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popculturespiritwow · 5 years

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THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #27: OB-SESSION

After many months, I’m back! Sorry for the long silence. Life=Crazy=Sorry.

I’m planning over the next couple weeks to post summaries of the rest of Imperial Phase I & II and then hopefully I’ll catch up soon after that. It’s hard to believe there’s only a few more issues left. (Nooooooooooo.)

I’ve actually held off reading the most recent couples issues until I’ve gotten back onto this, so if as we go you’re wondering how it is I don’t already know this or that, that is how. I think the last issue I read had all kinds of crazy reveals about Baal. Speaking of which...

BAALER (I Hate Myself for this Title But There You Are)

The big reveal of issue 27 is that Baal has some kind of magic super secret voodoo he can use to stop the Great Darkness. It builds on last issue, where we learned he’d not only been previously briefed on the GD by Ananke but seen his father murdered by it. It’s also the beginning of another shoe dropping, except we don’t really know what gets squished beneath it for another eight issues and two specials and like a year of reading time so it doesn’t seem like a shoe so much as a hmm, that’s mysterious, I’m sure it’s fine, shall we rave then?

I love the visual structure of this page, the way it uses repetition to express the passage of time and also distance to simultaneously demonstrate our own distance as readers from whatever horrible nightmare things are going on and to minimize those events. (It’s so small; whatever it is, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?)

(Baal, what have you done...)

I also like how Baal’s “reassurance” to Mini repeats his mother’s words from last issue--“It is what it is,” but then adds on in a way that sounds like the sort of ‘steel yourself for nightmares’ mantra learned from everyone’s favorite grandmonster. Even as it gives Baal an adult-sounding stoicism, it also makes him sound like a little boy.

And speaking of Baal’s complicated relationships with children: Had we been told before now that Mini ascended just a month after him? It strikes me as a brilliant move on Ananke’s part. Right from the start she’s set up her replacement self as a little sister for Baal to protect.

Two issues in a row we’ve got Mini as the seeming target of the Great Darkness bug fiesta. Is that because it knows who she really is/will be? Is the GD somehow in league with Ananke, and the attacks on Mini are just another way of keeping everyone thinking of her as Everybody’s Favorite Divine Lil Sis? Or does this, too, have something to do with Baal? Could it be that it’s actually Baal and not Laura that is well and truly cursed?

TOPOGRAPHICAL FLUIDITY

The heart of issue 27 is the five double-page spreads in which the standard left to right, up to down of Western comic storytelling slowly breaks down. On the first splash we’ve got a Laura/Sakhmet story riding the top, then the lower three quarters of each page telling their own stories (though really it’s the continuation of Baal’s story from page one to two). The second spread flips the structural arrangement, but now the left and the runner are continuing a story while on the right page we’re with Laura and Baph and Laura’s sister and ow oh God that hurts to read.

The pages continue to shift and change from there, with one section always following Laura, at least one following Dio/Cass at the rave, and the other one or two checking in on what other characters are up to.

The thing I love about the approach is how it speaks to the disintegration within the group that Laura ordained with her choice of “Anarchy” last issue. We’re not in complete collapse by any means, we can definitely follow the narratives, but the idea that these characters are starting to go in different directions is literally demonstrated in the structure of the page.

And also in the way the pages alter the visual language of Dio’s earlier rave (from issue 8). We’ve got the same 16 block grid structure, but it’s twice as dense; now every block contains an actual story panel, as compared to half for most of 8, with the other half used for the ongoing rave 1-2-3-4 countdowns.

Whereas issue 8′s dance pages had a sort of expansiveness, a sense of the rave as the overriding context that the story panels are just a part of, in 27 we’ve lost all that. In fact the rave is only one small part of what’s going on, even as its grid and color frames remain. (It’s interesting to see the rave visual style used as well for what precedes and follows it; it’s like the energy of the rave is starting to bleed out beyond the confines in which it makes sense.)

It’s also worth noting the rave in issue 8 ends with different members of the Pantheon one after another finishing Dionysius’ sentence, as though all one person. Another great contrast with the never-united narratives of issue 27.

But you know, even seeing how issue 27 offers an intensifying deterioration of the rave joy feel of issue 8, I still easily get lost in the visual dance of its two page spreads. I think it’s those bright frames; they just read to me as “fun”. (Apparently I’d be all good living in a prison camp as long it was decorated with Christmas lights.)

One moment does really snap me out of it, though:

No matter how bad things have gotten, Drunk Child Star Mini feels very unexpected. Plus who is she talking to? The camera team? Herself? Ananke Within?

(Actually, going back to issue 8 I realize we get a similar moment where out of the blue the story cuts to Minerva, talking directly to the camera with that same combination of ‘Don’t mind me.” and “Life sucks.”

So she’s almost certainly talking to their documentary squad.)

Mini drinking is not the worst thing we see in these pages by any means.

Ow. Ow. Oh God, Oh God it hurts.

But somehow that Mini moment (that mini Mini?) (#sorrynotsorry) is the moment I find most off key.

ONE MORE ONE MORE TIME

Hmm. That comparison between the two Mini moments has got me thinking...

You know, give me a second...

*time passes*

So hey, I’m back. I just went back through the rave in issue 8. Here are some of its major beats:

Dio tries to help Laura let go.

Laura becomes a part of everything going on.

Laura talks about her family and sketches them in light.

Cassandra cannot connect.

Sakhmet and Laura look each over and then start dancing together.

Woden watches.

Mini is left out.

The Morrigan warns Laura about getting too into Baphomet.

Everyone unites around Dio’s thought of making people’s lives better, because the end is coming soon.

Each of those beats is returned to issue 27.

Dio tries to help Cassandra let go.

Laura tries to disconnect from everything that’s happened.

Laura thinks about when she got Baphomet to create an illusion of her family.

Cassandra finally connects, saying “You’re full of stars”, which is what Laura said to her at the rave in issue 8. But then she rejects the connection.

Laura, now with Sakhmet, wonders what’s the worst thing she could do to her.

Woden watches. (Jamie uses the very same image.)

Mini is still left out, and now drinking.

Laura gets too into Baphomet, and now Baphomet is locked away with the Morrigan.

Cassandra rejects the connection.

There’s a little more in each rave than that (Woden plotting, Woden calling for a hook up, Baal and Inanna), but you gotta love the way the parallels show those stories having progressed (and not for the better).

(Also, I know Dio is on life support at this point, but man it feels like there should be one more cast rave, doesn’t it? Jonesing for my rule of threes.)

LOCK STEP

In the final pages we shift to two pages of a sort of call and response; on the left side we get David telling us what’s “really going on”, aka in year two the gods lose it, and on the right we cut back to each god in their own version of doing that, and ending on the punch line of Cassandra.

She’s the one god who seems to have her head well and truly on straight, the adult in the room, but here she is just staring silently at what has been her white whale the whole issue, Ananke’s Murderous Mystery Machine.

Gillen’s notes on this moment are familiar, chilling and wonderful:

Comrade Rossignol, my old partner in crime, game developer and co-writer on The Ludocrats, and I have a line we tend to quote to one another. It’s a paraphrase of a quote from Ballard: ‘My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.’

We quote it as: ‘Stay true to your obsessions and your obsessions will be true to you.’

It’s basically been our respective careers’ magnetic north, but there’s certainly times when I wonder how good it’s proved for us as human beings.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

You could easily go from Cassandra staring silently up to the spooky final full page spread of her white whale itself. But instead Gillen gives us an extra six panel page first. It seems puzzling; we don’t really need to have David ask “Are you okay?” We already know that Cass isn’t, and that she doesn’t know it.

But for me what makes that page so important is that it gives the other Norns the chance to ask David about their own fate. Imperial Phase I has taken Skuld and Verdandi from silent back-up singers to real emotional partners with Cass, indeed the dominants to her submissive. By presenting us with the question of their fate we’re reminded of the fullness of their humanity; their lives are just as valuable as that of Cass.

Their question also plays very much to Gillen’s comment about the destructive impacts of artistic obsession. These gods don’t just hurt themselves; they put their families, their fans, their friends at risk. What will Skuld and Verdandi do when those dangers come for them, one wonders...?

#wicdiv #kieron gillen #jamie mckelvie #Hoping for a Skuld and Verdandi sitcom spinoff #matt wilson is the god of colors

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