This is the high concept behind The Wicked + The Divine, the latest Image comic from Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson. Every ninety(ish) days, two handsome young writers return to this blog. They read the last three issues of The Wicked + The Divine, and they write three essays each. Welcome to Tim + Alex Get TWATD. Each set of essays will be broken into two posts, to save our wrists and your eyes. We might be doing close readings of particular scenes or panels, picking out a theme or character that’s caught our attention, or just speculating wildly. Spoilers will be everywhere, so if you haven’t read the comics yet, avert your eyes or, better yet, grab them and come back later. In two years, they’ll probably still be doing this. The idiots. “But not yet.” You know, given that its very first page is dominated by a skull, and the majority of its cast’s lives have a guaranteed expiration date of two years’ time, The Wicked + The Divine has actually shown a remarkably light touch when it comes to mortality. In the opening pages of #1, which take us back to 1923 and the era’s own set of deities, we get a preview of the gods’ inevitable fate. Eight have already been reduced to the aforementioned skulls, and a couple of pages later, we see the explosive murder-suicide of the remaining four. But their demises don’t weigh too heavily on us – they’re not characters we’ve had time to get invested in, despite their wonderful Jazz Age designs – nor, it seems, on their 21st Century counterparts. Over in 2014, Amaterasu (aka 17-year-old Hazel Greenaway) is asked about her imminent demise by the comic’s resident cynic, Cassandra. There is a regretful pause, a moment of wonderfully-drawn sadness in Ammy’s big brown eyes, before she pretty much shrugs it off:There are a few possible reasons for all this: They’re teenagers. Do you remember being 17? The threat of dying before 20 feels more like a promise. Amaterasu’s reaction is pretty much this. They’re also kind of immortal. After all, that elegant set up makes two promises: You will die. But, in some sense, you’ll be back, long after everyone else here is gone. It’s just like pop music – I can just about conceive that Prince Rogers Nelson will one day die. But Prince, the artist previously known as an unpronounceable symbol? He’s not going anywhere. They’re too busy making the most of being not-dead. Creation is these gods’ main business, both in the artistic being-popstars sense and the procreational one. Based on Luci’s accounting in issue #3, pretty much the whole pantheon has touched pelvises. (More on that from Tim in our next set of essays.) Simple dramatic license. If The Wicked + The Divine was wall-to-wall moping about the gaping abyss (and not the kind Badb is taking about), it’d be about as much fun as hanging out in a funeral home. Besides, with a promised run of 30-40 issues, the comic has plenty of time to reach that point yet. In fact, the one time so far that the comic has really pushed the issue – with a pure black page, lit only by the refrain “We’re all going to die” – it came from the gods’ music. (The two-page sequence being, as far as I can tell, a particularly abstract way of depicting the trance-like state of a perfect gig.) It’s a performance, and it’s the message Baphomet and the Morrigan choose to send to the outside world. So it’s probably telling that the sequence ends with three more words, lighting the darkness and breaking the rhythm: “But not yet.” Won’t Somebody Think of the Grown-Ups? The Wicked + The Divine is a series with its eye fixed firmly on the young. Laura, our entry point into the story, is 17. The gods and goddesses are, at most, in their early 20s. Apart from the elderly and possibly immortal Ananke, the only major character that could rent a car in the US is Cassandra, who is old enough to have a Masters degree, but young enough to still be annoyed about her student loans. That said, one group of adults is very conspicuous in their absence – the parents. Laura’s parents are both seen and heard, and her interactions with them root her as a ‘normal’ figure caught up in the supernatural events of the Recurrence. In issue #2 we are presented with a portrait of their normality, as the family sits around the television watching Baal’s interview. Laura’s father gently prods at his daughter’s affection for the gods, her mother prevents it escalating beyond good-natured familial banter. In issue #3, we see the consequences of Laura being caught (quite literally) at the Morrigan’s gig, and the ensuing row, again a picture of normal teenage life.In contrast, we have the parents of the gods. Amaterasu is 17, Lucifer maybe a couple of years older. Minerva is only 12. It’s common knowledge that the gods live for a maximum of two years after they are awoken. Where are their mortal parents, lamenting their childrens’ inevitable early deaths? Or, given that we’re also dealing with pop stars and the modern cults of celebrity, where are the parents desperately trying to edge their way into their child’s spotlight, barely acknowledging their foretold doom? Granted, we’ve only had three issues, and the plot has been moving at a fair tick, but we’ve already had our attention drawn to the empty seats at the family table. Lucifer’s parents (or rather the parents of the girl who became Lucifer) are twice referenced. First in Cassandra’s interview, where she conjures a picture of Luci discovering Bowie in her parents’ “embarrassingly retro record collection”, and then again when Luci regales Laura with the tale of her transformation into a god, while her parents “were out at some awful Britpop covers band”. If her parents are at the court hearing in […]