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C2E2 2017: Kieron Gillen Talks High Fantasy, “Self-Hatred,” and Music Spoiling Comics

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Through his creator owned comics Phonogram and The Wicked + the Divine with artist Jamie McKelvie and colorist Matthew Wilson, Kieron Gillen has masterfully melded the fantastic worlds of music and urban fantasy into an exciting read experience. He has also conquered the worlds of Marvel with the delightful Young Avengers and way too sad Loki solo series Journey into Mystery among others as well as comics set in a galaxy far far away, like Doctor Aphra and Darth Vader. He’s also one hell of a DJ and has quite the Twitter pun game.

At C2E2, I got the opportunity to chat with Kieron about being a fantasy writer, and how the characters of WicDiv have all become terrible people. We also preview the upcoming WicDiv 455 special set in ancient Rome and ponder the fate of Phonogram‘s David Kohl (and his fiction suit wearer Kieron Gillen) in 2017 as well as strain out some of that book’s autobiographical bits.

Graphic Policy: I guess you could classify WicDiv and Phonogram as urban fantasy. (And Journey into Mystery, now that I think of it.) What has drawn you to the fantasy genre over and over again, and do you have any particular books or fantasy films that have influenced you?

Kieron Gillen: Back when I was starting to write comics, I used to call myself a speculative fiction writer. The person I was seeing told me, “No, you’re not, Kieron.” She said, “You’re a fantasy writer. Making a world where music is magic isn’t speculative fiction.” Being a speculative fiction writer is much cooler because science fiction writers are genuinely cooler than fantasy writers in my opinion. It’s real work as opposed to fantasy, which is just making shit up.

It took me a long time to accept [being a fantasy writer]. I burnt out on a lot of fantasy as a teenager. I had a kind of “come to Jesus” moment where I was like “What on Earth is this shit?” A lot of fantasy is just shit like the travelogue school of fantasy where there’s a map, the heroes will go around the map, and the big mountain. At least, Tolkien had a degree of originality.

So, the idea of me identifying as a fantasy writer is anathema. But then there’s the whole idea of urban fantasy. I used to write essays about this when I was a music writer before I realized [urban fantasy] was what I wanted to write. It was the idea of the transformation of an environment. The magic in Phonogram is that we have a world, and then you add something over the world. Like augmented reality.

People tell me that Phonogram gives them permission to view listening to music and going to clubs as a magical space. It always makes me think about parkour. My favorite thing about parkour, at least when it started, was the idea that buildings are designed as prisons for people. But, in your imagination, it can turn into a playground. They’ve chosen to see the world differently, and there’s always things to traverse.

This is kind of what urban fantasy does. You have a world and overlay it. There’s magic here. It’s like when I was a kid and loved Transformers. That car [Outside the convention center] could be a fucking robot. It’s like the Kurt Busiek core idea about superheroes. We have this magical thing in the world, and the world doesn’t change. The point of Superman is that you can see him fly past you in the skyline. If you take superheroes too seriously, you become something alternate history like Uber or science fiction. Add a superhero, and the world changes enormously.

I’ve actually been digging into primary world fantasy, like Middle Earth, as opposed to Narnia, which is a secondary world. It’s something I want to do in the future.

GP: You doing high fantasy would be awesome.

KG: I’ve said in a few interviews that I’m working on my next big, spangly thing. It’s a very literary high fantasy. It’s very grown up. I say grown up as a very loaded term because high fantasy is trashy in many ways. But I want to dig into some bigger themes and see what I can do with the genre. That hate fuck, that passion I have for fantasy means something.

GP: One thing I really enjoyed about “Imperial Phase” was that you and Jamie [McKelvie] gave Minerva and Baal a lot of character development. Why did you leave them out of the last issue of the arc?

KG: I get asked questions like “You’re very efficient with your storytelling. You hit stuff very cleanly and elegantly.” A lot of that is necessity, which is a word that is very fucking loaded in the context of WicDiv.

GP: Oh yeah, good ol’ Ananke.

KG: I’ve got 14 primary characters across the series and quite a few smaller, supporting ones. I ask what we can fit in an issue. The previous issue where we did the “phased” bit was me responding to the fact that I had so much shit to do. How can I do it in an artful way that speaks to the theme of the book.

Baal and Minerva just weren’t in this issue. The thing about “Imperial Phase” is that there’s parts one and two. When I originally planned “Imperial Phase”, I was thinking that we don’t have a cliffhanger. What’s the most unexpected thing for a WicDiv end of arc to be? It just stops, and we continue it. But when I ended up plotting it, it had a climax, but just a different kind of climax.

There was no room for Baal. If you remove Baal, you remove Minerva as well. The reason that Baal wasn’t there was a soft story beat. “Oh poop, Baal isn’t coming” leads to Persephone’s “Why do we hurt people?” The reason that Baal wasn’t there was because Persephone was there. It’s that moment when you realize that someone’s not coming to a party because they don’t want to see you. Baal not being at the party is kind of the point.

Baal is a sensitive man, and I love the dichotomy between him and Minerva. In other words, there’s more from Baal and Minerva in “Imperial Phase Part Two”. At the end of the story, Baal will be one of people’s favorite characters. He and Minerva are some of the most interesting characters, and knowing the whole story means I put him low in the mix early and then bring him up later.

GP: Good metaphor!

KG: I’m always a DJ. And since I know the whole thing, I want to build him up at different times. Dionysus is stepping forward and is one of the key players in the next arc. He’s got a scene in issue 30 with the Morrigan, which is one of my favorite things to do with the character

GP: I am really looking forward to the WicDiv 455 Special. Why did you decide to set it at the end of the Roman Empire instead of the Augustan Age with Ovid and Virgil, or during the time of Nero?

KG: If you set it at the end, you can include anything earlier. Everyone at the end knows what happens to Nero, Sulla, and Caligula, and you can reference all those people. If you’re doing something about Rome, set it at the end, make it about the end of Rome. Of course, WicDiv is about endings and the death of an empire.

This is minor spoilers, but the basic plot of 455 is that 455’s Lucifer has decided to not be involved in the Ananke pact and says, ” We don’t need Lucifer, we need Julius Caesar (Who was a god.), I’m going to save the empire.” You imagine that goes well.

The way I researched this special as opposed to the Romantics’ one [WicDiv 1831 Special] was different because the Romantics were a small cast of people, I could go relatively deep. Rome is so big that I had to do a very broad sweep and look at the entire history of Rome, which interests me. There’s some stuff I wished I gotten into, like Tiberius, who did Goth parties where everyone was in black. The slaves are painted black, he’s wearing full black, and they spend the entire party talking about death. And he’s killed people so everyone expects to die. It’s the most Gothic thing I’ve ever heard. But we had to cut it from the story.

GP: Why was Andre Araujo the perfect artist for this story?

KG: The way to phrase it is that I had a core image based on a Roman triumph, and I needed an artist willing to draw a Roman triumph. A triumph is a blaze of color and shape. Andre and I were talking when his comic Man Plus was out, and he said that he was working on a creator owned Rome pitch. In my head, I thought he was a [Katsuhiro] Otomo-esque cyberpunk guy because of Avengers A.I. and Man Plus, which is basically Akira reimagined in Portugal.

He had fantasy, sci-fi, and medieval pitches. And I said, “You like historical stuff and like drawing enormous landscapes. We can use this.” I asked him, and he was working on Ales [Kot’s] new book Generation Gone. So, we’ve derailed the work on another Image book in WicDiv’s favor and are very grateful to Ales. Also, Matt Wilson is doing the colors, and it works very well in the issue.

GP: The first 12 issues of WicDiv seemed to be about the relationship between being a fan and a creator, especially through our main character, Laura. How does her turn to the “dark side” in the past arc fit in with that fan/creator dynamic?

KG: “Imperial Phase” has been solipsistic. It’s about the gods being quite navel gaze-y. You get bits of fan stuff, like Persephone having her own fans. And that’s fun. I love how creepy everyone wearing a Persephone skull is. That transition from being a fan to having fans, and the responsibilities and duties that lie on that access and how well you navigate it.

WicDiv is based on a format of four years. The first year is a fan trying to become great, the second is this weird thing and ends with you getting your big hit. The third is you’ve got your success, and now what the hell is it for? The third year is about many things, but mostly my ambivalent feelings about WicDiv‘s success. When you get to the end of WicDiv, you’ll get that. There’s spoilery stuff I don’t really want to talk about yet.

GP: It’s like your “Ashes to Ashes”.

KG: A little bit, yeah. To go with the Bowie, we start out with Ziggy Stardust with some Black Parade, then you’ve got the Berlin period for “Commercial Suicide”. Then, it’s Let’s Dance, and “Oh yeah, we’ve got an enormous hit.” We’ve done the “Bad Blood” Taylor Swift everything explodes thing, what now? The idea that you can remain successful and use your craft to do a trashy pop thing, and everyone will love it.

But how can you look in the mirror? It’s basically the stuff that killed Cobain. That’s kind of what “Imperial Phase” has been about. There’s lots of self-hatred. That’s what we do.

GP: I don’t really get a Nirvana vibe from WicDiv, but it makes sense now.

KG: Everything’s in there. I don’t want to do too much because the gods are disappearing down their own holes in their own different ways, which is kind of the point. They have their own hamartia. This collapse is how we delineate whether people are wrestling with their demons or not.

GP: Right now, Amaterasu is basically evil. When in the past issues of WicDiv did you start to seed in her heel turn and realize she would turn out this way?

KG: It’s like one of those questions, “How do you define evil?” Amaterasu is somebody who has been easy to forgive her foibles because she’s nice. She’s Cassandra’s opposite. Cassandra is easy to dislike, but is mainly right. She is very abrasive, and it’s the irony of “the Cassandra”. People aren’t listening to her because she’s annoying, but she’s mostly right.

As opposed to Amaterasu, who’s very sweet, very kind, and a coward. And she looks great. She’s a pretty white girl, and people let them get away with things. If you look back at the first speech she gives [in WicDiv #1], it’s creepy as hell. Amaterasu is someone who knows stuff, but isn’t great at putting the them together. She’s got her practiced lines, but her interview [in the first issue] falls apart when she panics.

I’m always worried that I make her IQ drop too much. But she just doesn’t get it. One thing I love about Amaterasu is that apart from the loss of her parents, she’s had a nice life. She’s 17 and the second youngest of the Pantheon. She’s slightly younger than Persephone.

GP: I always forget she’s so young.

KG: It doesn’t make her behavior forgivable, but you understand it. If you reread WicDiv, you’ll go, “Oh yeah, that was kind of coming.” But I think might be easy to miss what we’re trying to do with Amaterasu until you got to her solo issue and that image of her immediate rage when someone tried to take a toy from her. That’s Amaterasu in two pages. This is mine, and fuck you if you try to take it.

The darker side of the characters has started to come out. And, in the last issue, she’s a fucking monster. There’s some stuff that she does that is amazing as in “Wow, you actually did that.”

GP: Like the whole “ShinTwo” thing.

KG: I always knew she was going to lean into that, but only got the pun while writing her first scenes. ShinTwo, oh no! That’s so bad, and it’s completely the right thing to do [for the character].

The thing about WicDiv is that it’s all very planned. I know the characters’ arcs. But the specific execution is what I keep free; otherwise it’s just typing for four years. It’s got to surprise and delight me, or it gets boring. And if gets boring for me, it’s even more boring for the readers. A bored writer is generally a shit writer.

GP: Moving onto the recently released Complete Phonogram, what is David Kohl up to in 2017?

KG: I imagine he’s being interviewed about his glorious career as a phonomancer. He’s settled into being a complete has-been, which is kind of the weird joy of it, I think. That final story I did with Tom Humberstone when we pull away the mask a bit and let Kohl become Kieron, and he’s like “Yeah, you got me”.

And the weird thing is you’ve got this push and pull between Kieron Gillen the writer and David Kohl the character. There are bits, like when Michael Jackson dies, and that segue between time and space. Those panels are very clearly about me, Kieron Gillen, as opposed to the panels that are about this fictional character, David Kohl, who is a critique of my own writing of a certain period. I think David Kohl is about me.

 

GP: Phonogram: Rue Britannia especially has that autobio comic vibe to it.

KG: I’ve learned to hide it better. When I was writing Rue Britannia, I was influenced by Joe Matt’s The Poor Bastard, Eddie Campbell, and of course, Grant Morrison with this quasi-fiction suit sort of thing. That’s what I wanted to do with Kohl.With Rue Britannia, I hid [the autobiographical elements] less expertly than I did later. Like I gave Britannia some of the same outfits as someone I dated. It’s kind of funny when people come up cosplaying as one of my ex-girlfriends.

I realized that in Singles Club, which is more autobiographical in a real way.There’s more facts in Rue Britannia and more emotional truth in Singles Club. By splitting the stories into the seven characters of Singles Club, I could hide it better, which is what WicDiv is doing as well.

GP: I have one last musical-based question. I’m a big fan of the WicDiv playlist, and it keeps me sane during work. I was wondering what albums or artists you were listening to while scripting “Imperial Phase Part 2”.

KG: The easiest way is to look at the playlist, but there are songs I want to add that aren’t on Spotify, like “Shocked” by Kylie Minogue. And then there’s others I can’t add because of spoilers. You need to be an obsessive WicDiv fan to see what I’m adding, but sometimes I have to wait until various [story] beats hit to drop it in. Like if there was a song called “Sakhmet’s Eating Some People,” I would add it to the playlist.

If you look at the more recent stuff on the playlist, there’s ANOHNI and her track “4 Degrees” that’s amazing apocalyptic awfulness. Blood Orange’s album Freetown Sound is on there and very Persephone in its sadness. Then, there’s Downtown Boys and their cover of “Dancing in the Dark” [by Bruce Springsteen]. I was obsessed with that track for a week and kept breaking into tears about why this record meant so much to me.

[Downtown Boys] are an X-Ray Spex-like bisexual punk band from New York, and their cover of “Dancing in the Dark” reframes the sheer anger of the lyric as a song about depression with dancing in it. You’ve got the beat and the line, “I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my faces”, and it’s like someone carving their face off. It feels very political.

And you can scan the playlist for more great stuff.

Kieron Gillen is currently writing “Modded” and Uber: Invasion for Avatar, Doctor Aphra for Marvel Comics, and of course, The Wicked + the Divine at Image Comics.

You can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

The Sights, Sounds (and Selfies) of C2E2 2017

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Four years after I first visited it as a 19 year old journalist, I returned to C2E2 in 2017 to a much more crowded show floor and a world where a monosyllabic tree and a talking raccoon, not Iron Man were the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe. Most of my C2E2 was spent wandering around Artist’s Alley, chatting with creators/fellow fans/Twitter friends, and trying to not get lost.

One reason I love C2E2 is that they bring in excellent comics guests to balance the celebrities and their overpriced autographs. ($100 for Stan Lee. Come on!) There’s everyone from the very friendly and passionate webcomic creator Ngozi Ukazu from Check Please! to veteran writers, like Greg Rucka and Kieron Gillen, and I found myself flipping from Archie to Black Mask and occasionally a side of the Big Two while walking around. The Artist’s Alley is the beating heart of the con even though C2E2 also has two quite large gaming areas for console gamers and tabletop fans, and the Weta Workshop truly spoke to the Lord of the Rings nerd in me.

Here is a gallery of pictures of my C2E2 2017 experience starting with the Captain Marvel cosplayer I met while waiting for the shuttle bus and ending with a moment where I felt like a comic book character. (Dionysus from The Wicked + the Divine #8 aka the rave issue to be specific.)

 

 

 

Six Things at C2E2 I’m Most Excited About

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I love C2E2, not just because it’s located in the great city of Chicago, home of the best pizza, rappers, and (As of this writing.) basketball team in the world. C2E2 one of the few big time cons that still focuses on comic books and their creators, not just celebrities and movie trailers. It’s also the first comic book convention that I attended many moons ago in 2013 when I strode into the press lounge asking how to interview a comic book creator and frantically texting my editor. But it was a great time, and I got to see some of my heroes, including Felicia Day, comic book painter demigod Alex Ross, Kieron Gillen, and the very kind Doctor Who and Wolverine writer Paul Cornell.

I am very excited to return to C2E2 in 2017 and bask in the glow of comic book fans, creators, and publishers. Here are six things you should check out at (or after) the show, which runs from Friday, April 21 to Sunday, April 23.

  1. C2E2 Exclusive Variants/Comics

At their most primal (and capitalist) level, cons are about buying stuff that we think is cool. Whether that’s a celebrity pretending to care about us for sixty seconds, a print by our favorite artist, or a replica of Mjolnir because we have a god complex. One thing I love about comic book conventions is the opportunity to get special covers of comic books. It can be a snapshot reminder of meeting a certain creator, having an artist draw a character you like, or a bit of both like when I picked up Joe Quinones’ Serenity: Leaves of the Wind variant at Baltimore Comic Con in 2014. (Mal and Inara drawn like a pulp novel cover equals major heart eyes.)

Number one on my list of special comics to pick up at C2E2 is an exclusive early copy of Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss’ hilarious 80s period piece/crime comic Four Kids Walk Into A Bank #4, published by Black Mask Studios. There are only 66 copies of this comic, which features a cover by We Can Never Go Home so get to their booth quickly, and all proceeds to go to the anti-gun violence charity, CeaseFire Illinois. You get to read a cool comic early and help an important cause. Some other comics worth checking out are horror maestro Rafael Albuquerque’s variant for the new Alien: Dead Orbit series, Scott Hampton’s classic fantasy style cover for American Gods #1, Matt Wagner’s creepy Joker-centric cover for The Dark Knight III #1, and Mike Allred doing Flash of Two Worlds Harley Quinn #1 style.

And if you’re a huge Lord of the Rings geek and have money to burn, you could always grab an exclusive Helm of Sauron from Chicago Costume…

2. The Valiant X-O Manowar Release Party (And General Con Presence)

The resurrection of Valiant Entertainment as a publisher has been one of the great comics success stories of the past five years. And they have quite the C2E2 planned with everything from a special beer to commemorate the launch of X-O Manowar #1 by Matt Kindt and my favorite Conan artist Tomas Giorello to Bloodshot coffee mugs.

Valiant is doing a full spread of panels, including ones about X-O Manowar’s past, present, and future as their flagship book and one about the upcoming Harbinger Wars 2 crossover with never seen before art and information about this book, which will affect almost all Valiant titles, including Faith. There’s also an early look at Ninjak vs. The Valiant Universe, a live action webseries featuring many Valiant heroes, like Ninjak, who will be played by Jason David Frank. (The former Green Power Ranger.)

And to cap things off, there’s the X-O Manowar #1 release party held at 7 PM on Friday at the Cobra Lounge. The party is also celebrating the release of Pipeworks Brewing Company’s X-O Manowar Galactic Golden Ale and has a $5 cover charge that will be donated to the suicide prevention charity, Hope for the Day. Comics and craft  beer are an excellent combination, and maybe you’ll spot Valiant’s famous ale and wine swilling immortal, Armstrong, at the party.

I HATE FAIRYLAND

3. Image Comics Panels

Image Comics is home for some of the creative comics of the 2010s in a variety of genres from dystopian science fiction (Bitch Planet) to space opera (Saga), urban fantasy (The Wicked + the Divine), and even sex comedy (Sex Criminals) and autobiography (Self-Obsessed). And all of Image’s books are owned by their creators.

One place to see all of your favorite Image creators at one place is at various panels. The one I’m looking forward to most is  “Image Comics Presents: Storytelling Essentials”, which will be held on Saturday at 11:15 AM and is a general chat about craft, influences, and inspirations. The panel lineup is pretty stacked and includes up and coming writer Donny Cates (God Country), queen of all colorists Jordie Bellaire (Injection), artist of all the pretty people Jamie McKelvie (WicDiv), the legend Greg Rucka (The Old Guard), the artist with one of the cleanest lines in comics Declan Shalvey (Injection), and writer/artist of adorable superhero babies and demented fairy tale characters Skottie Young (I Hate Fairyland).

I can’t wait to hear the interactions between this eclectic group of creators, who demonstrate on a daily basis that comics are much more than superheroes, and artists and colorists are equal, if not superior participants to writers in the creative process.

4. Weta Workshop Awesomeness

Before I got into comics, I was a huge (and still am) J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings nerd. They weren’t splashed on the covers of Entertainment Weekly and People, like the trilogy’s stars and Academy Award winning director Peter Jackson, but the visual effects and makeup team at Wellington, New Zealand’s Weta Workshop truly brought the denizens of Middle Earth to life in both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Plus they’re named after a prehistoric, resilient cricket that only lives in New Zealand.

Weta is also responsible for crafting the worlds of Narnia, the Planet of the Apes, Mad Max Fury Road, and the upcoming Thor Ragnarok and excels at both practical effects and CGI. One thing that they are especially known for is creating large scale miniatures, like the ones of Minas Tirith, Helm’s Deep, and the dark fortress of Barad-Dur in Lord of the Rings as well as the Great Wall of China in the recent 2017 Matt Damon film with the same name.

And lucky for fans of science fiction and fantasy, they have booth and panel at C2E2 where you can geek out over Gollum, King Kong, Elven blades, or Power Ranger suits and check out the company’s portfolio and history. As icing on the cake, you can see a live makeup “transformation” featuring Warren Dion-Smith. Basically, you will see how flesh and blood human beings become orcs live and in person. The panel is at 2:30 PM on Sunday.

5. Mike Colter Panel

Marvel Studios is bringing several of the actors from their TV shows to C2E2, including Iain de Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge, who play the adorable, quirky British agents in Agents of SHIELD, the Kingpin of crime himself Vincen D’Onofrio, and finally, Mike Colter, who played Luke Cage in Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and will reprise his role in the upcoming Netflix series, The Defenders. Before playing the hero formerly known as Power Man, Colter was a crime lord in CBS’ The Good Wife and had roles in The Following and American Horror Story: Coven.

Colter’s appearance at C2E2 is almost perfectly timed as a bulletproof, black superhero is a powerful image for the United States in 2017. We currently have an Attorney General in Jeff Sessions, who has disparaged the NAACP and was considered by Coretta Scott King to be too racist for a federal judge and is one of many cabinet members and high ranking racist, xenophobic (usually) men that run this country. By standing up for his community of Harlem against corruption, Luke Cage is a symbol of hope in this dark time, and Mike Colter embodies him perfectly by playing him with a wonderful mix of physical presence, understated politeness, and a touch of rage in the middle of battle.

And, on a pure fan level, it will be interesting to see how much (or little) Mike Colter is allowed to say about Defenders, which is coming out in about four months. I am intrigued to see if he has anything to say about working with Finn Jones’ Iron Fist, and if they had any of the chemistry that Luke Cage and Danny Rand had in the comics. Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and Luke Cage were all enjoyable shows, and the environment in this panel room is bound to electric with anticipation for their team-up in Defenders with the audience hanging on every crumb of information Colter doles out about the upcoming show.

6. WicDiv Panel and Exclusive Merchandise

If you have read my work at all, you know that I wouldn’t end an article about a comic convention without bumping The Wicked + the Divine, which is my favorite current comic. Writer Kieron Gillen is making his first appearance at C2E2 since 2013, which was the glory days of Young Avengers, and artist Jamie McKelvie is going to his first C2E2 ever. They are bringing some exclusive merch, including pins of a death skull and Persephone’s hand and a very metal Baphomet t-shirt. Wearing this shirt instantly gives you the superpowers of ripped abs, Andrew Eldritch sunglasses, and fire swords.

And it’s kind of fitting that the WicDiv panel is being held on Sunday as fellow fans, er, worshipers of the Pantheon can join together and air out our feelings about the bittersweet ending to the “Imperial Phase” arc and get ready for the WicDiv #455 featuring the gods of ancient Rome. The panel is at 2:30 PM and will most likely have some glorious cosplay.

And that is my highly subjective list of the six coolest things to do at C2E2. Remember to stay hydrated, pack a portable phone charger, and take plenty of selfies with your favorite comic book creators and fans of general awesome things.

Review: The Wicked + the Divine #28

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To steal a phrase from the great Hunter S. Thompson, The Wicked + the Divine #28 (and the end of the “Imperial Phase” arc) is decadent and depraved. There’s cocaine, an orgy, and even some cannibalism in store as writer Kieron Gillen, artist Jamie McKelvie, and colorist Matthew Wilson show once and for all that the members of the Pantheon are terrible people for the most part. I’ll still vouch for Dionysus and Urdr, but I’m probably being naive. Also, Urdr is kind of an asshole in this issue. The comic is centered around a party once again as Amaterasu thinks she is the actual Shinto goddess Amaterasu even though she is a white girl from England and throws a soiree for her “worshipers”. She goes from a favorite to beyond problematic in just a couple painful pages. Choosing anarchy has taken a real toll on the Pantheon, and after an incident like what happens in this issue, they won’t be much of a match for the Great Darkness.

McKelvie and Wilson’s visual stylings for WicDiv #28 are EDM meets hot lava, especially when Amaterasu gets angry at the always skeptical  Urdr, and her usual kind mannerisms turns orange and rage filled. However, the plot and tone of the issue felt a lot like the end of Brit Pop in 1997 when Oasis was focusing on cocaine and hanging out on 10 Downing Street more than music and releasing nine minute long tracks with multiple key changes that really should have been a four minute pop rock song. Their key rival band Blur was more self-aware releasing tracks like “Death of a Party” and sounding like an American alternative band and later experimenting with hip hop and world music.

Amaterasu, Sakhmet, Woden, and to a certain extent, Persephone, are Oasis in this case and have given up on fighting the Great Darkness or being artists to basically party and use mortals to make themselves feel better instead of inspiring humanity like the Pantheons supposedly did in the past. Like Oasis, they are caught making the same album over and over again and coasting on the fact that they once played a gig to 250,000 people. (Thankfully, Liam Gallagher never ate anyone.) WicDiv #28 is self-indulgence at its peak giving readers a dose of the old sex, drugs, and ultraviolence, and there is going to be one hell of a hangover once “Imperial Phase Part II” kicks off. And this decadence extends to Jamie McKelvie’s clothing choices, especially Sakhmet’s drop dead gorgeous dress, which gets a full establishing panel and sets her up for a major role in the plot of this issue.

The cast of WicDiv has been pretty well-established, but a character, who has been on the margins, ends up kicking off WicDiv #28 with some real emotions. It’s David Blake, who is a scholar of the Pantheon and Recurrences, and is revealed to be Woden’s father. McKelvie draws him as tired, yet angry as he quickly snatches a family picture out of Urdr’s hands complete with a speed line. Gillen’s dialogue for David is full of regrets even as he openly admits being proud of his son, who is at a “finishing school”. With all the battles, motorcycle rides, and non-stop hivemind parties in “Imperial Phase”, it’s nice to have a reminder than the Pantheon members are human beings with parents and families beneath their divine trappings. Also, Woden has an Oedipus complex because the Valkyries remind him of his Asian mother. It’s pathetic, really, but Gillen and McKelvie don’t make a big deal about it and “reveal” it only in a background picture in David’s flat.

WicDiv #28 is so draining that an epilogue featuring an Ananke flashback actually comes as a comfort. She writes about how difficult this particular era is, and in an age of Trump, Brexit, missile strikes on Syria, concentration camps for gay men in Chechnya, and corporate airlines physically dragging paying customers off their flights, this rings true. 2017 is scary and difficult, and Gillen, McKelvie, and Wilson reflect this in WicDiv through the metaphors of youth and divinity.

Everyone is just fucked up in WicDiv #28 as Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, and Matthew Wilson show the unraveling of relationships as conversation turns to violent threats and actual violence in shades of red and black. These stylish characters have been stripped down to their ugly essences with Sakhmet’s bloodstained mouth representing most of the Pantheon, who have been utterly consumed by fame and power, that they are inspiring absolutely no one and could end up leading to the end of the world.

Story: Kieron Gillen Art: Jamie McKelvie Colors: Matthew Wilson
Story: 9.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 9.0 Recommendation: Buy 

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Logan’s Favorite Comics of 2016

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Some amazing comics came out in 2016 from both the Big Two and the indie ranks. This was the year that I had a lot of fun reading the books that came out in the “margins” of Marvel and DC that didn’t feature their top characters, but had idiosyncratic, top notch visuals, or just a good sense of humor. Black Mask continues to be my go-to for hard hitting indie work, and the whole BOOM! Box imprint continues to be as fun as ever.

Without further ado, these are my personal favorite comics of 2016, the ones that stimulated and entertained me the most in this difficult year.

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10. Kim and Kim #1-4 (Black Mask)
Writer: Mags Visaggio Artist: Eva Cabrera Colorist: Claudia Aguirre

Kim and Kim was a super fun sci-fi miniseries with some wild and wacky worldbuilding, rollicking action scenes, and lots of hilarious interactions between the two leads, Kim Q and Kim D. Writer Mags Visaggio put their friendship front and center giving the comic a strong emotional through-line between bounty hunter shenanigans. Also, Eva Cabrera excels at drawing attractive humans as well as strange aliens, and I enjoyed Claudia Aguirre’s pastel-filled color palette. It was also nice to have a story starring two queer women not end in senseless death.

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9. Jonesy #1-8 (BOOM! Studios)
Writer: Sam Humphries Artist: Caitlin Rose Boyle Colorists: Mickey Quinn, Brittany Peer

Every year, the BOOM! Box imprint seems to churn out a new title that captures my heart. Jonesy is a fire cracker of a comic starring a teenage girl, who can make anyone fall in love with anything. Unfortunately, that power doesn’t work on her personally, and it gets her into a lot of trouble. Sam Humphries’ writing has as little chill as his protagonist, and Caitlin Rose-Boyle’s art evokes the zines that Jonesy loves to make about her favorite pop star, Stuff. The hyper-stylized plots and faces that Jonesy pulls kept me laughing while Jonesy’s struggles with finding someone to love her and her strained relationship with her mom in the second arc gave me the feels. Her and her friends’ unabashed passion for life is kind of inspiring too.

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8. Ultimates #3-12, Ultimates 2 #1-2 (Marvel)
Writer: Al Ewing Artists: Kenneth Rocafort, Christian Ward, Djibril Morrisette-Phan, Travel Foreman Colorist: Dan Brown

Ultimates and Ultimates 2 were the gold standard for team superhero book at both Marvel and DC, and not even Civil War II could stop this title’s momentum. The Al Ewing-penned comic was more of a science fiction saga that happened to star a diverse cast of superheroes than a straight up team book as they tried to find productive solutions to problems like Galactus and the Anti-Man instead of just punching things. And like all good team books, there’s some great interpersonal tension like when Black Panther puts Wakanda before the team, Ms. America defies Captain Marvel, and Spectrum and Blue Marvel start smooching. Ultimates also has some wonderful tapestry-style double page spreads from artists Kenneth Rocafort, Christian Ward, and Travel Foreman that match its multiversal scope. It’s an entertaining and esoteric comic.

 

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7. Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love #1-2 (DC)
Writer: Sarah Vaughn Artist: Lan Medina Colorist: Jose Villarrubia

In 2016, DC really stretched its wings genre-wise with the Young Animal imprint and comics, like a satirical take on the Flintstones. But, the best of this quirky bunch was a Gothic romance take on Deadman from Fresh Romance‘s Sarah Vaughn, Fables‘ Lan Medina, and atmospheric colorist Jose Villarrubia. The main character, Berenice, can see ghosts, including Deadman, who are trapped in a haunted British mansion. There are secret passageways, mysterious backstories, and an epic, bisexual love triangle, but mostly, Deadman is a meditation on mortality and relationships, both platonic and romantic with some jaw-dropping scenery from Medina and Villarrubia.

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6. Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat #2-13 (Marvel)
Writer: Kate Leth Artists: Brittney Williams, Natasha Allegri Colorists: Megan Wilson, Rachelle Rosenberg

Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat is a comic that acknowledges how annoying getting your life together can be for twenty-somethings, who live in the city. Kate Leth, Brittney Williams, Megan Wilson, and Rachelle Rosenberg also throw injourneys to Hell, guest appearances from Jessica Jones and Jubilee, telekinetic bisexuals quoting Hamilton, and nods to the old Patsy Walker romance comics to a quite relatable comic. Brittney Williams’ Magical Girl and Chibi-inspired art is great for comedy purposes, but she and Leth also had some emotional payoffs throughout Hellcat thanks to the relationships developed between Patsy, Ian Soo, and She-Hulk, especially when she reacts to She-Hulk’s injury in Civil War II. Hellcat is fierce, high energy comic that is the best of both romance and superhero comics with the occasional trippy scene shift from Williams, Wilson, and Rosenberg.

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5. Mockingbird  #1-8 (Marvel)
Writer: Chelsea Cain Artist: Kate Niemczyk, Sean Parsons, Ibrahim Moustafa Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg

Mockingbird was experimental, unabashedly feminist, pretty sexy, and just happened to star a former West Coast Avenger and be published by Marvel Comics. Thriller novelist Chelsea Cain plotted a pair of mysteries, involving cosplay cruises, doctor waiting rooms, corgis, and Marvel Universe deep cuts that were engaging thanks to detail filled art from Kate Niemczyk and inker Sean Parsons. Loaded with background gags and subtle foreshadowing for future issues, Mockingbird certainly has “replay” value as a comic and is triumphant, messy, and funny just like its lead character, Bobbi Morse and was a coming out party for Marvel’s next great colorist, Rachelle Rosenberg.

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4. Love is Love (IDW)
Writers: Various Artists: Various

I just reviewed this comics anthology a few days ago, but Love is Love is the 2016 comic that affected me personally the most as it showed the effects of The Pulse shooting on the LGBTQ community in a variety of ways. I latched onto stories about the vibrancy of the queer community in Orlando, the sanctuary effect of gay clubs that provided some of the anthology’s best visuals from Jesus Merino, Alejandra Gutierrez, and Michael Oeming, and the use of superheroes like Batman, Midnighter, and Supergirl as simple analogues of hope in the middle of heartbreak. Love is Love saddened me, but it also inspired me to continue to uplift my LGBTQ siblings as the racist, sexist, homophobes Trump and Pence take the office of president and vice president. It was also cool to see so many talented creators using their gifts to help raise money for Equality Florida.

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3. The Wicked + the Divine #18-24, #1831 (Image)
Writer: Kieron Gillen Artists: Jamie McKelvie, Stephanie Hans, Kevin Wada Colorist: Matthew Wilson

In WicDiv‘s third year, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, and Matthew Wilson went a little blockbuster with big battles, splash pages, and an unexpected character death. But, the comic is still about the journey of Laura (Now Persephone.) from fan to artist, and how it has changed her life and relationships. And, in time honored tradition, WicDiv wasn’t afraid to get experimental with an issue featuring a Pantheon of Romantic poets and writers, like Mary Shelley and Lord Byron with lavish guest art from Journey into Mystery‘s Stephanie Hans, or the magazine issue with professional journalists interviewing Kieron Gillen roleplaying as Fantheon members with beautiful spot illustrations from Kevin Wada. As WicDiv enters its “Imperial Phase”, McKelvie and Wilson’s art is both opulent and disarming while Kieron Gillen has started to expose the personalities behind the explosions and drama of “Rising Action”.

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2. Giant Days #10-21, Holiday Special #1 (BOOM!)
Writer: John Allison Artists: Max Sarin, Liz Fleming Colorist: Whitney Cogar

Giant Days is funny, true, shows the value of a good inker in Liz Fleming to nail a face or gesture, and reminds me of a weekend I spent in its setting of Sheffield over two years ago. John Allison and Max Sarin have developed the personalities and mannerisms of the three leads: Susan, Esther, and Daisy that any situation that they’re plugged into from music festivals to housing selections and even cheating rings is pure entertainment. Allison, Sarin, and the bright colors of Whitney Cogar nail the ups and downs of college life with a touch of the surreal, and the series continues to be more compelling as we get to know Susan, Esther, and Daisy better as people.

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1. Midnighter #8-12, Midnighter and Apollo #1-3 (DC)
Writer: Steve Orlando Artists: David Messina, Gaetano Carlucci, ACO, Hugo Petrus, Fernando Blanco Colorist: Romulo Fajardo Jr.

Steve Orlando’s run on Midnighter and Midnighter and Apollo has the most bone breaking action, the coolest panel layouts from David Messina, ACO, and Fernando Blanco and yes, the hottest kisses and other sexy stuff as Midnighter and Apollo are back in a relationship. Orlando shows his passion for the DC and Wildstorm universes by bringing in obscure or neglected characters, like Extrano, and making them instantly compelling or frightening in the case of Henry Bendix. Watching Midnighter skillfully take down opponents from the Suicide Squad to subway pirates or demons is an adrenaline rush, and Orlando tempers these action scenes with plenty of romance and personal moments. Midnighter and Midnighter and Apollo aren’t just the best superhero comics of 2016, but the best ones period. Come for the one-liners and shattered limbs and stay for the self-sacrificing love.

Review: The Wicked + The Divine #24

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tumblr_ohs9labcrg1uxdbsko1_1280As we head into a new year, the Gods are heading into theirs. Well, the beginning of 2015, but it has been a year since Laura found herself wanting everything Amaterasu had. Now she does, but at what cost?

A lot of The Wicked + The Divine #24, the first traditional issue back, is a lot of quiet reflection of where the Gods are now a year later now that Ananke is gone and they’re on their own. In the letters section, Kieron Gillen talks about how the Gods are very much in the same boat as the readers in that they don’t know what happens next. This seems especially true for Persephone, who spends a lot of this issue in her own head. While Amaterasu seems rather excited about the future (and no longer feeling ‘boring’ if her kiss with Persephone on the ledge of the Strand is anything to go by), the rest of the Gods seem less sure.

One of my favorite things about this issue is how much it captures the feeling of New Year’s Day. While the beginning of the issue captures a brief look at the revelry of New Year’s Eve with Matt Wilson’s glowing fireworks and a kiss, most of the issue is the eerily quiet hangover of the first day of the New Year. Some of it is literal with Persephone waking up in Baal’s bed with Sakhmet with Minerva warning her not to hurt Baal. Other parts of it are atmospheric, with the grey morning Persephone rides into past an adoring crowd and the silent work of Cassandra and the Norns in the ruins of Valhalla. It feels like that long, deep breath, where you seem to not just be recovering from the night before but the entire year, and taking a long pause before you tackle the rest.

Besides the atmosphere, the fashion in this issue is on point. It has to be a tough act to go back into the regular flow of the issue after the lush interiors from Kevin Wada on #23, but Jamie McKelvie is solid as usual creating fitting and believable street wear for Persephone, but also giving Minerva bright and youthful fashion befitting a 13-year-old in 2015. You have to wonder if her new fashion is a reflection of her new independent state, since she is not only without Ananke but without her parents. She also manages to be the most mature member of the Pantheon, but that’s probably to be expected with the Goddess of Wisdom.

Speaking of fashion, so much of this issue is what the kids would call “hair porn.” Persephone’s hair was the showstealer of this issue, even when it was messy the morning after a roll with Baal and Sakhmet.

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However, the quiet doesn’t last for long as Persephone and Cass confront Woden, who all lay their cards on the table, leading to the most silver age-esque closing scene of the issue.

As the “Imperial Phase” begins in earnest, The Wicked + The Divine #24 is much like the day it takes place on. A deep and quiet breath before jumping into the deep end. The calm before the storm. And if the last page is any indication, there are high stakes in play in this brave new year.

Story: Kieron Gillen Art: Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson
Story: 9.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 9.0 Recommendation: Read

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with  a FREE copy for review.

Review: The Wicked + The Divine #23

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tumblr_ocdihkx6kh1tuoa2wo2_1280Before the start of this latest arc of The Wicked + The Divine titled ‘Imperial Phase (Part I),’ writer Kieron Gillen told readers to expect decadence as the Pantheon finds a newfound freedom in the wake of Ananke’s destruction. Well, decadence was certainly right on the button as we enter the Imperial Phase with a world building issue from Pantheon Monthly. Because of course, there’s a monthly glossy mag dedicated to the Pantheon.

The structure of this issue was mostly done as a way for Team WicDiv to collaborate with Kevin Wada, whose gorgeous and fashionable art has graced many a comics cover and a Twitter feed, but has never been interior for a comic. Instead of making Wada’s style conform to traditional comics format, we instead see a format suited for him: drawing the gods of the Pantheon in the way of a fashion shoot spread. Even Morrigan gets in on the action, which a beautifully gothic set that adds a pop of color to the None More Goth goddess. In fact, all of Wada’s pieces capture the Pantheon’s individual style in such a way that we usually don’t get to see in the regular issues. This is not as a diss to Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson, who still get to shine in this issue with their “advertisements” from Baal and Persephone, but rather highlights how strength in drawing fashion can mean different things with different artists.

The issue pushes the magazine format even more with Gillen taking on more of an “editor” role and asking several of his journalist friends to write interviews with the gods. The results are astounding, from beginning to end. Leigh Alexander’s interview with The Morrigan is especially haunting, not just for the dark imagery Alexander captures, but for how she manages to humanize The Morrigan as someone she could have known back in school. While we as the readers will remember Marian’s backstory from the ‘Commercial Suicide’ arc, this piece is presented as the first time people in the world of The Wicked + The Divine have seen press for The Morrigan. Alexander strikes that balance well, alluding to the backstory of The Morrigan without delving information that isn’t known in that universe.

My personal favorite interview though had to be Laurie Penny’s interview with Woden, titled “Sympathy for the Nice Guy.” Penny constructs the interview as an unwilling assignment, preferring to talk to a “nice” God like Amaterasu or Dionysus and getting the reviled Woden instead. I’m not certain how much of his reviled status is an allusion to his status as the most hated character in WicDiv or is a true in-universe fact, but it’s good to know everyone hates him. Penny throughout the interview tries to understand Woden at least in the way he thinks, but also doesn’t give him quarter for his actions either. Reading it was fascinating and unsettling, and I was worried that something was going to happen to Penny by the end of it. It doesn’t, but it does end with a highly ironic remark from Woden regarding the more problematic aspects of Game of Thrones. Problematic, says the sexist sociopath…

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Through the interviews and notes from our “editor” Kieron, we start to get an idea what life is like for the Pantheon so soon after Ananke’s death. It’s a lot of mystery and growth, with Valhalla being abandoned for The Strand and Baal assuming de facto leadership of the Pantheon since he was the first of the gods to “ascend.” Minerva is struggling some with the death of her parents and the other gods are trying to find balance in the wake of it all. The presence of Persephone worries Woden especially, but you have to wonder how much of that is Woden and how much of that is Persephone. You also get some fun little background details of the gods, such as Amaterasu becoming a god on her birthday/the winter solstice and running to tell Lucifer while she’s in an interview with Mary HK Choi. It was an unexpected surprise to get those kind of details, to say the least.

Early reviews of this issue harkened it to Watchmen in terms of how deep it lets the story run. While I don’t know if I can make the same comparison just yet, the way that The Wicked + The Divine #23 builds the universe of the comic while letting others play in the sandbox is kind of mindblowing. Wada’s art alone justifies the existence of this issue, but the articles by real journalists writing about their interactions with these fictional characters is what makes the issue shine in those spaces between the art. If Pantheon Monthly was to return for another arc, this The Wicked + The Divine faithful would certainly not argue.

Story: Kieron Gillen, Leigh Alexander, Dorian Lynskey, Laurie Penny,
Mary HK Choi, Ezekial Kweku
Art: Kevin Wada, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson
Story: 9.0 Art: 10.0 Overall: 9.5 Recommendation: Buy

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

The Wicked + The Divine 1831: A Review Of A Single Sentence

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By Maya Garcia

When the creative team behind The Wicked + The Divine announced the The Wicked + The Divine 1831 special, the classic literature diehards in the fandom rejoiced. And we rejoiced by flocking to social media to post long threads about our hopes and predictions for the issue and dashing to the library to pick up biographies, poetry collections, and campy 80s movies pertaining to the English High Romantics.

I opened 1831, fingers twitching with excitement at the thought of seeing my old friends the Romantics in a strange new way, and was delightfully thunderstruck to find among them the Romantic nearest and dearest to my own Russophilic heart – Aleksandr Pushkin. His appearance in the comic is brief and oblique, consisting in fact of a mere ten words in a speech bubble.

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No unit of literature is too small to be given an in-depth analysis by a properly enthusiastic and imaginative reader. And I hope that by performing such an analysis on this single sentence (in the context of the comic up to this point) I can offer fellow fans entertaining and edifying insights into one of the myriad literary allusions in 1831.

Let’s have a go.

“Perun…” This is the name of an ancient Slavic sky god, the supreme deity in his pantheon. There are frustratingly few sources of information on the gods of the ancient Slavs as they had no known systems of writing before the 9th century C.E., when Greek Orthodox monks invented the Glagolitic and later Cyrillic alphabets to aid in bringing Christianity to the region. Much of what we know about Slavic mythology is extrapolated from visual artifacts and reports by monks. Perun is one of few figures who emerges from this tradition with a relatively clear image, that of a kingly, bearded warrior who commands stone, fire, and above all, lightning.

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This image doesn’t call any 18th or 19th century Russian writers to my mind (other than maybe Tolstoy who had the long beard and patriarchal wrath thing going on, but he was just a baby in 1831 and wouldn’t be caught dead in a story about Romantic poets anyway). But why spend time wondering which Russian writer is best fit to wear the mantle of the highest god, because Russia has already chosen Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin.

There are endless fascinating cultural artifacts that one can point to illustrate the extreme degree to which Pushkin is venerated in Russia, and my personal favorite examples are: that time I was street drinking in St. Petersburg with a group of American college students and tipsily exchanged recitations of classic Pushkin verses with a couple of strangers we met outside a bar; the presence of civic artwork and/or tourist traps in every place the man ever set foot; and the fact that even the radically avant-garde Futurist poets and critics, who exhorted the Russian literary community to cast its old writers overboard from the “Steamship of Modernity,” still wrote essays and poems that praised Pushkin.

“…collapsed in Petersburg…” Ah, Petersburg! Petersburg! My favorite city for many reasons, one of which is the fact that you can’t go more than a few blocks without seeing the name or face of a dead poet. When I first saw the city in the fall of 2011, several metro stations had translations of verses by of the Romantic poet John Keats displayed in the big frames where metro stations usually hang advertisements. When I asked someone why the metro was advertising for Keats, their answer was “It’s pretty. It’s poetry.”

This is a city that may no longer be the political capital of the country, but proudly considers itself to be “The Cultural Capital of Russia.” This is the city to name drop when making a shorthand reference to Russian Romanticism. And yes, of course Pushkin died there. I’ve been to the lovingly preserved room where the tragic event occurred (a real must-see for melancholic comparative literature majors doing a year abroad in Russia).

“…pure language raging from his guts…” What a lovely turn of phrase, moving from the almost-Biblical mysticism of “pure language” to the (literally) visceral brutality of “raging from his guts.” The juxtaposition of these elements is very Russian Literature ™, but the resulting phrase is original and compelling enough to reach my ears over the din of lesser clichés one encounters daily in Slavic Studies. I can’t trace it to a quotation (though I’ve only been working it over for a couple days and I mostly work on 20th century literature anyway…), but I can see what moments in the Pushkin Mythos to which it could refer.

“…pure language…” Students of Russian literature learn to recognize the particular aspects of literature with which each canonical writer is most strongly associated – their divine domains, if you will. Dostoevsky is the Patron Saint of Unreliable Narrators; Pushkin is the All-Father of the Modern Russian Literary Language.

“…raging from his guts…” Unlike Shakespeare, Pushkin lived and died a well-documented and very public life. An incredible amount of detail concerning his day-to-day existence is available to the dedicated archival scholar and such major moments as his death are familiar to all. Pushkin’s death is such a well-known moment in Russian culture it is the subject of countless paintings and poems, and even has its very own Wikipedia page. It doesn’t get much more Romantic than dying at 37 (just a few months older than Byron) from a wound sustained in the course of a duel defending his wife’s honor against a dastardly French officer. While he did die in bed several days after the duel, the image of the poet collapsing in the snow, bleeding from his guts, is entirely true-to-life.

I think I’ve proven the connection here thoroughly enough to move on to examine the possible implications of Pushkin-Perun’s inclusion in the Wicked + Divine world. In particular, this implied character invites comparisons with a certain member of the contemporary Pantheon – Baal. Baal (the Sumerian deity) and Perun have very similar functions and imagery in their respect mythological traditions – it’s not too outlandish to posit that they, along with the other ruling sky-gods that appear in nearly every other Indo-European pantheon (i.e. Zeus, Jupiter, Indra) could perhaps be regional interpretations of the same figure.

Baal (the comic character) and Pushkin-Perun might also be regional interpretations of the same figure: the Black superhero with lightning powers. Pushkin, like Baal, was Black – well, not Black like Baal as he was Black under very different historical conditions. He was a member of the nobility whose maternal great-grandfather, Abram Hannibal, was African. Hannibal was kidnapped from Central Africa as a child and held in bondage at the court of the Ottoman Sultan for a year before being bought by Russian ambassadors and given as a gift to Tsar Peter I. Peter made Hannibal his godson and gave him a nobleman’s education and military rank. Pushkin’s relationship to his African heritage, as understood from his poems, letters, and unfinished biography of his great-grandfather, is a complex topic of interest to many scholars. I have not (yet) studied it closely, but I am familiar enough with Pushkin’s heritage that imagining him with lightning powers brings to my mind a certain racialized superhero trope.

The “Black Lightning” archetype has a long history in superhero comics, and may have been propagated by a certain laziness among white comic book creators when it comes to making new and interesting roles for characters of color. As a non-Black person, I have a limited capacity to comment insightfully on this trope, and I hope that my writing here is just the beginning of a larger conversation that will prominently feature input from Black readers. Examination of archetypes and stereotypes is one of the main forces that drives characterization in The Wicked + The Divine, and it is up to people of color in the fandom to judge how sensitive and useful this examination is. Until there’s a Latinx character in The Wicked + The Divine (a moon goddess Selena would be fantastic!), I’ll be careful to stay in my lane. The comparative reading of Baal and Pushkin that I’m attempting here will be done from a literary criticism standpoint, but I invite other fans to bring the ethical questions to bear.

The gods of the contemporary Pantheon incarnate a range of pop star archetypes and Baal is one of the more easily identifiable of the group. The “elevator pitch” one might give for Baal could be “What if Kanye West really was a god?” Of course, both Kanye and Baal have a lot more going on beneath their cosmically egoistic personae. Baal’s character arc (in my opinion, one of the most emotionally compelling in the comic) explores the cognitive dissonances of being a self-aware celebrity, of having tremendous power, but still not being able to control how others will ultimately judge you. The dynamism of Baal’s character is built on a series of seeming contradictions in his personality and positionality in the narrative: he’s “bad” and revels in the label, but he is also a proud Sky God who (for most of the narrative so far) takes Ananke’s side in the fight she frames as being one of law, order, and light against rebellion, chaos, and darkness; he performs a particularly forceful type of straight masculinity, but is involved in one of the series’ most tender queer love stories; he’s a man of action and violence, but also a genuine poet (he briefly hints at having had an artistic career before he met Ananke – and he delivers some of the best one-liners in a comic full of quotable one-liners).

Baal’s character development seems to be in the process of undermining and overcoming these ultimately artificial contradictions, with the result being a more complex and human character. In this context, Baal’s being an instantiation of the comic-book cliché linking Black men and electricity might be another way of exploring celebrity persona as self-parody.

The Wicked + The Divine’s central conceit of Recurrence allows its creators to explore characterization and archetype in a way not confined to a single, linear storyline. The first tableaux of the comic features four gods of the 1920s and judging by the iconography (Baal’s sigil is a ram’s head), one of their number is also a Baal. The man whose place at the table matches the placement of the ram’s head in the pantheon wheel is Black, and while he doesn’t bear a strong physical resemblance to Baal or comport himself as flashily as Baal does, he does exude a similar strong, masculine confidence.

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Writer Kieron Gillen has said in interviews (and his notes to issue 4) that Baal is “inspired by the whole line of archetypes between Bo Diddley doing Who Do You Love? And Kanye West doing Power.” Now, Bo Diddley came too late to fit in the 1920s pantheon (and the man in the comic lacks Bo’s iconic glasses – you know the ones that Buddy Holly, Elvis Costello, and Morrissey all copied?), but if we trace the genealogy of the Blues back a few decades, there’s a wealth of iconic musicians who might provide inspiration for a Wicked + Divine character.

Robert Johnson leaps off the pages of musical history as an obvious choice for inclusion here (perhaps team WicDiv could deconstruct the rather patronizing legend about him meeting the devil at a crossroads and selling his soul for musical talent), but equally strong cases could be made for such other early blues and jazz pioneers as Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, and Lonnie Johnson. The creators may be going for a more composite character anyway (the other 1920s characters seem like they might not be as directly based on real celebrities as the 1830s characters were).

Going back one more saeculum (90-year cycle), we return to Pushkin-Perun It seems more than coincidental that we’ve been presented with another pantheon member who is a thunder god and a black male artist. Of course, one could say that he’s just a combination of the most prominent Russian Romantic with the most well-known East Slavic deity…but that would be boring. I personally would not have thought of Perun when assigning a god to Pushkin (in Russia he’s often compared to Apollo, and while I would rather not continue in the hellenocentric tradition, I would also have gravitated towards such a god of music and prophecy, or perhaps a messenger god with a mischievous streak).

But what fun would it be to read this comic if the creators thought the same way I do? I have enjoyed the chance to think about Pushkin in a different way by comparing him to the Baal archetype. To do this, I’ve considered how Pushkin (the myth if not the man) related to power.

Pushkin had a complicated relationship with authoritarian power that makes Baal’s relationship with Ananke look blissful. He was a rebellious youth who wrote politically charged poems that earned him repeated exiled from the capital in the early 1820s. He was welcomed back to Petersburg after the newly crowned Tsar Nikolai I squelched the Decembrist Uprising of 1925 (in which a large group of reform-minded officers refused to pledge allegiance to the conservative Nikolai). For the rest of his life he would be under close police surveillance and his works would be personally edited by the Tsar before publication. Despite having voiced anti-authoritarian views in the past, he would publish poems in praise of the Tsar. To what extent he was motivated by concern for safety, defeated resolution, and/or a real change in belief is unclear. Ultimately Pushkin, like Baal, had to negotiate having a fierce, iconoclastic spirit, with serving a violent, paranoid dictator who ruled by divine right.

Defiance of authority and social expectations is only one connotation of the versatile descriptor “bad” that Baal claims for himself in issue 4. It’s also a bold assertion of sexuality.

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In a society where the dominant group (i.e. white men) sees black male sexuality as threatening and deviant, to be a black man who revels in his own sexual power and refuses to apologize for being beautiful and aware of it is a radical provocation.  This framework doesn’t exactly map onto Pushkin, who could almost pass for white and lived in a society where aristocratic poets such as he were expected to be sexually voracious. Pushkin had many lovers and wrote a fair number of sexually explicit poems (my favorite is the one where Satan fingerbangs the Virgin Mary and she likes it so much that her eventual holy union with God the Father ends up being a real disappointment).

And what of the connection to power as visually manifested in the command of thunder and lightning? Baal characterizes his electrical abilities with the phrase “I do power,” which suits his magnetic charisma and assertive sexuality (lightning, once thought to be the literal “spark” of life, is a time-honored symbol of virility). Pushkin too had charisma and physical charm in spades. Moreover, I think inserting lightning into his mythos amplifies his association with nature, the vast, wild Russian nature into which this Romantic (and political) exile wandered when he needed (or was forced by the tsar to take) a break from being an urban dandy.

The future issues and special issues of The Wicked + The Divine will doubtlessly reveal many more facets and complexities in the characterization of the current Baal and his predecessors. If I have inspired even one reader to help pass the time until the next issue by reading some Pushkin, I have done my duty as his loyal follower.

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Maya Garcia is a recovering Romantic and current graduate student specializing in music, literature, and youth cultures of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Originally from Southern California, she currently resides in Somerville, MA, where the climate is much more suitable for melancholic brooding. She writes and draws things as @gothshostakovich on Tumblr and @otterhouse_5 on Twitter.

The Wicked + The Divine: Depiction of Baal in Majesty, AD 2014

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Baal’s atrium in Wotan’s Valhalla features a gigantic mural of Baal dressed in an understated black suit and tie. His suit is the only thing understated about his portrait, and I love him for that. The mural is a fresco, pigment painted onto a wet plaster wall. It reaches from vaulted ceiling to floor on a Heroic scale. Baal is the central figure, positioned like a god—which of course he is—attended by archangels and cherubs. At his feet and supplicant are the devil, the Egyptian god Horus, Zeus and another angel. That bearded figure might be “God the Father” but it’s probably Zeus, a lightning god.

The arrangement of figures evokes traditional depictions of “Christ in Majesty” or “Christ in Glory,” but with some key differences. Christ in Majesty is usually seated and serine whereas Baal’s face and posture are determined, he is ready to confront world. Others have pointed out the image looks a bit like Kanye West’s video for “Power”.

Artist Jamie McKelvie renders the fresco differently from his standard bold and graphic illustrations because making this art resemble a hand-painted fresco is significant.

We never saw the full fresco within the comic as published. We only see it in issue #4 of The Wicked + The Divine, obstructed by the characters viewing it. The image above is taken from the backmatter of the trade paperback. It shows that the fresco was important enough that it was made separately from the panel and then set at an angle. It was drawn digitally by McKelvie and then colored over by Nathan Fairbairn. In issue #4, we see scaffolding for painters in front of it, indicating that the work is not yet complete.

Why does it matter that we read the fresco as a painting executed on wet plaster? Because Baal’s wall isn’t decorated by poster art, or by airbrush or any modern technique– it’s Renaissance Art. Baal is positioning himself in a European pantheon. He is showing the lineage between himself and eurocentric culture and he is dominant over it.

He is Baal Haddad, a Canaanite god but painted like this he could also be Zeus or Jesus. Or Yeezus (aka Kanye).

This powerful statement reminds me of the heroic scale paintings of Kihinde Wiley. Wiley is one of the most important contemporary visual artists. He’s an African-American artist depicting black subjects. In many of his jaw-dropping traditionally executed oil paintings he casts contemporary black men (some famous, some not) as the central figure in paintings like: “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps” or “Equestrian Portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares”.

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From the National Portrait Gallery’s website :

For most of Kehinde Wiley’s very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects.

In 2005, VH1 commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of the honorees for that year’s Hip Hop Honors program. Turning his aesthetic on end, he used his trademark references to older portraits to add legitimacy to paintings of this generation’s already powerful musical talents. In Wiley’s hands, Ice T channels Napoleon, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five take on a seventeenth-century Dutch civic guard company.

In Wiley’s own words he “posit[s] young black men, fashioned in urban attire, within the field of power reminiscent of Renaissance artists such as Tiepolo and Titian.”

While Wiley’s depictions generally cast his subjects in the position of historical figures, never religious ones, Baal’s fresco depicts him in the position of the Christian god– the most important figure in European culture. And why not?! He is a god!

We may not have seen it on the page yet, but I’m confident Baal has one of Wiley’s paintings somewhere in his room because if Baal is sort of Kanye then Wiley has already created his portrait.

Plus, Baal does have impeccable taste. As of course does this comic’s creative team Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKevlie for using expert visual strategies to show us how Baal sees his place in the world especially in relation to the eurocentric culture of the past.

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I’m aware of the criticisms of his Wiley’s work, particularly from a socialist perspective. But a lot of criticism of his work is racist and homophobic. Here’s a really nice defense of him.

Review: The Wicked + The Divine 1831

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tumblr_ocb81o7dst1rp6eo5o2_r1_1280So far in The Wicked + The Divine, most of what we know about past pantheons is from hearsay or little tidbits of information from those who have studied past pantheons. In fact, the pantheon in this particular issue was hinted at as far back as issue 2 when Laura went to meet with Cassandra about freeing Lucifer.

After The Wicked + The Divine 1831, we don’t have much more to go on, but there’s a bit more background about one of the past pantheons, how the celebrity of the Gods changes in each era, and maybe how Ananke manipulated the gods to meet her own goals.

The issue gorgeously illustrated by Stephanie Hans takes place mostly at Villa Diodati, the mansion by Lake Geneva where Frankenstein and The Vampyre were developed. In fact, a quick bit of research reveals that the pantheon of 1831 was completely composed of the Romantics. Never mind that many of them were already dead by 1831. It’s an alternate history though where the Romantics were given the powers of Gods by a mysterious old woman, so a little wiggle room can be made for such things.

For most of the issue, the story is narrated by Inanna, who was Claire Clairmont in this era. This is where the universalness of the story really plays, since it becomes less about the gods and their fates, but rather the interpersonal issues as the clock nears midnight on their time. In this story, there is only four left: Inanna, Lucifer, Morrigan, and Woden. There are hints of who the other gods were, but that almost doesn’t matter in this context. Writer Kieron Gillen and Hans instead weave a story about old friends and family gathering together, airing their grievances in the only way they know how: horror stories.

What’s especially interesting about this issue is that it seems like Inanna may have brokered a deal for her godhood, playing the role of the jealous sister when her sister Mary Shelley became Woden. It’s not unheard of, since it’s implied that’s how Baphomet gained his powers in the modern pantheon, but the ways in which Inanna went about it seem much bloodier. If it hasn’t occurred by now, 1831 will make you realize just how deep the world of The Wicked + The Divine really runs. Oh Kieron, what wicked things are you planning for the future of this series?

Something that Hans doesn’t get a lot of credit for with her art is how expressive it is. You see this a fair amount in 1602: Witch Hunter Angela, but it’s on full display here. Especially with Inanna and how subtly her face can change from contempt to seductive in just a matter of seconds. Mixed with the use of a more sketchy style for the flashbacks within the story that recalls back to illustrations of the era, and Hans rightly deserves all the applause for this issue.

Besides the shenanigans of the Romantics (because who else would be the celebrities of this era), this issue raises a lot of questions about what Ananke’s endgame was. Especially regarding the hand of Hades. While we’ll never know from the woman herself now, you have to wonder just how the end of this issue might come back to haunt the modern gods later.

Story: Kieron Gillen Art: Stephanie Hans
Story: 9.0 Art: 10 Overall: 9.5 Recommendation: Buy

Image Comics provides Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review.

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