One cool thing about Caspar Wijngaard's attention to visual detail in The Power Fantasy is that, rather than having a specific trademark hairstyle or a single Important Haircut moment (TV Tropes link), everyone is characterized by their overall relationship to their hair. All six Superpowers change up their hairstyle, whether that's day-to-day or year-to-year- but they each have unique approaches to how they look, that offer clues to who they are as people.
As far as we can tell, Valentina's had the exact same haircut her entire adult life, but she styles it differently on different days, and in different contexts. I think she's known for a long time who she is and who she wants to be- specifically, she knows she's a Superpower, a hero or a danger or both, but she wants to be human, someone who can be kind and friendly and have loved ones. For her, that's manifesting as conventional femininity, which shows up in her overall sense of style as well as her hair.
That said- her hair was shorter as a kid, probably just for practical reasons. And when she goes full angel-self, it changes both color and texture- pure white, and a more stylized texture than the detailed strands of her usual hair.
In contrast, Eliza's changed her hair a whole bunch of times, and I feel like she doesn't have any consistent throughline to what she's going for. It's been all different lengths, usually worn loose but one time in a ponytail, usually kept straight but one time permed. Eliza switching haircuts so many times feels to me like she's never satisfied with who she is- she's hungry to be something else, something more. It's the opposite of Valentina having a very clear idea what her hair is expressing. Eliza's searching for something with her hair that a haircut alone is never going to give her.
However, she's repeated haircuts a couple times. Her long hair the day she said no penitent sinner would burn is similar to the long hair she received right after selling her soul to hell. And also, her chin-length bob the day Magus passed her over for promotion is similar to her 1999 hair, when she's so far been pretty antagonistic towards Magus. (Although the haircuts aren't identical. Like Valentina, Eliza's hair changes color and texture from her fully-human form to her descended extradimensional form.) Is the visual echo significant? It'll probably never be confirmed one way or the other that it is, but it's an interesting way to look at things. (Credit to someone on the Discord for sharing the insight that Eliza's 1999 haircut matches her 1986 one!)
Heavy is kind of the midpoint between consistent look and continual change- he's always had long hair, but the context keeps shifting. He's switched subcultures a couple different times, always conveniently to a look where it's fashionable for a man to have long hair- which means the exact style of his long hair varies.
Instead of chronological order, I laid this image out to show that Heavy also puts a lot of effort into styling his hair day-to-day- which is really a showcase of Caspar's attention to texture. The top row of images are ones where I'd say he hasn't done anything to his hair except maybe wash it- and so it's just slightly wavy, drawn with a crinkly kind of texture.
The second row is him the first scene he appears in, where his hair is incredibly silky-smooth at first, and then a little wilder after getting shot and flying around. I can't actually prove that he had someone blow-dry it for him that morning, but I choose to believe that he did. (My full headcanon on that is that having his hair done is a comfort thing. Like, he'd never admit out loud how stressed he was that day, but he'd have someone take care of him without having to directly ask for it... that's all just speculation and personal gratification, though.)
And the third row of images is all the other stuff he does with his hair. In order: he's gelled it back for Masumi's exhibition, then he sleeps on it with the gel in and it turns into a mess. Then you've got his tightly-curled perm from 1981 and a looser perm from probably the seventies. More than anyone else, Heavy's the one who's willing to put day-to-day time into his hair looking good. (For a certain definition of period-piece "good", with that perm.)
Etienne gradually moves from very short hair to locs, but I think the interesting part is how he grows out his beard. These are in chronological order, and you can see him go from a patchier beard when younger to a full, bushy beard by 1999. My read on this is that he's trying to look sophisticated- which means mature, a grown-ass man- and he's trying to compensate for the receding jawline that's more visible when he's a clean-shaven teenager. (Again, full headcanon mode is that he feels compelled to compete with Heavy's ridiculous lantern jaw. But again, that might just be me.)
Masumi, the character most openly inspired by anime and manga, comes very close to having anime/manga-style Expressive Hair (TV Tropes link again), meaning that it almost seems to move based on how she feels. The first row is three panels in order from the same scene- messy hair while she's grumpy, transitioning to smoother hair as she starts to relax. The second row is three panels from a different scene- hair that's been straightened at a time when she's trying to hold herself together, getting messier as she loses composure. Neither of those hair changes is completely impossible under the circumstances- maybe her bedhead is resolving itself, and maybe her styled hair is coming loose from sweating and moving around. But those changes just conveniently parallel her emotional arc.
And at other times, she puts her hair up in mini-ponytails that make her look young and cute. When she actually was younger, her hair was longer and naturally black. Ironically, I think that actually looks more mature... maybe she's made a move towards looking cute and nonthreatening over time?
Magus* has also always had long hair, but it was a bit shorter in 1978 than it has been since. I think it's interesting that he bothered to keep that neatly trimmed beard even though most of the world didn't see it- it was for the sake of himself and his inner circle. I think it symbolizes him being a little scruffy, a little countercultural- but not a total mess, as he clearly takes care of it.
By 1999, his* hair texture has changed a bit, messier and lanker... my original theory was that he stopped washing it, in line with how he's gotten too thin and he's not buying new clothes. In retrospect though... yeah I'm not taking any bets until next issue.
* it's complicated
And then there's Tonya, Isabella, Kid Ignition- I could say stuff about their hair too but I think I've gone on long enough. Even walk-on extras have visual characterization that extends to every part of their design, head to toe. It's kind of mind-blowing the amount of thought that's gone into just that one aspect of character design in TPF, and the amount of drawing skill it takes to carry the ideas through.
This is just so eloquent. Eliza's cross (symbolic of her Christian faith) is the thing that visually-metaphorically "comes between" her and Magus. It's the "crux" of their disagreement. And it's the lens each of them sees the other through- he judges her for being a Christian, she judges him on the basis of her Christian values. And I feel like, even before I articulated all that stuff to myself, the image just visually works to convey those vibes. So good.
All right, I'm going to do something dangerous and write one post that promises eight more to come. It's been a while since I reread Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, a groundbreaking nonfiction comic on the techniques, theory, and potential of comics as a medium. It was first published in 1993, and it's aged... interestingly, but going back through it is giving me a lot of thoughts. Specifically, thoughts about The Power Fantasy, the comic that's been occupying 99% of my brain for four months now. So I'm going to (try and) do a post for each chapter of UC, write about what I think McCloud got right and wrong, and apply that to TPF.
Chapter One is about "What is the definition of comics?" but more specifically, it's McCloud being very clear that comics can be so much more than just the (direct quote) "crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare" that they usually were. Comics can be manga, or comic strips, or graphic novels, or any number of other things, McCloud tells us! There's precedents for comics in Ancient Egyptian wall art, medieval stained glass, all kinds of things! Comics is a medium, not a single genre! It's not just all superheroes!
...and look, this is what I mean by UC having aged interestingly. I want to remind everyone this book was published in 1993, and also point out that Watchmen launched in 1986. UC was groundbreaking in 1993, because lots of people had never seen someone write and draw seriously about comics as a medium. If we take comics seriously today, and we don't feel overly defensive about it, we probably owe some of that credibility to McCloud's defensiveness once upon a time. And he's right that "comics" is best defined as "sequential art", rather than "magazines about superheroes". You can tell all kinds of stories in comic form.
But that defensiveness about "comics can be more than just that superhero junk" is kind of funhouse-mirrored in The Power Fantasy and in its predecessor, Watchmen. I'm admittedly only on the fringes of conversations about superhero comics and their evolution over time... but I know Watchmen was also a groundbreaking comic that shaped comics culture forever. It's a deconstruction of the lighthearted heroic fantasies that came before it, and it inspired a lot of grimdark comics that matched its bleak tone but not its depth and insight.
...or so I'm told. I only read Watchmen once, years ago. I tried rereading it earlier this year, but I couldn't get into it. I just still know all this stuff because that's the level of cultural impact it's had. Also, because so many TPF reviews and blurbs say stuff like, "It's the next Watchmen! It's superhero comics finally moving out of Watchmen's shadow and onto the next thing! It's capturing the true spirit of Watchmen's deconstructionism, not just the surface tone!"
Understanding Comics is one of the best-regarded nonfiction comics of all time. Watchmen is one of the best-regarded comic books of all times. The Power Fantasy is one of the buzziest indie comic books being published right now. All of them roast classic superhero comics pretty hard, and maybe you could read it as an affectionate roast, but I don't know.
Superhero comic books are still usually the face of comics to people who don't read them. Probably not so much as in 1993, but still. How many more comics classics are going to get ahead by throwing them under the bus?
[EDIT: I later took back a lot of this in a follow-up post that you can read here. Writing late at night and not revising your posts has mixed results!]
Thinking about visual storytelling, and the "camera angle" in comics. Look at the top-right and bottom-left panels specifically- the camera is really low in both, actually below Kid Ignition's eye level. But these (implicitly) aren't moments that Kid's remembering- they're what Heavy thinks his son's childhood was like. They're not drawn from Heavy's perspective, visually, but they are his perspective, narratively. I feel like there's something really profound to be said there about emotion and subjectivity and visual metaphor, but I can't put my finger on whatever it is.
Also, why is everyone lying in a circle on the ground in that last panel? That's the most contrived-stock-photo illustration of a happy community that I could possibly imagine. I think the takeaway here is that Heavy's incredibly adept at buying his own press, no matter how flimsy the narrative is.
