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Powers: Definitive Collection #8
Powers: The Best Ever
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Eisner award-winning cops and capes comic Powers, original creators Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming have reunited for the most significant Powers story ever. Really.
Spanning decades and genres while hearkening back to its earliest origins, the story of superhero turned homicide detective Christian Walker comes to a fantastic conclusion. This all-new graphic novel will be a celebration of the entire run, a look back at the cult classic TV show including an exclusive look at the third season that never was and an all-new series spanning retrospective interview with Brian Michael Bendis!
Spanning decades and genres while hearkening back to its earliest origins, the story of superhero turned homicide detective Christian Walker comes to a fantastic conclusion. This all-new graphic novel will be a celebration of the entire run, a look back at the cult classic TV show including an exclusive look at the third season that never was and an all-new series spanning retrospective interview with Brian Michael Bendis!
264 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2020
3 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
Brian Michael Bendis
4,415 books2,569 followersA comic book writer and erstwhile artist. He has won critical acclaim (including five Eisner Awards) and is one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics. For over eight years Bendis’s books have consistently sat in the top five best sellers on the nationwide comic and graphic novel sales charts.
Though he started as a writer and artist of independent noir fiction series, he shot to stardom as a writer of Marvel Comics' superhero books, particularly Ultimate Spider-Man.
Bendis first entered the comic world with the "Jinx" line of crime comics in 1995. This line has spawned the graphic novels Goldfish, Fire, Jinx, Torso (with Marc Andreyko), and Total Sell Out. Bendis is writing the film version of Jinx for Universal Pictures with Oscar-winner Charlize Theron attached to star and produce.
Bendis’s other projects include the Harvey, Eisner, and Eagle Award-nominated Powers (with Michael Avon Oeming) originally from Image Comics, now published by Marvel's new creator-owned imprint Icon Comics, and the Hollywood tell-all Fortune and Glory from Oni Press, both of which received an "A" from Entertainment Weekly.
Bendis is one of the premiere architects of Marvel's "Ultimate" line: comics specifically created for the new generation of comic readers. He has written every issue of Ultimate Spider-Man since its best-selling launch, and has also written for Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men, as well as every issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Ultimate Origin and Ultimate Six.
Brian is currently helming a renaissance for Marvel’s AVENGERS franchise by writing both New Avengers and Mighty Avengers along with the successful ‘event’ projects House Of M, Secret War, and this summer’s Secret Invasion.
He has also previously done work on Daredevil, Alias, and The Pulse.
Though he started as a writer and artist of independent noir fiction series, he shot to stardom as a writer of Marvel Comics' superhero books, particularly Ultimate Spider-Man.
Bendis first entered the comic world with the "Jinx" line of crime comics in 1995. This line has spawned the graphic novels Goldfish, Fire, Jinx, Torso (with Marc Andreyko), and Total Sell Out. Bendis is writing the film version of Jinx for Universal Pictures with Oscar-winner Charlize Theron attached to star and produce.
Bendis’s other projects include the Harvey, Eisner, and Eagle Award-nominated Powers (with Michael Avon Oeming) originally from Image Comics, now published by Marvel's new creator-owned imprint Icon Comics, and the Hollywood tell-all Fortune and Glory from Oni Press, both of which received an "A" from Entertainment Weekly.
Bendis is one of the premiere architects of Marvel's "Ultimate" line: comics specifically created for the new generation of comic readers. He has written every issue of Ultimate Spider-Man since its best-selling launch, and has also written for Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men, as well as every issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Ultimate Origin and Ultimate Six.
Brian is currently helming a renaissance for Marvel’s AVENGERS franchise by writing both New Avengers and Mighty Avengers along with the successful ‘event’ projects House Of M, Secret War, and this summer’s Secret Invasion.
He has also previously done work on Daredevil, Alias, and The Pulse.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
September 23, 2020
Bendis and Oeming end Powers on its 20th anniversary with a brand new OGN. It's a very fitting end to the series. Walker and Pilgrim return after 20 years for one last case. I'm not going to say more except I really dug it. If you've stuck around for the book this long, you'll probably dig it too.
February 4, 2025
Great series!
December 1, 2021
Look, I am deeply fond of the Powers series -- meaning always happy with the works and almost always happy with the franchise -- so this work is bittersweet, for two reasons.
First, it marks the end of one era of Powers -- the finale of this graphic novel puts a wrap on the-way-things-have been. Then, I found it bittersweet because the story, dialogue, and illustration were not a crisp as they have been -- there were pictures where I could not make out what was being shown to me; there were scene transitions that were too sudden, there was action for no identifiable reason. I mean, still, probably the most awesome comic ever, but The Best Ever is second best to other issues of Powers.
I have spoken.
First, it marks the end of one era of Powers -- the finale of this graphic novel puts a wrap on the-way-things-have been. Then, I found it bittersweet because the story, dialogue, and illustration were not a crisp as they have been -- there were pictures where I could not make out what was being shown to me; there were scene transitions that were too sudden, there was action for no identifiable reason. I mean, still, probably the most awesome comic ever, but The Best Ever is second best to other issues of Powers.
I have spoken.
June 27, 2023
I love Powers and I miss Powers.
March 25, 2022
Powers is finished.
It's been a rocky road for this series. It started as detective fiction mixed with superheroes. What's not to like? The hype train kicked in and momentum pushed it out to the masses. Tons of people read the stories and were fascinated with the world.
Then...
The hype train got loose and Powers went careening through various retcons, reboots, and revisions. Hell, they even got two tries at a TV show.
At least with this, we get a decent (if mostly a retelling) ending for our main characters. It had highs and lows. It isn't their worst, but don't expect earth shaking revelations. It was just nice to see them finish this story out.
It's been a rocky road for this series. It started as detective fiction mixed with superheroes. What's not to like? The hype train kicked in and momentum pushed it out to the masses. Tons of people read the stories and were fascinated with the world.
Then...
The hype train got loose and Powers went careening through various retcons, reboots, and revisions. Hell, they even got two tries at a TV show.
At least with this, we get a decent (if mostly a retelling) ending for our main characters. It had highs and lows. It isn't their worst, but don't expect earth shaking revelations. It was just nice to see them finish this story out.
November 4, 2020
A largely unsatisfying conclusion to this long running creator owned series. What started with so much promise, a unique art style and engaging storytelling fell victim to the "creator owned curse" of extensive delays between issues, frequent reboots (after the failed TV series) and the total loss of all narrative momentum. I'm glad Walker and Deena got a conclusion, I just wish I cared more.
September 18, 2020
Solid finale to one of the all-time great series. Oeming's art is (unsurprisingly) perfection. Makes me want to go read the whole thing from the start, brb ;)
December 13, 2022
I've been reading this series (obviously very slowly) since college. It's given me 20 years of genuine pleasure. One (if not THE) best series ever.
June 28, 2025
Bendis has the decency to finish what he started properly. The characters complete their personal arcs and we are given a conclusion.
However, it is delayed and takes forever to get there and much time is wasted to find back a long gone spark. The ending is very gory but feels out of place and somewhat outdated. If I had to summarize it it’d be "too little too late".
It's good that this conclusion exists, but given the success the series had in its days, it deserved better.
However, it is delayed and takes forever to get there and much time is wasted to find back a long gone spark. The ending is very gory but feels out of place and somewhat outdated. If I had to summarize it it’d be "too little too late".
It's good that this conclusion exists, but given the success the series had in its days, it deserved better.
Read
April 29, 2022Powers was, alongside Ultimate Spider-Man, the first Bendis comic I read. The quickfire dialogue was the most distinctive aspect of a whole new kind of realism, moving on from the post-Moore and Miller wave which was already starting to run out of steam. But in comics as any other artform, every new 'realism' comes to look mannered soon enough, and heavens know that Bendis back-and-forth has worn thin over the intervening years, splurged across too many unsuitable characters and directionless team books. Still, even as I've read less and less of the other stuff, I'd always check out new Powers. Not least because that wasn't much of a commitment; the more YA books and misbegotten DC events he wrote, the less time he had for the series that got him there, and even its brief turn as a TV series (starring Eddie Izzard, during PlayStation's fleeting attempt to join the Peak TV bandwagon) never really saw it regain momentum. I wasn't one of the lightweights who fled after the monkey sex issue, but somewhere in the various renumberings and relaunches, it did slip from a book I bought to one I got from the library. Recently, I realised I didn't know if there had been any more, looked, saw this, and subsequently happened across a copy. But it's the first Powers I've read since 2016 and, looking back, even there I was complaining that I had lost the thread a bit.
The upshot of which is that, despite having to the best of my knowledge read all of Powers, even the Who Killed Madman? short that I suspect can never be reprinted for legal reasons, as I started this I basically had no clue what was going on. At least this left me in much the same boat as Christian Walker, the protagonist, who was revealed a couple of years in to be at least as old as humanity, but not to remember that because he only has a human amount of memory space. Now, having been depowered a while back, he's finally ageing (and looking good with it, to be fair; I suppose silver foxhood is some small consolation for being cursed with mortality), but much of the book flashes back to his earlier lives, including a character normally seen as his arch-enemy incongruously teaching him about his destiny as harbinger for fresh ages of heroes. There are plenty of other callbacks too, some resonant (a dead superhero found under graffiti reading 'KAOTIC CHIC' on the anniversary of Retro Girl's death) and some less so (I recall FG3 having been the focus of a story, but not what happened therein). At times I genuinely didn't know whether what we were seeing was meant to be revelatory – was it already established that Triphammer was the inventor of the power-dampeners necessary for police cells to mean anything to superhumans? Still, if clarity remained elusive, the heft of the volume at least means a certain momentum could build up, such that after a while I was invested in the now even if I couldn't fully recall the then (again, very Walker). And if Bendis' toolkit has come to seem like a tired box of tricks of late, slotted back into its original setting it still has a certain power. Part of which, I suspect, is simply being able to swear properly here: a lot of the emotional impact comes from how bloody ancient Walker is, how the years are starting to tell on other characters too, how kids from before are now adults, but nothing crystallised this so well as the response when Sunrise describes him as "Old as fuck" and Pilgrim* replies "He might have known fuck's father". Which depending how you read it could also double as a summary of the monkey issue.
If my patience with Bendis has sometimes lapsed over the years, I've never lost faith in Oeming's art, and here he's definitely still got the goods, going just far enough into cartoonishness for his superhumans to feel mythic, yet still noir enough to sell the cops – and the intersection of the two being the right fit for the lusty, foul-mouthed heroes to feel inevitable instead of adolescent. Where he falls down is on extended scenes of close-up action, particularly gory ones – and those take up much more of this volume than I recall from earlier Powers. Perhaps that's my memory tidying up long scenes into more telling glimpses, but certainly the sheer volume of it here feels excessive, particularly when post-Powers mainstream comics have been so happy to base big comics around minor heroes getting ripped in half (hiya, Geoff Johns). The quiet epilogue scenes are much better at giving the series a sense of closure than the confused welter of dismemberment that thinks it's a climax, and achieve that all-important trick of sending the reader away feeling like what they've read wasn't a colossal waste of time. And time's the tricky element here; in some ways this would have landed a lot better without the massive gaps in publication, but equally the time jump within the story has a lot more impact for being paired with an extratextual time jump, instead of just falling between two monthly issues.
*Only now do I twig that all three leads have surnames which could also be superhero names.
The upshot of which is that, despite having to the best of my knowledge read all of Powers, even the Who Killed Madman? short that I suspect can never be reprinted for legal reasons, as I started this I basically had no clue what was going on. At least this left me in much the same boat as Christian Walker, the protagonist, who was revealed a couple of years in to be at least as old as humanity, but not to remember that because he only has a human amount of memory space. Now, having been depowered a while back, he's finally ageing (and looking good with it, to be fair; I suppose silver foxhood is some small consolation for being cursed with mortality), but much of the book flashes back to his earlier lives, including a character normally seen as his arch-enemy incongruously teaching him about his destiny as harbinger for fresh ages of heroes. There are plenty of other callbacks too, some resonant (a dead superhero found under graffiti reading 'KAOTIC CHIC' on the anniversary of Retro Girl's death) and some less so (I recall FG3 having been the focus of a story, but not what happened therein). At times I genuinely didn't know whether what we were seeing was meant to be revelatory – was it already established that Triphammer was the inventor of the power-dampeners necessary for police cells to mean anything to superhumans? Still, if clarity remained elusive, the heft of the volume at least means a certain momentum could build up, such that after a while I was invested in the now even if I couldn't fully recall the then (again, very Walker). And if Bendis' toolkit has come to seem like a tired box of tricks of late, slotted back into its original setting it still has a certain power. Part of which, I suspect, is simply being able to swear properly here: a lot of the emotional impact comes from how bloody ancient Walker is, how the years are starting to tell on other characters too, how kids from before are now adults, but nothing crystallised this so well as the response when Sunrise describes him as "Old as fuck" and Pilgrim* replies "He might have known fuck's father". Which depending how you read it could also double as a summary of the monkey issue.
If my patience with Bendis has sometimes lapsed over the years, I've never lost faith in Oeming's art, and here he's definitely still got the goods, going just far enough into cartoonishness for his superhumans to feel mythic, yet still noir enough to sell the cops – and the intersection of the two being the right fit for the lusty, foul-mouthed heroes to feel inevitable instead of adolescent. Where he falls down is on extended scenes of close-up action, particularly gory ones – and those take up much more of this volume than I recall from earlier Powers. Perhaps that's my memory tidying up long scenes into more telling glimpses, but certainly the sheer volume of it here feels excessive, particularly when post-Powers mainstream comics have been so happy to base big comics around minor heroes getting ripped in half (hiya, Geoff Johns). The quiet epilogue scenes are much better at giving the series a sense of closure than the confused welter of dismemberment that thinks it's a climax, and achieve that all-important trick of sending the reader away feeling like what they've read wasn't a colossal waste of time. And time's the tricky element here; in some ways this would have landed a lot better without the massive gaps in publication, but equally the time jump within the story has a lot more impact for being paired with an extratextual time jump, instead of just falling between two monthly issues.
*Only now do I twig that all three leads have surnames which could also be superhero names.
October 23, 2021
I started reading POWERS when it was only a few issues into its original run. I found the serious, dark, and funny storytelling to be incredibly fresh and engaging and I loved the stylized art (which recalled Batman the Animated Series but interpreted though the hands of someone new and very talented) I read the series for years, eventually dropping it sometime after it became POWERS : BUREAU, after feeling that the series had gotten stale, constantly trying to raise the stakes and rewriting its own continuity along the way. For all that Bendis had a trailblazing new take on super heroes and villains, the series always suffered from his inability to stick to the stories he'd already told. He was constantly throwing out what he'd already established about the world and the characters in the service of whatever new story he'd come up with. I tried to be forgiving about it, but as a reader I couldn't help but feel betrayed. As a creator he was asking me to care about and invest in his stories even though he was more than happy to randomly retcon them, rendering them moot. Again, I read the series for YEARS and recommended it to a lot of people, so I was able to overlook a lot of Bendis' faults as a writer for a long time because there was still so much there that I loved.
When I saw that he'd written this new story, I was excited, having not read a new POWERS story in years. But buying it was a mistake. In this new edition, he isn't revisiting the world to tell some final story about the characters or to provide a satisfying conclusion. No, once again Bendis decides to rewrite the characters' histories in the service of this new story idea, which is really just a retread of another story he's already told a few times before. I found nothing fresh, new, or interesting in these pages. It was only an abyss of disappointment.
When I saw that he'd written this new story, I was excited, having not read a new POWERS story in years. But buying it was a mistake. In this new edition, he isn't revisiting the world to tell some final story about the characters or to provide a satisfying conclusion. No, once again Bendis decides to rewrite the characters' histories in the service of this new story idea, which is really just a retread of another story he's already told a few times before. I found nothing fresh, new, or interesting in these pages. It was only an abyss of disappointment.
November 15, 2022
Powers is easily one of my all-time favorite superhero series. For something like 16 volumes, we got the extended adventures of detectives Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim, two cops in a superpowered city who investigate homicides of people with powers. It was such a simple, brilliant premise, and Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming did it justice again and again, offering a deconstruction of the tropes and suspended disbelief that makes superhero stories run while still showing a love for this crazy genre that only makes sense when we accept that it's not supposed to. The original run ended on a deeply satisfying note, which is why it's so interesting to come back to the universe years later for an unexpected coda we never thought we were going to get. I don't know if Bendis meant to give this series years to cool off before writing its final volume, but the result cannot be argued with. Despite the usual excesses that give Powers its blemishes - just because you can drop f-bombs in this series doesn't mean doing it every page actually improves things, Brian, and yes, we saw that you snuck in the monkey naughty bits one last time - this is as good a Powers story as we ever got, with Walker and Pilgrim coming back after years away from the game, each still haunted by the ghosts from their earlier days, each given one last chance to square the bad stuff in their head, each confronted by an ancient nemesis who never really went away, and probably never will. This is a return to a story that never ends, really, even though parts of it must. And in seeing all that play out, we see that even the Powers themselves are all part of something much larger than themselves. Something eternal. Something immortal. Something...Powerful.
June 15, 2025
After finally reading the whole Powers series at once (I originally fell off it at some point after loving the first few stories), I wish I liked this more.
The storytelling is messy, with art that frequently makes it hard to understand what just happened. That was more charming 20+ years ago, when Powers was an indie success. But in getting away from the ground level stories that worked so well in 2000, later volumes and this conclusion lose appeal for me. The story tries to be a big dramatic superhero battle drama, and the art style just doesn't work for that. I wish the Powers finale leaned into the series' strengths instead of highlighting its weaknesses.
The storytelling is messy, with art that frequently makes it hard to understand what just happened. That was more charming 20+ years ago, when Powers was an indie success. But in getting away from the ground level stories that worked so well in 2000, later volumes and this conclusion lose appeal for me. The story tries to be a big dramatic superhero battle drama, and the art style just doesn't work for that. I wish the Powers finale leaned into the series' strengths instead of highlighting its weaknesses.
March 12, 2023
Solid wrap/coda on the Powers story. Impact a little blunted since it's been awhile, but it's a solid story if leaning a bit hard on history - would probably hit harder if I was fresher on my Powers world knowledge.
March 29, 2025
A come-back for Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim, as they are wrenched back into the world of the police and the powers when Wolfe is reincarnated. We get a genuine origin story and all the graphic violence that is normal in the Powers series.
December 13, 2025
A fine "conclusion" to the Pilgrim/Walker story. Mad carnage, old villains, fine dialogue, strong layouts - good aging character art. Not the very best (ever), but the end of a 20 year story well done.
September 11, 2020
3.5 really
November 15, 2020
You never get what’s promised. Sigh. I’m going to have to go back and re-read all the previous volumes.
May 2, 2022
A deserved close up to a beloved series.
October 5, 2022
Goodreads password SNAFU locked me out from April to October, so I’m just adding all the books at once. Read dates aren’t accurate.
February 22, 2023
I've only read Vol. 1, so I'm guessing I'm missing a lot, but this one was pretty hard to follow. Even the fight scenes, something with minimal story, were tough to follow what was going on.
November 8, 2023
Great closure. Got me right in the feels.
December 8, 2023
Lots of characters, not much recollection, perhaps too nostalgic, but ok wrap - I suppose.
June 9, 2025
Sad end
Sad end to one of the best Storylines ever written. Makes me wand to reread the series from scratch. I’d say one of the two best comics ever written.
Sad end to one of the best Storylines ever written. Makes me wand to reread the series from scratch. I’d say one of the two best comics ever written.
July 28, 2025
A wonderful send off for the title, for the time being!
August 23, 2021
I'm conflicted about how I feel regarding this last volume of Powers.
On the one hand, although it does end close to definitively, I didn't need to see middle-aged Pilgim. Also, given the events in this book, are we really sure that this is even an ending?
An old antagonist comes back in this volume, and many pages feel like a re-hash or even outright reprinting of old, and well-known events. I guess this is to help newer readers come up to speed. But it feels like a waste of pages to me since I've been following since the beginning. I also feel like Sunrise gets shunted to one side a little because of Pilgim's re-emergence, and that unrolls years of progress developing her as Walker's new partner.
Finally,
On the gripping hand, it is good to see the old team together, and the mystery is fully satisfying to me.
On the one hand, although it does end close to definitively, I didn't need to see middle-aged Pilgim. Also, given the events in this book, are we really sure that this is even an ending?
An old antagonist comes back in this volume, and many pages feel like a re-hash or even outright reprinting of old, and well-known events. I guess this is to help newer readers come up to speed. But it feels like a waste of pages to me since I've been following since the beginning. I also feel like Sunrise gets shunted to one side a little because of Pilgim's re-emergence, and that unrolls years of progress developing her as Walker's new partner.
Finally,
On the gripping hand, it is good to see the old team together, and the mystery is fully satisfying to me.
July 10, 2023
I finished Brian Michael Bendis' and Michael Avon Oeming's POWERS, like all of it. Every single issue. Except the novel (The Secret History of Deena Pilgrim) and based off of the reviews, I have no interest watching the tv show. Powers Bureau which is the 4th series is my least favorite of the bunch. Every time they renumber (and I presume there was a long hiatus each time), the storytelling weakens a bit and the continuity feels off. I know it's intended to bring new people into the fold, but Bureau was easily my least favorite of the bunch. The final story, the 5th series, titled ALL NEW POWERS and BEST EVER are more of a return to form and a decent wrap up to our beloved characters. As a whole this was a series that really peaked early. The earlier issues were a unique mix of noir, police procedural, and critique of the obsession with superheroes, the media and the larger world played a huge part in the series, and at the heart of it all were the two leads Deena Pilgirm Chris-tian Walker. The first and second series are both mostly pretty excellent and feel like a complete story, as it went on, it felt like revisiting old friends, and it did get tired the longer it went. Yet, I really enjoyed my time with the series overall, all 100+ issues of them.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews