Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #2 - Watch, Part Two (February 27, 2019)

writer: Kieron Gillen | artist [penciller & inker]: Caspar Wijngaard | colorist: Mary Safro | letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou | editor: Matt Idelson | associate editor: Kevin Ketner | publishing company: Dynamite Entertainment

I smile at seeing this again. Earlier Caspar and us on our bullshit.

I probably should post these here, as I do have fun making them.

Etienne Lux: Heart of Glass

By Tamsyn Elle ( @meserach ), with illustrations by Blastweave ( @artbyblastweave ), Jason K Jones ( @jkjones21 ) and @idonttakethislightly , plus excerpted panels with art from the comic itself (art there by Caspar Wijngaard) This essay was originally published on February 14th 2025, in issue #1 of THE POWER CUT, a fanzine about The Power Fantasy, the Image Comics book by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard. You can find that zine free to download right here.

This first arc of The Power Fantasy touches on all of the main cast, but the spine of it belongs to Etienne Lux: telepathic omnipath, problem-solver, negotiator, peacemaker, mass-murderer. We travel with him as he juggles and keeps the balance between the more disruptive forces of the rest of the cast: the threat of Masumi’s monster, Heavy’s reckless temper, and Jacky’s active attempts to capture him. In the plot so far he's the restoring force, keeping the very balance Magus is so worried about: counselling cooler heads, de-escalating, trying to think logically and dispassionately.

This is a role he's crafted for himself; in that conversation in ‘66 with Valentina, he talks about being the public face, the theorist, “someone to contextualise the horrors… but mostly someone that governments can work with”. Even his ostensible surname reflects that role: Etienne is Lux, light, providing information and clarity in a world that's become markedly more fuzzy and magical; but his actions and processes also have a laser-like quality; clean edges, surgical, precise. (Also he's French, and Paris is the City of Light. Well… it was.) A mind like a crystal, refracting light through facets, brilliant in every sense.

Consider, though, what else we know. On a day in 1953 a boy, aged almost certainly no older than five, woke up in a hospital bed and learned two things: one, his parents were dead; two, he was possessed of immense and perfect control of the mind of anyone he chooses to.

This, at least, is the story as we understand it so far. Picture Etienne Lux — if that was his name then — having gone through violent tragedy, dealing with the immense grief of being suddenly orphaned, waking up, bruised, confused and traumatised, and discovering… well, what, exactly?

The exact reach, flexibility and limits of Etienne’s powers as an “telepathic omnipath” remain a mystery, albeit a continually prodded one. Magus tells us he's getting stronger. Valentina insists Etienne could never control her, Magus isn't convinced; presumably, a malefic version of the divine imprimatur that shields Valentina also protects Eliza. Seemingly, he can't control Magus (because of the mask, he implies), but he evidently doesn't control Heavy directly either, even when it would seem to be to his advantage. (What protects Heavy? Just being near his singularity in Haven? We don't know.) And he's unable to penetrate the void of Masumi's mind specifically as a manifestation of her own powers: compared to Lux's light, Masumi's mind is darkness where no light can penetrate.

But the one superpower who's mind he can control is his own, and he suggests (in the conversation with Masumi in issue #2) that he can do so much more perfectly and directly than most humans, as part and parcel of being a telepath; he “keeps himself balanced”.

What could that possibly mean? Anyone who's ever struggled with their mental health, like Masumi, has probably spent at least a little time wishing they could directly take the bad thoughts out of their brain. But Etienne might be able to do just that. He is claiming the ability here to be his own architect; to design his personality from the ground up, to be the person he thinks he needs to be.

Through the comic so far we have watched Etienne be in essentially permanent crisis management mode. The closest thing to genuine rest he gets is sitting for coffee with Tonya, and even then, he was only in the area to tackle Heavy bringing Haven over Manhattan, and he was using the interview as a PR management opportunity. The rest of the time, over the span of maybe a few days at the most, he's entirely putting out fires or saving his own life: negotiating, manipulating, and just plain psychically-adjusting whoever is needed to keep the world turning for one more hour. 

Possibly he does outside of this have a recreational life, and time to rest. It makes sense the comic would only show us the more exciting parts of his life, after all. But can he afford to? We've also repeatedly seen Etienne's physical vulnerability stressed, with the attempt to apprehend him at the airport, with his need to call in favour from Valentina to prevent anyone taking down the plane, with Valentina’s moment of nearly killing him in 1966. That interaction told us he claims safeguards, of a mutually assured destruction variety — releasing a psychic contagion if he's killed — but unlike Masumi's more visible dead-man’s-switch monster, this exists in the realm of the theoretical. It’s based on a judgement about what Etienne would actually have done as a moral actor, as opposed to the seemingly entirely inadvertent destruction that would be wrought by killing Masumi, and that’s a fundamentally more nebulous kind of threat. For all his power, amongst the superpowers Etienne is the glass cannon: deadly, but vulnerable, even fragile.

As such, can Etienne allow himself any moments of imperfect vigilance, of weakness? What about personal relationships, love? Any attachments would be a vector to get at him, and he can’t be everywhere. Etienne makes a remark about Masumi bouncing off Buddhism, and he sounds almost scornful of her need for attachment. Has he removed that need from himself?

Does he even sleep?

It's clear one major inspiration for Etienne is Kieron Gillen's time writing Professor X in various Marvel X-Men books, but elsewhere in Kieron Gillen's creator-owned comics oeuvre, I am put in mind of two characters. One is Dionysus from The Wicked and the Divine, a kind of selfless hedonist, a deeply moral individual )in a more instinctive way than Etienne), who also had a kind of psychic power to bring people together, who gave too much of himself to keep that going at any cost, and who didn't — couldn't? — sleep. But the other is Emily Aster from Phonogram (particularly the third and final series The Immaterial Girl), a kind of selfish hedonist, a deeply immoral individual who used magical power to discard an entire half of her personality that was weighing her down.

Spoilers, but it doesn't go great for either individual. If nothing else, Emily Aster had to worry about where the other half of her personality went. Might Etienne have a similar problem? Where do the bad thoughts go? (What is the Signal really, anyway?)

Pull back to that young child, barely in school, who is discovering his power and his loss. What aspects of his own mind might he have decided were dead weight that needed to be discarded, just to survive the trauma of that moment? And then later, having rid himself of pain and coming into his power fully, and realising what it meant, what might he have decided about the person he needed to be?

Later still, in 1966, in issue #1, we see Etienne and Valentina on that street corner. Valentina has not been persuaded of Etienne's benevolent god-queen pitch, and has decided Lux needs to die. But he stops her, with some psychic message we don't see: “Here is who I am.” And a tear, a big deal from someone as mostly emotionally still as Etienne.

Whatever it is, it flips Valentina from avenging to nurturing angel. Immediately she's struck by sympathy for him, with a little horror: “terrible. I mean, difficult.” She addresses him in infantile terms, suddenly — “you poor thing” — as he confesses to some sort of lapse: “I tried to be ethical, as far as I could, but—”. 

Doubtless this moment will be revisited, but whatever was imparted here has significant emotional and narrative heft. It can't solely be that he's communicated his ‘safeguards’, given both the break in Etienne's still pool and Valentina's sudden swap from death to hugs. So what could this momentous disclosure have been?

Without doubting the genuine emotion behind it, was this also a formative experience for Etienne in terms of learning how to manage people? He saves his own life with what is, ultimately, an emotional manipulation, finding a means to trigger behaviour in someone he can't control more directly. And we see him later demonstrate the same trick, most obviously with the soldier in the mech suit at the airport, but also in how he sets up a precisely calibrated amount of validation for Masumi's artistic ambitions.

Maybe it started even earlier, though. Issue #3, 1957, Valentina goes to meet Etienne after she's had to reveal herself. Note, though, how carefully he words the observation: “if I'd done it sooner, you wouldn't have had to reveal yourself.” Not ‘I wish I'd done it sooner’, not an expression of regret, merely an observation about conditional statements. Another way to phrase it: if he hadn't done it when he did, she could have remained secret. Instead, Etienne by delaying a little, forced her out into the open. Thus forcing the meeting he thought was necessary so they could become friends, which he also thought was necessary. Not that he admits to any of this, but he doesn't deny it either. But then, lying unnecessarily is unethical…

By the time we catch up with him in the present of 1999, Etienne is, well, the scariest motherfucker alive. Heavy claims that when he kills he’s with them, and the level of detail he has about seemingly anyone he chooses to investigate, kept inside an eidetic memory, suggest that on a level of perception at least this is true. See him describe in detail the soldier’s children, and then threaten that they’d open their wrists with their teeth; see him kill a mother with her family at breakfast. Masumi’s question still has force: how can he do what he does? How does he live with it?

He does describe himself as a man with regrets, back in the interview with Tonya. He even calls the regrets personal, yet even there, it’s in terms of evaluation. He could have done it better. It was a failure. All deaths were regrettable. He wants to avoid future mistakes. He’s practically laying out his own improvement plan at an annual job review. It’s a hell of a way to talk about mass psychic murder primarily in terms of how you wish you were better at it. Yet, he seems sincere about wanting to improve. Heavy thinks he’s getting less human, but I think Eitenne sees it as refining himself, and with his power there’s really no limit to where refinement might take him. Self-help doesn’t usually involve being able to rewire the neurons and flush chemicals through the synapses directly, but for Etienne it does. A mind of glass, again: everything transparent and free for vision, weighing, analysis, and he’s so sharp he can cut himself, cut himself right open and carve away what doesn’t serve.

This, then, is the picture of Etienne Lux I see: a person with huge traumas and incredible ongoing stressors, who ordinarily would be a good candidate for some serious therapy, is instead possessed of the ability to shape his own mind however he wants… but that means his own desires are also themselves subject to his will. The snake eats the tail, and Etienne's early decisions about who he wanted to become may end up determining how he acts now. If Etienne concluded that his sense of empathy was an impediment to making a good ethical decision, he could choose to discard it. But having done so, would he ever make the decision to put it back? And if not, what kind of person does that make him now, while he weighs these ethical judgements?

Let's pull back to that child one last time, but back a little further. Why was he in that coma in the first place? The timeline in issue #3 merely says “his parents dead in a crash”, a notably passive phrasing that even omits any sense of what the crash was… or what caused it. 

Is it possible Etienne, even at four years old, decided that his own parents needed to die? And if so, what could possibly lead a four year old to that decision?

Regardless of his culpability, though, this moment of the crash must figure heavily in Etienne's psychology. It could well be literally his earliest memory. That sort of thing leaves marks on a person, indelible images of the moments of collision.

Impact. A window breaks. Shards of glass, hanging in the air. Sharp edges and light, the kind that both sees and sears. Shards: beautiful, but broken.

The mind of Etienne Lux.

been doing a little power fantasy reread even though we’ve got only one completed volume so far (i used to do this all the time with wicdiv so i guess kieron’s cooking again) and i think my favorite scene in this comic so far is etienne and valentina’s first meeting as children, if only for how it’s having so much fun playing with tone. at first you’re like oh how cute they were childhood pals! and then etienne immediately starts talking about how he had to fry a guy’s mind for valentina because otherwise people would have died. to which valentina responds “omg cool i would love to be friends with you. also every person that has ever existed has been from one single timeline and no one realizes how precariously close they are to never existing at all.” then they go on the swingsets :)

Get Masumi an Island

On first reading The Power Fantasy, I didn't really think about whose voice these data pages are written in. Are they in-universe documents, perhaps from a government dossier or newspaper article? Are they a reliable, omniscient narrator? Are they something else entirely? I admittedly didn't think about any of that until a friend raised those questions for me- but while I don't know if it'll ever affect the plot, it's kind of a fascinating topic.

Particularly I want to draw attention to names...

Interior illustrations of Etienne Lux and Major Glenn Campbell from The Power Fantasy, produced for @thepowercut zine. Out today!

I really want the doomed by the narrative hell woman to not be evil.

Dark Horse Preview: FML #4

Read a preview of FML #4 from Dark Horse Comics, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick with art by David López.

The Power Fantasy #6

"Okay-- it all comes down to the goth chick, right?"

I think every Kieron Gillen comic I've read defies neat classification. The Power Fantasy is very much not a superhero comic, but it has all the trappings of one, mostly for the purpose of examining and subverting them. One volume in, we're starting to see what they're going to do with it.