So this was the first pick of the year for the little book club I have going with my friends, and it’s a REALLY interesting take on the superhero comic genre. Gillen mentioned in an essay at the end of Issue 2 or 3 that he was coming off doing a comic series for Marvel, and wanted to explore the idea of a world where supers exist, but their powers have some very real, very troubling consequences. Unlike in most superhero stories where the world seems to survive devastating clashes between supers and other similar entities (see: New York in Marvel comics), Gillen proposes a world much more closely aligned to our actual reality, where the consequences of such fights would, in fact, be utterly devastating. In such a case, supers would be more akin to nuclear bombs - except these nuclear bombs have a will of their own, and their own ideas about how and when to use their abilities.

The last time I read anything written by Gillen, it was Wicked + Divine, and what I remember most (apart from the fantastic art, courtesy of Jamie McKelvie) is the characterization. And that characterization shines through again here, in the way Gillen handles the supers of this story, since he extends his original premise of “What if there were supers with extraordinary powers in the real world?” to include the supers themselves: “What if supers had the same problems we did?” And while I know this concept has been explored in other superhero stories before, the smaller main cast of this particular series allows Gillen to get into the minds of the individual characters and develop them in a way that makes sense to the reader - and may even seem familiar.

Consider the character Masumi, who is prominently featured in Issue 3. She is an artist, but also has some rather bad mental health issues, including depression and a deep need for validation. Now, while that combination of traits is very familiar - I’m sure most people know at least one person who is like that, or might have those issues themselves - the difference is that Masumi has a potentially world-ending power, one that comes out if she “gets sad”. It can be hard enough, being a person like Masumi, or knowing someone like Masumi; imagine being like that and having a world-ending power that comes out when “gets sad”. How does one manage someone like that? How does one manage oneself? This comic tries to explore that in a way that feels grounded in our own current reality, and it is VERY interesting.

What Gillen is trying to do here, in grounding the supers and their world in a reality that is as close to ours as possible, is to try to explore a reality where the big, tense moments do not lead to people fighting. In lots of superhero comics, the supers are always fighting, whether that is other superpowered individuals or each other. In this series, though, where the most powerful supers are basically nuclear bombs, and where there is only ONE timeline, ONE reality (and therefore no possibility for multiverse shenaniganry), this means that there is much less fighting and a LOT more de-escalation. THAT is where most of the tension comes into play: the supers balancing each other out, in such a way that they neither destroy each other, nor the world around them. Of course, governments attempt to control them, and in such cases the supers do what they can to protect themselves and the world, according to their own ideas of morality and, in the case of one specific character, good ethics. This creates another interesting layer of tension regarding control of the supers, because they are world-ending levels of dangerous (which governments are VERY concerned about), but they are also PEOPLE. I really liked this particular angle because of the potential tensions and consequences that can spin out of that conflict - some of which has been partially explored in this first volume, but has not been revealed in its entirely just yet.

Overall, this was a lovely way to get back into reading serialized comics. I’m not very much into reading superhero comics, but the concept for this is deeply interesting, with the whole point being to AVOID fights as much as possible. Thus far the story’s been interesting, the characters engaging, and the artwork is remarkable. Will definitely have to get my mitts on the second volume as soon as possible so I can keep reading.

So this wasn’t all that bad a read. The author’s writing is a pleasure to read, as ever, but this book feels a bit lighter in the heel, so to speak, compared to his previous works. I personally attribute this to his dips into fiction for almost half the book, wherein he spins a little tale about the specific time period and culture he’s focusing on in any given section, showing how the artifacts and techniques that he tackles in that section might have been applied by people in the past. These little fictional bits are not utterly egregious, and they are clearly solidly grounded in pretty good research, but I, as a reader, could have done without them. I would have appreciated a stronger focus on the experimental archaeologists themselves: most of whom seem like an interesting bunch, and, even better, have the benefit of being people who are currently alive and working on their research despite pushback and condemnation from more traditional archaeologists.

Speaking of pushback and condemnation, I liked that the author tackles the friction between traditional archaeologists and experimental archaeologists, and even tries to explain why the friction exists in the first place, but I could not help but notice that he missed a crucial sticking point: classism. Traditional archaeology has, historically, been a pursuit of wealthy white colonizers with noble titles, and as such the class biases of such people linger in that particular field of study even today, exacerbated by the ivory tower of academia. Such people are not interested in the nitty-gritty of ancient Egyptian beer-brewing, for instance, or how to take down a giant sloth with an atlatl - such things are too “common”, the purview of the lower classes, not the kings and high priests they are often far more interested in. Traditional archaeologists of a certain type are entirely happy to make admiring noises about marble busts of ancient Roman matrons and can probably identify each one based on their hairdos, but are far less interested in figuring out how those hairdos got made in the first place.

Which brings me right back to what I mentioned earlier, about being more interested in the experimental archaeologists the author interviews and works with during his research for this book. Each of them is a character in their own right, and the interviews the author conducts with them to learn the whys, wherefores, whats, and hows of their special interest are more fascinating to read than the fictional stories. While it’s true that many of these experimental archaeologists do not have the specific academic training to qualify as traditional archaeologists, and it’s somewhat reasonable for traditional archaeologists to be wary of people who claim expertise outside of their field, the bias can be unjust in certain cases, especially when the experimental archaeologists are themselves experts in the specific subject matter they are tackling, or have degrees in other fields besides archaeology or related fields like history. Take, for example, the aforementioned hairdos depicted in statues and busts of Roman women. The person the author interviews in this book herself works as a professional hairdresser; if anyone knows hair, she would. And yet, despite this clear expertise, her research about ancient Roman hairdos has been met with dismissal by some archaeologists and academics. This is why I say classism may be at play here: both against the subject matter at hand, and against the person presenting the research.

Overall, this wasn’t a bad read, but it doesn’t have the same level of heft and rigor that I remember from the author’s previous books. I think this might be because he spends almost half of each section telling a fictional story which, while it IS grounded in solid research and does not not feel outlandishly speculative, does take a lot of power out of the nonfictional parts of the book. I wish more space had been devoted to talking about the real experimental archaeologists whom the author interviewed and interacted with while putting this book together, as well as tackling the reasons behind why some traditional archaeologists tends to frown upon experimental archaeologists.

So this wasn’t that bad of a read - or at least, conceptually it’s not. Like, if one imagines the best possible version of this story, this concept, it wouldn’t be half-bad at all. Hell, it could essily be amazing. Sadly, one must judge a book as it actually exists, and this book falls far short of its potential.

The first letdown is the worldbuilding. While genre fiction frequently borrows from and references real places and historical periods, the best authors use what they borrow as springboards for creating something unique. Even the authors who borrow entire historical periods almost wholesale (ex. George R. R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire series is essentially a fantasy version of the Hundred Years’ War) attempt to do something fresh with what they’ve borrowed. This book doesn’t even do that: the whole thing is basically eighteenth-century France with vampires and blood magic and some mentions of Filipino food to spice things up a bit. May as well have set the entire thing IN pre-revolutionary France and written this as a historical fantasy; the story would still be the same whether this was set in a fantasy world or in Paris.

Speaking of Filipino food, the attempt to include Filipino references in this story was poorly done - enough that it actually felt like tokenization as opposed to genuine representation. This goes back to the lack of worldbuilding: if these references had been given proper context and grounded in the world itself, they would feel true and organic in the context of the story. However, just hand-waving this necessary worldbuilding by mentioning some random “Tagalan Islands” somewhere else in the world and then saying that some of the protagonists have parents from those islands, is woefully inadequate. It makes my culture and history feel like a costume some of the characters have put on, borrowing from it without really understanding why pancit bihon is the way it is, or the significance of the surname “de la Cruz” (which is the most common surname in the Philippines, yes, but because of colonialism - something which this novel NEVER touches upon in any significant way). For that matter, using the term “Tagalan Islands” restricts the actual sociocultural complexity of my country to just ONE ethnolinguistic group (the Tagalog people): yet another example of tokenization.

Another thing that makes this book disappointing is the juvenile tone of the writing. I went into this expecting adult fantasy fiction, but what I got was something more akin to the prose of Madeleine L’Engle and Garth Nix. I’m NOT saying the prose is bad; the comparisons to L’Engle and Nix are complimentary. But the best of L’Engle and Nix are YOUNG ADULT: both A Wrinkle in Time and Sabriel are classics of YA fiction. What this means is that the prose of this novel is very good - for YA, not necessarily for adult fiction. To qualify as adult fiction the prose would need to have a level of complexity and nuance - a level of craft - that it simply does not have. I suspect that, had the author been given more time (and maybe a more attentive editor), significant improvements could have been made in this regard, but as I said earlier, one must judge the book for what it is, rather than what it COULD be, and sadly this just doesn’t quite make it.

Overall, this is a book that could have been so much more than what it actually is. The potential is there: certainly, I appreciate that there is a signifcant transgender character, and an attempt to portray a positive polyamoric relationship - probably the only time when I thought “Oh thank the gods” to myself when reading this book was when the potential for a polycule was confirmed. Unfortunately, those are the only good parts of this story; everything else is hampered by a lack of complexity and nuance. The worldbuilding, the characterization, the magic system, even the prose itself - all show the potential for greatness, but are instead stifled by underdevelopment and a lack of much-needed intricacy that I expect from fiction - especially fantasy fiction - geared towards adults.