowers — each is a Person of Mass Destruction.
• Fling a Light into the Future: During the finale of the Second Summer of Love, Jacky decided to create his own Signal and ensured that the many who died in Europe were absorbed and became a new Signal (II) and launched them to space, with some improvements to ensure they didn't die during the travel so they could find another home. This was done under the presumption that the Earth might be lost, so that there was something of humanity to survive and find a new place in the cosmos.
• Floating Continent:
  • Heavy has a moveable floating city, called 'Haven', which is where he and his cult/revolutionary movement live. It's powered by a gravitational singularity.
  • The Pyramid, Jack’s base of operation, floats above the sea.
• Fold-Spindle Mutilation: Once Heavy hears that the Major doesn't have the high level of Super-Toughness that the other Superpowers assumed, he uses his Gravity Master powers to crush him into a sphere of meat and bone, instantly killing him.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the first issue, when contacting Valentina to ensure she doesn't interfere with his plan to appease Heavy, Etienne responds to her disapproval of what he's about to do with "it's nothing you haven't done before." Valentina closes her eyes with annoyance and weariness, and considering that Etienne goes on to kill the U.S. president, this clearly referred to her (accidental) killing of Richard Nixon in the 60s, revealed two issues later.
  • Also in the first issue, Etienne tells and shows Valentina 'who he really is'. What she sees shocks her, breaking her out of her 'avenging angel' mode, and she's instantly incredibly sympathetic. Etienne claims that he tried to be ethical in the circumstances, but Valentina agrees that people would hate him regardless. It turns out in Issue 12 that the 'Etienne' we see is a puppet body, and the real Etienne is a Brain in a Jar who controls the bodies of braindead people to interact with the world.
  • In the flashback in issue 8, Magus is particularly pissed about Etienne's blasé attitude about Eliza damning herself to Hell to stop the Queen. While she was a high-ranking member of the Pyramid, he explicitly did not allow her to move up any higher due to her religious beliefs, which implies that he doesn't have much of his own. While he does explain that "Hell" isn't biblical, his outrage makes more sense when it's revealed in issue 10 that Dev, Eliza's husband, has been impersonating Magus since the Second Summer of Love.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Issue 4 implies that Eliza is the Superpower nobody likes. Heavy, Valentina and Etienne were all invited to Masumi's art show and went; Magus was invited but didn't go, and Masumi seemed genuinely upset that he wasn't there. Eliza is never mentioned by Masumi or the others, which implies that she wasn't even invited.
• From Bad to Worse: Issue 16 opens with the world saved from Eliza with just 30 million deaths— until the sedated Masumi wakes up and realizes that Isabella has been killed. She unleashes Deconstructa in her horrified grief. Valentina can only watch from the moon as the kaiju quickly wipes out humanity... until perhaps most forebodingly of all, she time-travels back to the conversation she had with Etienne at the start of the series, now agreeing to his original plan to take over the world.
• Game Face:
  • Santa Valentina's human appearance is a mask. She gains Prophet Eyes, bleached skin and hair, and a Holy Halo when she's ready to exert her full powers. Her very presence emits strange, rainbow-colored lights and the sight of her in this state reduces Etienne to tears.
  • Masumi's eyes turn almost completely white when she is about to use her powers.
  • Going by Jacky's view of her and Valentina, Eliza's real face is split down the middle, half-human and half-demonic.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: While they do not form a stable group, the main characters of the book are three men (Brother Ray Harris/Heavy, Etienne Lux, and Jacky Magus) and three women (Santa Valentina, Eliza Hellbound, and Morishita Masumi/Deconstructa).
• Glass Cannon: The main thing holding back the Major from being a Superpower is his lack of durability. Jacky says that in a first strike the Major would have a chance against a Superpower, and he has some resistance against Etienne, but once warned Heavy crushes the Major to a pulp without effort.
• Godiva Hair: Valentina attends a music festival topless in 1969, with closeups of her showing that she isn't wearing a bra either. Her nipples are instead covered in her hair, which she let down after previously keeping it tucked back with a hairband.
• God Guise: Depressingly, Etienne pretends to be God in telepathic communications to Eliza. He does this solely to give them hope, as otherwise she will go mad with no prospect of salvation from eternity in Hell.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: As Magus reveals, while Etienne is the only one still growing in power naturally, Magus is the opposite as he can grow deliberately. If more people join the Pyramid, his power grows in turn, which makes it a case of Quantity vs. Quality.
• Good Is Not Dumb: Valentina is an All-Loving Hero who loves all of mankind unconditionally as per her duty as an angel sent from heaven. But she isn't stupid or naive, knowing better than to take Jacky Magus at his word when he tries to sway her to his side against Etienne, and is also able to keep her secrets from Etienne, as the only person whose mind he can't read.
• Good Is Not Soft: Etienne is generally a polite, soft-spoken man and says he genuinely wants the best outcome for everyone. He also believes that life is a right that "should be extended to as many people as possible"; if that means other people have to die, he is prepared to make the calculation and act accordingly. Like killing everyone who was involved in or knew about the attempt to kill Heavy, so Heavy won't launch Texas into space as revenge.
  Etienne: If you have decided someone needs to die, you kill them. Declarations of war are for the Victorians.
• Good Parents: Heavy, despite keeping his son in isolation, does so for protection while ensuring he can be raised as a good kid with his mother and others who are part of the Family. Flashbacks making clear that despite some awkwardness here and there, he’s a decent enough dad to his child.
• Gravity Master: Heavy, "Brother Ray", is an immensely powerful gravity controller. He has a flying city powered by a gravitational singularity, he can implode a Kill Sat with a wave of his hand, and when he threatens to put the entire state of Texas into orbit, he's horribly serious.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The Superpowers have each done their fair share of mass murder or threatened to do so, and the world buckles under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. However, none of them can be described as "evil", even the narcissistic-but-politically-neutral Masumi, and they have humanity's best interests at heart.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Heavy is torn in half by a Kill Sat fired by the U.S. government, leaving just strands of flesh between his legs and torso. He then uses his powers to literally pull himself back together before crushing the satellite with his powers.
• Healing Factor: Heavy has an impressive one: he can heal being torn in two, or a shotgun blast to the chest, within seconds. It's not perfect though, as he's covered in faint scars from attempts on his life, and he's missing a tooth.
• Hell: Like Heaven, Hell also exists. However, according to Magus, it’s not the "biblical" Hell, and is “another can of demons” entirely — though it does still involve eternal torture. Given that eternal really does mean eternal, Dev is adamant that that no price is too high to avoid it.
• Hell on Earth: Inverted. Part of the Queen’s plan during the Second Summer of Love after going mad was not so much as bring Hell on Earth, but have Earth collapse into Hell instead. Not that this is any better and would wipe out reality.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • During the Second Summer of Love, Jacky could have left the Pyramid to close the rift in Hell and gone back to Earth, but he stayed there to make sure it was done right and sent Dev back in his place.
  • In the third arc, after Eliza breaches Hell and begins to collapse reality, Heavy tries to kill her from orbit by opening a singularity inside her skull. Acknowledging that Eliza will have time to retaliate even if it works, Heavy tells Valentina that at least if he's in space, Eliza's attack on him won't kill another continent.
• Hidden Depths: Heavy may be doing his best to give the Atomics a proper place in the world, but in the first issue he comes off as a Knight Templar who's perfectly happy to throw his power around in order to get his way, consequences be damned. However, when Tonya calls him out for endangering the tens of thousands of innocent Atomics and the millions who DIDN'T vote for the president that tried to kill him when he threatened to throw Texas into space, Heavy admits that he simply didn't believe Etienne when the latter warned him that the normal humans were terrified of him until that point, implying that he never thought they would go so far and that his overreaction, which he admits was a "mistake", isn't something he wants to repeat.
• High Hopes, Zero Talent: Masumi is a passionate artist who wants to express the dread she feels in living with Deconstructa through her work. She spends many sleepless nights in her studio and passes out in front of her work while rushing to make the deadline for her art exhibit. She is so fixated on this that even positive reviews will set her off if the critic wasn't actually there to see the work. In truth, the art world sees Masumi's work as mediocre at best, and Etienne has to change critics' minds for the sake of preventing Masumi from going on a rampage as Deconstructa.
• Hollywood Exorcism: As part of Magus’ plans to recruit thousands from the public into the Pyramid, he’ll also perform a purging ritual to ensure Etienne won’t have any sleeper agents in his group.
• Hope Spot: Heavy and Valentina manage to subdue Eliza and send her into Hell. While the aftermath results in "random acts of god" that kill 30 million people, the Pyramid notes that the Second Summer of Love killed many more people and destroyed a continent, saying that they should consider themselves lucky. Then Masumi wakes up to see that Isabella is one of the casualties, which causes her to become Deconstructa on the spot and destroy the entire planet before even Valentina could react.
• Hulking Out: Masumi fades out of reality and manifests Deconstructa when she is too sad or upset. When her general emotional state is agitated (such as when her art exhibition is coming up), the switch happens more readily.
• Humans Are Flawed: The series makes it very clear that while some like Jacky see humans as special, others like Etienne see them as flawed beings. Human nature has caused humanity to commit to horrible deeds that end with people dead or take action towards those like the Superpowers, who aren't necessarily perfect themselves, out of unneeded paranoia. At the same time, humanity just wants a world they can feel safe in, which the Superpowers themselves want as well.
  • Tonya writes an article in Issue 14 that reflects on the terrifying idea of any ordinary person becoming a world-ending Superpower, noting that when she got to know Heavy personally, he frightened her even more as he's such an understandable, normal, flawed man, with power that can kill millions. Consequently, her mixed feelings toward Etienne do not extend toward the neutering he performed on her original power, as she's frankly glad that she's not capable of tearing holes in spacetime on a whim.
• Humans Are Special: This is what Jacky, the original Jacky and not his replacement, Dev, believes in. As he tells Dev before dying, he wants a world of just humans without the Gods, masters, or anything like that because he believes in humans and trusts them, and that humanity just needs time to reach that place one day. Something he entrusted Dev with as he thought similarly.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Etienne, Jacky and Eliza have this viewpoint about their own actions, though how correct they are is debatable.
• I Have Your Wife: In Issue #4, Etienne is confronted by a soldier named Tony Herbert, a Medal of Honor recipient piloting a Jacky Magus-provided Powered Armor that is completely sealed from telepathic attack. Deprived of any means to disable his attacker directly, Etienne claims that he's placed a psychic bomb in the minds of Herbert's children that will go off if they're separated from his telepathic connection for too long. Herbert can either stand down and have his family escorted out of the Magus vault so Etienne can defuse the bomb, or allow his children to chew off their own wrists. Herbert stands down.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Valentina is an angel sent from heaven, making her an All-Loving Hero who will always try to do what's right and preserve as much life as possible. Even after being exposed to the worst of mankind, such as the U.S. government's willingness to sacrifice thousands of people in a failed assassination attempt on her, she refuses to give up on humanity and declares that she will save them all. But as Jacky Magus points out, she descended from a place of perfect bliss that never changes. This makes her stubborn and not used to changing with the times, which can make her slow to act when change inevitably happens. She reaches her breaking point on this after witnessing Deconstructa wipe out all of humanity in an instant and God simply calling her back to Heaven instead of trying to fix what happened, which leads her to break a major rule by traveling back in time and deciding to align herself with Etienne's original plan.
• Insistent Terminology: By 1999, Jacky Magus is right-wing, but when he says that Eliza joined him, she snaps that she is not 'right', she's 'righteous'.
• In Spite of a Nail: The existence of Atomics and the Superpowers have resulted in major geopolitical differences from the real world since World War II, but many historical events remained the same. For example, Ronald Reagan was still president and the Vietnam War still happened. These similarities are justified by the potential harm the Superpowers are capable of forcing them out of major conflicts, while their involvement does result in massive changes, like Valentina ending the Cuban Missile Crisis by wiping out every missile base and silo in an instant. Neon Genesis Evangelion and Star Wars still got made, too. In a darkly amusing aversion, the "Second Summer of Love" still happened, but instead of being a rise of rave culture in the UK, it was a powerful alien going insane and taking all of Europe with her before going down.
• Internal Reveal:
  • In a 1981 flashback, Jacky Magus tells the others that the Major isn't as invulnerable as he seems. Valentina checks the calculations and Heavy promptly kills him. This isn't a reveal for the audience, who already knew how the Major died — but the other superpowers realise that not only can Magus measure power levels, but he's known the Major's weakness for years and, until American foreign policy crossed a line, wasn't sharing it with them.
  • Issue #13 has Valentina reveal Etienne's survival to the other Superpowers. It's also here that other critical secrets that Etienne kept are aired, including him confirming his powers are growing and what his ultimate goal is, that he disabled Alex, revealing to Masumi that he keeps Isabella emotionally stable through psychic editing, that he killed the seer who sent Heavy on his path out of fear of her precognition, that the Devil and Alex aren't the only budding Superpowers Etienne's been neutering at their infancy, and finally the location of his true body, which Heavy launches into space at the end of the issue. However, he and Valentina still keep Eliza's fate and the nature of her "visions" a secret.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Valentina realizes that she cannot afford to live near people after the U.S. government attempted to assassinate her with a hidden nuclear bomb that killed tens of thousands of people in 1969. In the present, she spends her downtime in a house built upon a satellite she constructed from scrap so any attempts on her life can only target her and no one else.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Jacky is easily the most callous and rude of all six Superpowers in any given conversation — and considering this group contains an actual Human-Demon Hybrid, that's saying something — but he's also the first to raise the possibility of the tenuous balance between the six being destabilized due to Etienne growing substantially more powerful in the last 30 years while Valentina and Eliza, at the very least, have remained static.
  Jacky: I know he's your friend, but maybe one day the arsehole will be able to cut through this. Or take over you and Eliza... What would he do with his brain and your brawn? What would he do if he didn't have to worry about you?
• Kill Sat: By 1999, the United States has at least one satellite equipped with a beam weapon. It's precise enough to cut Heavy in half with a shot from orbit without directly injuring anyone nearby. As Heavy is a vengeful Person of Mass Destruction who's very hard to kill, it's also annihilated shortly afterwards. Etienne comments that the satellite's technology seems to come from Jacky Magus, via a plausibly deniable intermediary. Issue 6 reveals that the satellite was never intended to be used, it was just there so the Americans thought they had something they could use against a superpower.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Etienne has repeatedly made small changes to Isabella's mind to help sustain her relationship with Masumi, seemingly at Isabella's own request. Each time, he removes her memory of their conversation and his telepathic influence.
• Loophole Abuse: As lampshaded by the teaser for Issue #11:
  We said this is a comic where fighting was the lose state. We’ve kept that promise. We didn’t say anything about murder.
• Love Martyr: In Issue #15, Dev loves Eliza enough that he'd rather her collapse reality and kill everyone in existence rather than letting her be tortured in Hell for eternity, and he tries to get the Pyramid to back him up. Unfortunately for him, nobody else is on board with that.
• "Magic A" Is "Magic A": Magic exists in the setting; Jacky Magus claims that Santa Valentina's arrival "opened a hole" in Heaven, and in order to ensure that magic doesn't run roughshod across reality, he created the Pyramid as a way to control who knows of and learns magic. He describes it as the opposite of doing the impossible, but instead just the art of the possible, only limited by the natural world. Magus is more powerful the greater the Pyramid's numbers, and his closest acolytes get magic as powerful as some of the strongest Atomics.
• Magical Barefooter: Santa Valentina's civilian clothes peel away when she reveals her Game Face. As a magical being from a higher plane, her angelic form lacks shoes to emphasize her alien nature as an otherworldly being.
• Manchurian Agent: Due to his lack of physical capability, Etienne has many contingencies. One of them is making special agents who will act or report to him at certain times, as Magus comments on. One such example is Tonya, who unknowingly reports about Heavy’s son to him.
• Manipulative Bastard: Etienne is willing to brainwash and manipulate anyone in his pursuit of a better, more ethical world. This is best demonstrated in Issue #4, where it's revealed that he keeps Masumi from going on a rampage by periodically editing her girlfriend Isabella's mind to preserve their Destructive Romance. He also brainwashes an art critic to give Masumi a "glowing" review, lest Masumi go on a depressive rampage when her powers trigger. On the same note, Issue #8 reveals that he regularly masquerades as the voice of God to convince Eliza that there is still hope of salvation for her when Jacky knows that she's doomed to a Fate Worse than Death through the pact she took to save the world.
• Mass Empowering Event: The atomic age brought into existence "Atomics", people with superpowers. Valentina's arrival also "tore a hole" in Heaven, which allowed magic to leak onto Earth, controlled primarily by the the members of the Pyramid.
• Meaningful Background Event:
  • Dialogue and art focus on Etienne's 1966 and 1999 conversations in the first issue, so it's easy to miss what's happening with the normal people passing by. Their eyes go wide and blank for a second when they get close, and then they move on, redirected by Etienne's telepathy.
  • The blip visual effect (similar to a spike on an ECG) which appears when Etienne uses his powers on someone is visible just before the critic Olivia Brown gives Masumi a "flattering" review. It's just less visible than usual due to the color palette and abstract background of the scene.
• Meaningful Name: Let's go down the list, shall we?
  • Santa Valentina: "Santa" means "saint" and "Valentina" means "strong", alluding to her being an incredibly powerful literal angel. "Valentina" is also associated with Valentine's Day, a celebration of love.
  • Etienne Lux: "Lux" is Latin for light, signifying that Etienne is very, very firmly on the "enlightenment" side of Romanticism vs. Enlightenment.
  • Morishita Masumi: "Morishita" means "One who lives beneath the forest" in Japanese. In her art, Masumi depicts her Kaiju personality as being trapped underground or underwater.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: As of the end of issue #15, the three male Superpowers are seemingly dead, whereas the three female ones are still alive (for the moment, in Eliza's case).
• Mercy Kill: According to Eliza, when she killed the Queen, the latter thanked her, suggesting she perhaps didn’t want to tear down reality, understanding what she did was wrong, but couldn’t stop until Eliza killed her.
• Mind Hive: This was what the Signal was. Millions of sentient intelligences merged into one, with Jacky discovering they did it to escape some form of extinction of their long-gone home world. Sadly, they had to die when they attempted to hijack the bodies of those in China to ensure their own existence.
• Moral Dilemma: In the first issue, Etienne argues that it's immoral for anyone to exist with the amount of power that the Superpowers have, and that it might be more ethical to kill them all. However, what if someone did, and then a new Superpower turned up who wanted to kill and hurt people indiscriminately?
• Morality Chain: Isabella is Masumi's — their relationship keeps Masumi happy, which keeps her powers from activating.
• Muggle Born of Mages: According to Heavy, you’re either born an Atomic or you're not, with genetics not being a factor and more of a case of being Randomly Gifted. He also says that Masumi is the only superpower who manifested as a superpower, with Etienne and Heavy starting out small and becoming much stronger over time. It was just pure coincidence that Heavy's son would be a Superpower.
• Muggle–Mage Romance: Masumi, one of the superpowers, is dating Isabella, who appears to have no powers of any kind.
• Multiverse: Discussed and averted. When describing the nature of the universe, both Valentina and Jacky Magus claim that between Heaven and Hell, there is only a single, golden filament on which everyone exists, with almost everyone upon it being unaware of how truly blessed they are to exist. This means there are no alternate branching timelines or What If? scenarios to explore; either the Superpowers maintain the status quo, or they fail and everyone dies. As Issue #16 reveals, however, this does not preclude said timeline being revised by time-travel, though the only person capable of doing that (Valentina) severs her connection to Heaven in the process.
• Mundane Solution: Haven is shielded so that Etienne can't telepathically scan anyone inside, allowing Heavy to keep his son's existence a secret. This is emphasised when Tonya's invited in, as Heavy warns her she won't see the outside world again for a month or two. As telepathic communication isn't an option, she uses her phone to send Etienne text messages.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: The only thing maintaining the fragile status quo between the Superpowers is the knowledge that billions would die if they ever went to war with one another, rendering anything they'd stand to gain from fighting each other moot. Even then, there's always the risk that someone or something might disrupt this balance of power. Jacky Magus is especially worried when he realizes that Etienne's powers are growing stronger and may one day be able to penetrate Valentina's and Eliza's minds. Heavy is also revealed to have a son with potent abilities of his own in Issue #2.
• The Mutiny: In the third arc, Dev can't bring himself to act against Eliza and orders the Pyramid to defend her instead of saving the world. Instead, they remember the original warning about placing blind trust in the Pyramid's leader, gun Dev down, and prepare to sacrifice themselves in Hell.
• The Needs of the Many:
  • Etienne is willing to get his hands dirty if it means protecting as much life as possible. This means manipulating others, even his friends, while bargaining with his fellow Superpowers over who lives and who dies. He's willing to murder the U.S. president and everyone who helped the U.S. launch an assassination attempt on Heavy if it means saving the people of Texas from Heavy's wrath.
    Etienne: Understood. So... what do you want? I'll bloody my hands instead. Surgery instead of annihilation. Tell me.
  • Because of the potential of each of the Superpowers to perform acts of mass destruction, there have been numerous attempts on each of their lives in the name of protecting countries or "normal" people's interests. When Etienne boards a plane in Issue #3, Valentina questions whether the U.S. government would be willing to shoot down a plane full of civilians just to kill him. Etienne reminds her of when the Nixon administration sacrificed thousands of people in a failed attempt to kill her with a nuke in 1969, which leads her to agree to guard his plane as he heads to Tokyo to meet with Masumi.
  • Jacky Magus sacrificed all 250,000 of his followers to deal with the Queen's mess in 1989 and save people. Needless to say, his reputation tanked, with very few joining his group by present. This doesn't stop those who do join from rebelling against Jacky's successor Dev, choosing to sacrifice themselves to save the world from Eliza.
  • This trope is discussed in Issue 8 with regard to Eliza: Etienne initially thinks that one person sacrificing themself to save the rest of the world is the right thing to do, but Magus is furious at this and says that Etienne could torture every person on Earth every day for the rest of their lives and it wouldn't be a scratch on what's waiting for Eliza in Hell.
• Nerves of Steel: Aside from (maybe) Jacky, Etienne is the physically weakest of the six Superpowers and the only one that the rest of the world has come up with a semi-reliable counter to (due to the incredibly wide range of his telepathy) in the form of psi-blockers; if sufficiently powerful ones lie between him and his target(s), Etienne has no other power to fall back on, meaning he instead has to plan for a lot of possibilities and contingencies with implanted psychic suggestions and the like, to say nothing of when he has to negotiate between the five other Superpowers to prevent potential world-ending events like Heavy throwing Texas into outer space. Despite this, we never so much as see him sweat during the present-day storyline, much less raise his voice or visibly panic; this seems to be intentional on Etienne's part, as he mentions offhandedly to Masumi that he's used his powers on himself to keep his emotional state balanced and his head clear, and he elaborates on it in issue #9:
  Etienne: To begin with, emotionally limiting myself was trying to ensure I could make clean decisions. Now, I know if I felt everything, it would undo me, and that just won't do. If you'll excuse the self-pity, instead, I persist and the world does, too.
• Never Be Hurt Again: Eliza refuses to trust anyone who says they're trying to help her, and given that her husband lied to her for ten years and a literal angel lied to her about her visions from God, she has a point. Unfortunately, it means that her lack of trust in people who really are trying to help her ends really, really badly for everyone.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Jacky Magus has been plotting to eliminate Etienne—partly because he finds him too dangerous and partly because if Etienne knows he's not the real Magus he'd kill him on the spot—and, after conspiring with Eliza, they vaporize Etienne during Kid Ignition's birthday party. Etienne survives due to his secret ability to Body Surf and, with Magus putting eliminating Superpowers on the table, puts Heavy's son into a coma. Heavy believes Magus is responsible and nearly ends the world then and there, so Valentina forces Etienne to come clean to everybody, which Heavy responds by killing his real body. Without Etienne to give her visions, Eliza eventually learns the truth about her fate in Hell and is only able to keep it together for three months before finally crashing out. In other words, Magus broke the peace and the world almost immediately goes to Hell.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: You cannot be a superpower without being able to take hits from at least some of the other superpowers, so several variations of this come up.
  • Even as a baby, Valentina had no fear of mortal weapons, staring at a tank with curiosity rather than fear and shrugging when told that she was expected to destroy it. The U.S. government tried to assassinate her in 1969 by hiding an atomic bomb beneath a dance and music festival she was attending in New Mexico, killing tens of thousands of others party-goers. But Valentina is completely unharmed despite being irradiated from head-to-toe and emitting so much heat that the windows of the Oval Office melted in her presence. She later mentions that she peed out the rest of the radiation a week or two later.
  • Eliza fought The Queen in a battle that detonated the continent of Europe. And Eliza survived that.
  • The Major proves to be not so invulnerable as he claimed, and is unceremoniously one-shotted by Heavy.
  • Jacky Magus notes that he needs to have 50,000 people in his Pyramid organization in order to be a Superpower. Dev, not being the real Magus, has nowhere near that amount and is unceremoniously one-shotted by his own followers.
  • Heavy can pull himself back together with his Gravity Master powers, and has enough healing factor to survive this after being hit by a Kill Sat. However, this hurts, and that's one of the reasons for his heavy drug use.
  • Etienne is physically vulnerable but uses Body Surf methods, and it turns out that the Etienne we've seen throughout early issues isn't the real Etienne.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Subverted. In the opening of the first issue, Etienne says that it's simply unethical for anyone to have the abilities that the Superpowers do, as their abilities put all of mankind at risk. Thus the most ethical thing to do would be for both him and Valentina to die. However, he refutes his own logic on the basis of utilitarianism, as killing himself would place the world at the mercy of another Atomic or an extradimensional being with powers on his level and far fewer scruples about using them. Later issues have shown that he was right about that.
• No-Sell:
  • Valentina's Nigh-Invulnerability even extends to her mind, as Etienne is unable to penetrate it or control her in the way he's able to do for nearly everyone else. He is only able to telepathically connect with her, but needs her to use her "omniscient eyes" to see his perspective. Jacky is concerned that Etienne's growing powers could let him subvert this, with Jacky fearing what Etienne could or would do if he didn't have to worry about Valentina stopping him.
  • Etienne also cannot psychically control or manipulate Masumi. Both characters lament this, as it would easily prevent her powers manifesting.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Hell — the real Hell — is stated by Jacky to be astronomically, infinitely worse than the Hell humanity envisions in the Bible, and he considers Eliza damning herself to it to be so horrendous that the fate of the 250,000 Pyramid members he sacrificed to stop the Queen is a light sentence compared to what she's in for. What, exactly, is that? We don't know.
    • Eliza decides to see what Hell is like for issue #14. We see nothing but a haze of red, multiples of Eliza's face screaming, and a glimpse at what seems to be the Queen. She was there for two seconds, and she could only keep it together afterward for three months.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The aftermath of the Second Summer of Love: most of Europe was gone, with nearly a billion people dead, the relationships between the Superpowers fractured, with Magus actually Dev, because Magus was dead pulling away from the others and Eliza having joined the group, leading to the status quo in 1999.
  • Issue #13 ends with Etienne seemingly killed for good as Heavy launches his true body in space with no clue if he can even, if ever, return. This leaves the rest of the Superpowers now on their own as they continue what they've done before but without Etienne.
  • Things change even more in Issue #14, with Etienne dead and most of the secrets he kept spilled: Masumi breaks up with Isabella, feeling that she's only been hurting her. Tonya leaves Heavy, furious at his killing Etienne, and writes her article about the Superpowers, while Kid Ignition's mother is now furious at Heavy. And Eliza realises that Etienne was pretending to be God to keep her stable, looks into Hell to see what it's like and whatever she sees is so horrific that she can only hold it together for three months.
  • By the end of Issue #15, Eliza's attempts to end the world to save herself ends with her being dealt with thanks to Heavy and Valentina stopping her, with Dev and Heavy being killed in the process. The world is saved with very few deaths beyond the Pyramid who killed Dev to ensure he couldn't help Eliza while Masumi sleeps with Isabella watching over her. But then, in Issue #16, Masumi wakes to find Isabella killed by Eliza's dying "acts of God" and slips fully into Deconstructa in seconds, who then wipes out all of humanity before Valentina can intervene and forces her to, against the direct commands of God, go back in time to her first meeting with Etienne in order to bring about his utopic ideal of a world. Now, everything from that point on literally won't be the same anymore.
• Not the Intended Use: As Magus points out to an officer, the special orbital weapon they fired on Heavy wasn’t actually meant to be used. Magus intended it as a prop to make America feel safe and think they could do something against a Superpower.
• Oh, Crap!: Etienne, while calm in his words, briefly looks surprised when he learns that Heavy’s son is a Superpower.
  Etienne: Oh, dear.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: For Magus, after the incident with the Second Summer of Love to clean up the Queen's mess and save people at the cost of all of his followers, he admits things won't be the same for him when rebuilding his cult: the only people who'll want to join are the egotistical, the suicidal, and the occasional good person who wants to be a martyr. It's proven when he looks at a graph that shows that at its peak, the Pyramid had 250,000 members, and now barely clears 50,000. He dislikes this and what he had to do, and is now in a bad enough position that he intends to get the US Army into the Pyramid.
• Only One Afterlife: Discussed. While the details aren’t known, Heaven and Hell are indeed confirmed to exist. However, while the situation with Heaven is unknown beyond what Valentina says, Magus claims nobody actually goes to Hell — up until Eliza’s actions. This is because, as Magus points out, the true “Hell” isn’t what people believe it is, the biblical one, but something else. Though, yes, suffering still does occur within it, Jacky doesn't elaborate beyond that, other than that, because it exists outside of time, it's truly infinite.
• Open Secret:
  • As Magus points out to the new President of America, everybody is fully aware that he can't protect them from the six, with implications that every other leader in the world feels the same, whether they admit it or not.
  • When Magus begins recruiting en masse from the US Armed Forces, one officer asks why he’s doing that publicly with the other Superpowers watching. As Magus points out, him doing it in secret would just make them act immediately, where Magus doing it openly would make them pause and think it over.
• Our Angels Are Different: Santa Valentina is an angel who came to Earth, possessing the body of an infant leaving the womb. She mostly looks human, but her angel form is seen a couple times — radiant, haloed, and awesome.
• Papa Wolf: Heavy is very protective of his son. When he thinks that Jacky Magus/Dev put Alex into a coma, Heavy starts destroying Dev's Pyramid training camps and killing everyone there.
• Paper Tiger: The Major was this. While he could legitimately take on the entire world and resisted Etienne's telepathy, he stood no chance against the Superpowers. Magus knew this but kept it secret from the others because the reprisal from killing the Major would be worse. It's not until America threatened another war with the Major at the helm that Magus spills the beans, after which Heavy immediately turns the Major into a meatball. Crisis averted.
• Parental Abandonment: Valentina was abandoned by her family at a young age due to her otherworldly powers, intelligence, and perspective. She spent much of her childhood flying from place to place, asking one family or another if they'll take her in while promising to be good. Given that she has no family members in the present, her search is implied to have failed, with her only finding real companionship when she meets Etienne.
• Parents Walk In at the Worst Time: Amusingly, when Heavy is showing Tonya his son, he’s… just about to have sex with a girl, making things awkward. Heavy just tells him to wear a condom.
• Perception Filter: Etienne uses his telepathy to subtly keep people out of his way when he wants to be incognito. In issue #1 he's shown doing this in the 1960s to ensure that his conversation with Valentina is private, then again in 1999 to ensure privacy when Tonya is interviewing him.
• People Puppets: Etienne finds this a distasteful but necessary use of his powers, so he tries to minimise doing it. It's also the only way he can physically interact with the world, and he only uses vegetative individuals as long term puppets.
• Personality Powers: In one of the letters pages, Kieron Gillen admits that a lot of Heavy's personality traits are based on gravity-related puns: He's light-hearted, he's always high, he fully buys into the adage "heavy is the head that wears the crown", etc. On that note, it's rather apt that a Manipulative Bastard like Etienne has the power to control minds, and an anarchist like Jacky Magus has a powerset that lets him break the laws of reality through magic.
• Person of Mass Destruction: The six "Superpowers" are superhumans with the power to devastate continents, and Issue #6 measures their destructive power in megadeaths (i.e. how many millions or billions of people they could kill in an hour). One core concept of the series is that if they ever directly battle, it's likely to end the world.
• Pet the Dog: Despite Etienne being the most willing to bloody his hands, anything to keep the status quo with ideas to brainwash humanity to simply be good while even having a contingency to kill countless others if he himself is killed, upon his body being launched into space, nothing happens. Because while he did have that option, he ultimately refused to "push the button".
• Pious Monster: Discussed and invoked with Eliza, who's been a devout and sincere Christian her whole life. When she made her pact with Hell to become a demonic being roughly on par with Valentina, it wasn't out of disillusionment with God, but rather out of desperation to stop the Queen (knowing that Hell, unlike Heaven, could seemingly be reached and bargained with for such a purpose, and genuinely believing that God is all-powerful, all-good and would never abandon a penitent true believer). Even a decade after her Pyrrhic Victory that wiped out Europe, Eliza still prays and confesses to God daily, knowing full well her own sin of Pride that led her to where she is today... and though God isn't actually answering, Etienne answers her prayers as God to keep her faith stable due to a revelation from Jacky that said pact has already damned her to unthinkable and eternal agony and torment within Hell, with the safety of the world being contingent on her falsely believing that God will save her from her fate with enough penance.
• Plausible Deniability: It's all but stated that the Numinous technology used in the Kill Sat attempt on Heavy's life came from Jacky Magus, the most powerful magician on the planet. But Etienne knows that Magus will inevitably pass the buck onto some "renegades" to avoid having the other Superpowers piling onto him.
• Playing with Fire: Kid Ignition is a young Atomic with the ability to manipulate fire, creating fireballs as a pre-teen. Now that he's older and a Superpower, his hair is on fire at all times.
• Ponzi: The Pyramid of Jacky Magus is a pyramid scheme. Jacky’s power is based on the number of followers he has. A big chunk of the early plot is driven by Jacky’s worries that he’s weaker after sacrificing his followers in 1989, while Etienne is getting stronger.
• Preemptive Threat Elimination: Over the years, Etienne secretly uses his telepathic powers to deal with almost 200 Atomics who could have posed a threat to the world. About a hundred of them could have developed the destructive force of Superpowers. Where possible, he removes access to their powers; if that's not a possibility, he puts them into a permanent vegetative state or simply kills them.
• Pretender Diss: Years before the comic started, a powerful (but not Superpower-level) Atomic named himself 'The Devil' and tried to take over the Earth. After stopping him, Etienne dismissively referred to him as 'an egotistical man' who only had 'somewhat significant power'.
• Principles Zealot: Etienne lives and dies by ethics, to the point that he tells Heavy that he'll kill the families of the government employees who tried to kill Heavy, if he can also kill every member of Heavy's cult that he can find.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • A variant from Olivia Brown (controlled by Etienne) in Issue #4; it's meant to calm down the recipient (Masumi) and successfully does so, as she just wanted an honest reaction to her work.
    Olivia Brown: How great a painter would Hitler had have to be to justify the Holocaust? You are no Hitler, but your work could never be worth what you cost. You can never be good enough, but you still try. You are no dilettante. You are a serious artist aspiring to serious work. You show what it is to live in a world made of glass, and wanting to scream, knowing if you do, everything shatters. At your best, there are moments where you make even us glass people feel the horror of what that would be like. Will that do?
  • In Issue #13, Etienne confronts Valentina with a rant laying bare all the growing resentment he's had towards her for preventing him from doing more to change the world.
    Etienne: You have faith in the human nature that, time and time again, has treated humans as cattle — worse than cattle. You come from Heaven, Valentina. I come from Earth. I would've been thrown out with the trash if I hadn't had power. Magus explained our world. Your Heaven is fixed and eternal. Below, the churning fluid outside time. We are the single strip between. We only have one chance. I only have one chance. You make me roll the dice, every day. Remember how I saved Malcolm X five times before they got him? Your fault, Valentina. Every time anyone dies I could have saved, it's your fault. You are my oldest friend. I love you. I say this with all the rage my chained heart can muster: Your morals are going to kill us all.
• Rewatch Bonus: The reveals from Issue #10 and on cast a lot of the earlier issues into new light. For example, in Issue #5, Magus grimly muses that 'You tried saving the world. Look where that got you.' It looks like he's talking to himself; he's actually talking to the real Jacky Magus, who died saving the world in the Second Summer of Love.
• Riddle for the Ages: What exactly Atomics are and why they suddenly emerged in the 1940s is left a mystery. It's heavily implied that Jacky Magus knows the answer, but refuses to tell anyone else.
• Rivals Team Up: By the end of Issue #10, with the balance between the Superpowers already shaky, Eliza teams up with Jacky, who's actually her husband, Dev, and plans to kill Etienne in three days with him.
• Scars Are Forever: Heavy has many scars on his body from constant assassination attacks. He actually admits that he doesn't like this, wishing they could just heal normally rather than putting himself together, and is having to take a lot of Valium to deal with it.
• Self-Serving Memory: Issue #7 has a rather tragic example: Isabella recalls her mother giving her a touching speech encouraging her to seize opportunities given to her before she got on the plane to Japan, and then realizes that no, actually, that's not what happened.
  Isabella: ...fuck. No, that's a lie. She said that drunk at home years earlier, depressed over Papa cheating on her again. I edit the memories to make something meaningful. In reality, I looked back and she was already gone.
• Separate Scene Storytelling: Issue #7 jumps around a lot between Eliza asking Valentina to confess her sins, Valentina's recounting of the Second Summer of Love, Masumi asking Isabella for her account of the Second Summer of Love, and Isabella's recounting.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: After Masumi releases Deconstructa in her despair over her girlfriend's death in Issue #16, destroying the entire planet and everyone on it, Valentina goes back in time to when Etienne asks her to help him take over the planet to save it (as seen in Issue #1), and this time accepts to prevent that outcome or any like it from occurring.
• Sex for Solace: Heavy and Tonya sleep together in Issue #5, after Tonya admits that Masumi's art show made her very aware of her own (and everyone else's) mortality.
• Speech Bubbles:
  • The Power Fantasy's standard speech bubbles are sentence case, black text on a white background. Unlike most superhero comics, they don't normally use a black border — borders are only added when two different bubbles meet. Bubbles add a coloured background, such as pale pink or blue, when used in a white space.
  • Etienne's telepathy uses italic purple text in modified thought bubbles. Each bubble gets four spiky 'corners' added to its cloud-shaped curves.
  • Valentina uses standard speech bubbles most of the time. But when she invokes her powers to confront Etienne in a 1966 scene, they shift to white text on a purple background, surrounded by a white glow. When she shifts into her inhuman warrior angel form, they're golden text on a white background, with a golden border fading into a glow.
  • Eliza's speech bubbles have white text on a red background, surrounded by a white glow.
  • Kid Ignition's speech bubbles have black text on an orange background.
  • Kid Ignition's mother has black text on a blue background, matching her blue skin and hair.
• Spoiler Cover: The third printing cover for issue #1 is a wraparound reusing Caspar Wijngaard's double-page Splash Panel from midway through the story, in which a blast from a government Kill Sat leaves Heavy Half the Man He Used to Be.
• Squishy Wizard: Despite his incredible power, Etienne (or rather, his various human bodies) is as physically vulnerable as a non-powered human. His main deterrent against attempts on his life is a psychic kill-switch: if Etienne dies, then his powers will automatically kill the millions of people within the radius of his powers. In Issue 3, he has to have Valentina act as a bodyguard while he's taking a flight to Japan partially because, unlike the other Superpowers, he wouldn't survive a missile aimed at his plane; in Issue 4, he noticeably has to hide behind a desk when faced with the powered armor-wearing soldier sent to arrest him and then use the airport speaker system to negotiate his way out of the confrontation because he can't get through the soldier's psychic blockers, illustrating how relatively helpless he is once his only power is "cut off"; and his last line of defense in the event of a hostile entity discovering his true body is the fact that said massive brain is located underneath New York City, which would make vaporizing everything in a 10-block radius more trouble than it's worth to kill him for real. This is discussed in issue #9:
  Etienne: In 1989, you could at least try and stop the Queen. Heavy caught chunks of the continental shelf, squashed the tsunami. All I did was remove Masumi from the table and turn off people's pain receptors. I do what I do because if things ever get bad, it's too late for me to do anything. I just get to be with those unlucky enough to not die instantly.
• Storyboard Body: Isabella is Italian, and only survived the destruction of Europe because she was on a school trip. She has a tattoo of the outline of Italy, now lost to the ocean, on her left arm.
• Story-Breaker Power:
  • Played for Drama. The premise of the story is that every character is so powerful that conventional superhero battles simply can't happen — either the attacker kills their target instantly in a first strike, or the exchange of attacks is so powerful it destroys the world.
  • Also, Etienne, the character who does the most to prevent conflicts between Superpowers, is the first Superpower to die, clearing the way for the situation to escalate with the other characters.
• Stronger with Age: All Atomics grow stronger as they get older, until they hit their eventual limit. When he was 13, Heavy was limited to just performing party tricks, but he seems to have reached his limit now in middle age. According to Jacky, Etienne is still becoming more powerful, which scares the shit out of him as it threatens the balance between the Superpowers - he seems to have circumvented the usual limit because his true body is still growing without any visible limit, so his power scales with it.
• Superman Substitute: Santa Valentina is the setting's equivalent to Superman as an otherworldly being with godlike strength, speed, and durability along with boundless compassion. She is by far the most straightforwardly benevolent and ethical of the Superpowers, having been sent down by a higher being to protect Earth and its people from nuclear armageddon. In addition to her Flying Brick powerset, she possesses supernatural senses that allow her to perceive things like the workings of Etienne's telepathy as well as being able to see others' intentions by gazing into their eyes.
• Superpowered Alter Ego: Deconstructa is this trope taken to a hideous extreme. When Masumi feels too sad, she fades from reality and is replaced by a massive Kaiju which can easily wipe out a city. The two beings are psychically linked, as Masumi can hear messages from Deconstructa while active, and Etienne apparently managed to stop Deconstructa's first rampage by reaching out to Masumi via the creature.
• Superpower Lottery:
  • The comic has a variant. Like in a real lottery, the vast majority of the people who 'won' got a minor reward — powers that are either incredibly weak or mostly useless. A much smaller number got stronger powers, and the six real 'winners' have the strongest powers of all. Only these six are described as having "Superpowers", and two of them got powers in a different way to the other four.
  • To illustrate the vast gulf, the most powerful sub-Superpower individuals are the Major (who is powerful enough to "kick the world's ass" as Jacky Magus puts it), and the Devil (who thought he could take over the world)...but the Superpowers still killed and incapacitated them respectively in seconds without effort.
• Taken for Granite: When Eliza is sealed in Hell at the end of the third arc, her final attempt to survive leaves red, crystalline remnants scattered around the world. They're estimated to kill about 30 million people, with some directly petrified into crystal statues. Unfortunately for the world, Masumi wakes to find her girlfriend Isabella is one of the transformed victims.
• Take That!: Gillen specifies in the afterword of the second issue that he was inspired to write The Power Fantasy because of the ever-growing obsession with making superheroes perform greater and greater feats of strength and destructive capacity. In Gillen's words, in the essay attached to issue #2: "Ultimately, if the superheroes have the power of a nuclear weapon, they're not good for anything. All nuclear bombs can do is kill everyone." This makes the comic a jab at the "powerscaling" communities fostered by mediums like DEATH BATTLE!, as this obsession with power and ability at the expense of all else neglects the potentially horrifying actual outcomes of owning godlike power in fiction and in real life.
• Tarot Motifs: To those outside the Pyramid and in its lowest three tiers, the "Arseholes" and "Fucking Arseholes" are known by the Minor and Major Arcana respectively. When Magus inducts Eliza's husband into the latter tier, he designates him by the Fool tarot card.
• There Is Another: Kid Ignition, Heavy’s son, is special as he’s the secret seventh Superpower, and the only one fully loyal to another Superpower.
• This Means War!: Subverted. Etienne claims that declarations of war are for the Victorians. When he goes to "battle", he eschews any kind of prior notice and just acts. He kills the U.S. president and everyone involved in the assassination attempt on Heavy in moments, denying them any chance at fighting back.
• Time Skip: Issue 1 starts in 1966, with Etienne and Valentina, and then skips ahead to 1999.
• To Be Lawful or Good:
  • The two superpowers first introduced are Etienne (lawful) and Valentina (good). They conflict frequently throughout the series about whether to be moral or ethical. Etienne predicts that Valentina's morals will end up killing everyone, and that's exactly what happens.
  • At the end of the third arc, God orders Valentina to return to Heaven, because all of humanity is dead. Valentina instead decides to go back in time and try again. God tells her that if she does, she'll never be able to return to Heaven, but Valentina flips Him off and does it anyway.
• Too Good to Be True: When the Queen appeared in 1989, Valentina was on board with her, Heavy was on the fence, and Etienne and Jacky were solidly against her, arguing that nobody could predict what she would do, which made her too dangerous to tolerate. Unfortunately for the world, Etienne and Jacky were right.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Issue #9 sees one impulsive decision tipping everything over the edge. Dev's decision to reveal himself to Eliza leads them to plan an assassination attempt against Etienne, which only succeeds at killing his braindead proxy but does convince everyone that he's dead. This leads the US government to attempt to nuke Haven, causing/influencing Etienne's decision to turn Kid Ignition into a vegetable. His act nearly puts the Superpowers at war with each other when Heavy attributes the attack to Magus. Tensions don't cool until Valentina reveals that Etienne is still alive and responsible for the attack; this leads Heavy to murder Etienne in a fit of Papa Wolf-induced rage. Eliza goes insane without Etienne to keep her placated with his God Guise, with Dev eventually revealing to her that if she destroys reality, she might save herself from Hell. When the other Superpowers try to stop her, Dev orders the Pyramid to defend against them rather than repairing the damage, and is gunned down by his own men for his trouble. Heavy then places a singularity in Eliza's head in an effort to stop her - injured or dying, she retaliates by pulling a Taking You with Me that seemingly kills Heavy, who left himself vulnerable in space to keep anyone else from being caught in her attack, and the aftereffects of her death end up killing Isabella, causing Masumi to completely lose it and unleash Deconstructa to wipe out humanity in a single attack.
• Tragic Monster:
  • Of all the Superpowers, Masumi is the only one who both didn't ask for her powers and hates having them, as there's no positive way to use Deconstructa like there is gravity manipulation, telepathy, etc., and it being tied to her emotional stability (with Etienne unable to lock it away mentally and there being no guarantee that killing her wouldn't immediately manifest it) means she's the most dangerous and unpredictable of all six, needing constant appeasement just to stay above water. Tellingly, Heavy and Etienne both feel quite a lot of pity for her, and Issue #4, focused mainly on her, shows that she's a very broken young woman locked in a Destructive Romance because it's the only kind of intimate relationship she can ever have.
  • Eliza is also revealed to be one: her Deal with the Devil came from desperation and with only a faint knowledge of the future consequences (being eternal, unthinkable torment that her soul's already experiencing), and she's been a devout Christian all her life, leading her to confess her sins to God daily in order to reconcile her beliefs with what she's done. By the start and end of Issue #15, she becomes a monster as she attempted to the end the world to escape her fate but is ultimately stopped by Valentina and Heavy.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Justified since she's implied to be an angel possessing a human's body, but Valentina starts flying, glowing, and talking like an adult the moment she exits the womb, with more than enough cognizance to understand the intentions of the adults around her at a mere one year old and simply fly to another continent if she wants to start over with another family. The "Troubling" part is subverted, however, in that Valentina is far and away the nicest and most moral person in the setting who, in her own words, is here to protect humanity no matter what they do to her or how they view her.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Discussed. In the opening of the comic, Etienne and Valentina float the idea of taking over the world and ruling it as a god-king and god-queen. According to Etienne, this would be the ethical thing to do, as Etienne could remove people's desires to go to war while Valentina destroys any means of waging it. They could then produce a quasi-democratic system to keep the masses placated while they continue working on creating a utopia.
• Variant Cover: The first collected volume, "The Superpowers" (#1-5), has a standard cover based on the issue #1 cover with Heavy and Etienne. However, it also gets a direct market variant showcasing Valentina in her angelic form.
• We ARE Struggling Together: While the six Superpowers are aware they shouldn’t fight, different goals and ideals cause things to be… tense between them. Enough that at times they hide secrets or support others defeat/death or have some plausible deniability when something occurs.
• We Can Rule Together: In 1966, Etienne tried to convince Valentina to work with him to take over the world, reasoning that, with their combined strength and good (and ethical) intentions, they could take the Earth with minimum collateral and safeguard humanity from themselves and any other Superpowered threats. Valentina turns him down, forcing him to go with "Plan B": the Cold War-esque status quo maintenance we see throughout the comic. Fifty years later, after humanity has been wiped out, partly due to her own neutrality, Valentina leaps back to 1966, this time choosing to agree with Etienne's plan to avert the Bad Future.
• We Used to Be Friends: Etienne and Heavy were friends, but had a falling out at some point before 1999. They're still willing to talk, but an additional wedge is driven between them when Etienne threatens to kill Heavy's Atomic Family if he's pressed to kill the families of those involved in the attack on Haven.
  • Issue #6 shows a photo of Etienne, Magus, Heavy and Valentina together some time ago, which Valentina clearly treasures.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Out of all the six, Magus has actually been trying to kill the others for some time. Etienne, Heavy, making deals with others to off them due to believing that they're to dangerous, especially if another Superpower comes onboard. Issue #5 has him deciding to join America and even run for president to militarize his group and choose his winning side to save the world. By Issue #15, he betrays his ideals to help Eliza end the world and dies when the Pyramid mutiny and do the job themselves.
• Wham Episode:
  • The very end of Issue 2, where Jacky Magus specifies that if anything upsets the balance between the six Superpowers, they're all fucked... combined with the reveal that Heavy has a son, who's another Superpower.
  • The end of issue 9. Magus has been dead since 1989. The Magus we've been following is Eliza's husband, Dev.
  • Issue 11: Eliza and Dev "kill" Etienne, but he comes back in another body and nobody else knows.
  • Issue 13: Valentina reveals Etienne's survival to the other Superpowers, the latter honestly admitting his many ruthless actions to maintain peace (only lying with Valentina's help when Eliza asks if he sent her visions), including his ultimate plan to grow powerful enough until he can change humanity's destructive nature. Heavy rips Etienne's New York base out of the ground and throws it into space, seemingly killing him for good and any serious chance of stopping a future conflict between Superpowers.
  • Issue 15: Eliza keeps looking into Hell and is losing her ability to hold it together, as well as refusing to trust Dev when he says he's trying to help her. Dev tells her that she could escape her fate by collapsing reality, so Eliza decides to do that and Dev decides to defend her. The Pyramid guns Dev down to save humanity, while Valentina and Heavy work together to kill Eliza, even though all three of them are seemingly dead as the result.
  • Issue 16: Heavy, Valentina and the Pyramid successfully killed Eliza. Thirty million people died, but the world is saved... for about five minutes, because Eliza's last-ditch attempts to save herself have been causing random acts of reality-warping. One of those acts is random people being turned into crystal statues, and one of them was Isabella. With the woman she loves dead, Masumi becomes Deconstructa and destroys the entire planet, with Valentina only able to watch and despair... until she remembers what Magus, Heavy and Etienne told her in the past, and figures out how to go back in time. God orders Valentina to return, but she refuses, goes back to 1966 and agrees to Etienne's plan to take over the world.
• Wham Line:
  • Issue 14 has Eliza finally realize that "God" has been Etienne the entire time and that she is not going to be saved from Hell. The issue ends with her blank stare, the ticking of a clock, and the accompanying text:
  "Eliza holds it together. For the next three months."
  • With her optimism shattered after having watched Deconstructa wipe out humanity, Issue 16 ends with Valentina time-travelling back to the conversation she had with Etienne at the start of the series, now willing to try things his way:
  Valentina: Let's take over the world.
• Wham Shot:
  • At the end of issue #3, Etienne's on a flight to Japan, crossing Europe, and telepathically talking to Valentina. He makes a cryptic comment about watching people's reactions to the view, and then the scene cuts to Valentina, hovering in orbit and looking down. Europe is completely gone, with just traces of a crater remaining. A data page then confirms that this was the work of an extradimensional entity known as the Queen, and happened in 1989.
  • In Issue #12, the reveal of Etienne's original body- five tons of still-growing brain matter in a tank under New York, controlling the bodies of braindead people to interact with the world.
  • In Issue #16, at the end of the third arc, Eliza is trapped in hell, Heavy and Jacky Magus are dead, and 30 million people are dead. But it looks as if the world has survived. Then Masumi wakes in her girlfriend Isabella's arms to find that Isabella's dead, transmuted into a crystal statue by Eliza's last desperate attempt to survive. For the whole series, everyone's been dreading the consequences if Masumi's mood becomes too bleak and she loses control...and the subsequent rampage of Deconstructa proves them entirely right.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • In Issue 2, Tonya calls out Heavy for threatening to wipe out Texas, pointing out that he would have killed a lot of poor people, minorities and Atomics who just happened to have the misfortune to live there in the process.
  • In Issue 13, Etienne calls out Valentina for her principles, saying that she has too much faith in humanity to do the right thing and ignores the atrocities that humans inflict on each other, and her principles will get them all killed.
  • In Issue 14, Tonya calls Heavy out for killing Etienne, and flatly tells him that Etienne psychically neutering Atomics with dangerous powers and potential Superpowers like her was the right thing to do.
• Who Watches the Watchmen?: With six Superpowers in play, and nations like America incapable of actually doing anything about them, it's up to the very six Superpowers to watch over themselves. And, naturally, it isn't always easy when all six have different viewpoints on what should be done.
• Would Hurt a Child: After learning his son will be a Superpower, Heavy does his best to hide his existence as he’s fully aware that no matter how strong his kid is, he’s still a kid and can be killed by those who’d want him dead. He was unfortunately correct, as Etienne puts Heavy's son in a permanent vegetative state after learning that he's got Superpower strength without the resistance to mind control.
• You Are in Command Now:
  • After the botched attempt to assassinate Heavy in Issue 1, Etienne killing the President and everyone who knew about it leaves the Speaker of the House as the new President, as he was the highest-ranking member of the government who hadn't been told beforehand.
  • Jacky Magus turns over his mask and magical equipment to Dev, tasking him with taking up his position (and identity) to maintain the balance of power.
• You Keep Using That Word: Valentina is frustrated at how easily Etienne can use the word "ethical" to describe himself and his actions when he has a potential dead man's switch to murder millions of people in the event of his death.
  Etienne: You may suspect that if I died I wouldn't release a psychic contagion... but you won't risk the death of a continent over the chance that I am unethical enough to do so.
  Valentina: Oh, I'm more worried you've found some dumbass way to make yourself think that murdering a continent is an ethical thing to do.
  Etienne: Quite.

Valentina: Sweetie—in the last ten minutes, you just threatened the death of millions. In what universe are you a "good person"?
Etienne: Really? This one.