Putting The Band Back Together: Powers #10 Review

Brian Michael Bendis’s and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers has been a dicey read for me for a long time now. A comic that started as a unique take on the superhero book, where some regular cops worked regular cases that just happened to involve superhumans and included some of the coolest dialogue you could find in a comic book, it eventually… evolved. Or devolved. Into a book where the regular cops got powers and secret identities, and the compelling partners at the core of the book split up, all while Bendis and Oeming started putting out, say, an issue a year, whether we needed one or not.

If the original Powers arc, Who Killed Retro Girl?, was the comics equivalent of Twin Peaks season one, the more recent arcs have been more like Laverne & Shirley after they went to Hollywood… assuming Garry Marshal had had the brainwave to replace Shirley with The Great Gazoo. Which is somewhat of an unkind comparison, because I always kept Powers on my pull list, because even while the characters shuffled and I lost track of the plot between issues, it still offered some of the best dialogue in comics, and there was always something interesting going on, even if some issues felt less like seeing Muhammed Ali in his prime in 1979 than it did watching Muhammed Ali trying to eat prime rib in 2009.

You get all that? Good. Now forget it all. Because Powers #10 is flat-out the best issue of Powers since the early, early Image Comics days. It has it all: the crackling dialogue, Walker and Pilgrim back together doing interrogations in the box, and real, human stakes behind the superpowers. It is awesome, and one of the best single issues of not just Powers, but of any comic book I’ve read in weeks.

 We are still in the middle of the arc that started back in 2008 oor 2009: someone is killing The Golden Ones – thinks Kirby’s New Gods, only with perpetual hard-ons and a taste for strong drink – and original Powers partners Walker and Pilgrim have a suspect in interrogation. And after years of story arcs that have included Walker as superhero, Walker as superhero mentor, and Walker as fucking caveman, that alone should be enough to indicate we’re going back to basics, and in a welcome way.

But that’s not all. Not by a damn sight. This issue goes back to the elements that made the early issues of Powers so damn… powerful. We have a killer who is insane, but also brilliant and deeply, deeply tormented. When he reveals the reason behind the murder of Golden One Damocles, it is harrowing and graphic – think the descriptions of almost any weird-assed thing that any “superhero” ever did in Garth Ennis’s The Boys, yet without the extraneous dick jokes. There are many comic books that try to extrapolate what would happen if superhumans actually interacted with actual people in the “real” world, but few are as successful at showing just how horrifying that concept might be… or make me wish less that there was an actual thing as a superhero.

We also have a group of superheroes, for all intents and purposes, declaring war upon the human race. This is not only horrifying – particularly in the way that Bendis depicts the initial declaration of war – but it ups the stakes of everything that Powers has shown in its world since the first issue. This comic series has shown a world where people with superpowers are strictly controlled by human agencies. The entire premise is that regular people, with a little technology (drainers) and the rule of law, can control people with the power of gods. And this has led to some interesting and different stories… but here, Bendis blows the comfortable illusion that simple police can do anything about people with this kind of power straight out of the water. It not only turns the entire series on its ear, it is Goddamned exciting.

Oeming’s art is similar to how it always has been – an abstract style that has always reminded me a bit of Bruce Timm’s on Batman: The Animated Series – yet here it stays subtly away from the cartoony and errs toward simply simple-lined and abstract. This makes everything more menacing looking, in a way that completely serves the story. In addition, on many pages Oeming draws disconnected panels, allowing for huge areas of black space on the page, and when you throw in colorist Chris Eliopoulos’s darkened palatte for almost every panel, you have a menacin, threatening looking issue. And given the subject matter, it utterly works.

What else can I say? Powers #10 is the best single issue of the series in years. The only nitpick I have is that the cliffhanger ending seems to raise the stakes to a level where I can’t even see how the street-level police protagonists of the story can even take a part… oh, right. They both have superpowers. See? That’s how effective this issue was. It made me forget the places where the story lost its way, and made me remember the glory days of Who Killed Retro Girl? And considering how many times that story is referenced in this issue, it made Bendis remember it, too.

This is good comics. Go buy it.