Every 90 years, twelve gods reincarnate into human hosts. They become famous, adored, loathed, and catalyse the culture around them. And then within two years, they’re all dead. For their 2014 recurrence, the gods return as pop stars—blends of superstar music archetypes from Bowie to Kanye. That’s the premise of The Wicked + the Divine, a glorious new comic series about death, creativity and pop launching this week from Image Comics, written by Kieron Gillen, with visuals by Jamie McKelvie (art), Matthew Wilson (colors) and Clayton Cowles (letters).
The Wicked + the Divine appears at a moment when the American comics mainstream is being redefined. In the bookshops—and increasingly in comics stores—the hegemony of superhero giants Marvel and DC is being disrupted by smaller publishers with a stronger commitment to creator ownership (Marvel and DC own the rights to all their famous characters). At the forefront is Image, home to several giddily ambitious long-term projects: zombie epic and TV hit The Walking Dead, intimate and inventive space opera Saga, lush gothic western Pretty Deadly and the barely classifiable sci-fi rom-com Sex Criminals. It’s all matched by a demographic shift—the centre of comics gravity is shifting from a hardcore base of dedicated superhero fans to an audience that’s younger and more diverse. Comics aren’t just for dads anymore.
The new comics audience, in other words, looks a bit more like a pop audience—and a lot more like Laura, the 17-year-old fan who narrates The Wicked + the Divine. Gillen and McKelvie may be some way from 17, but they have plenty of pop previous. Their Phonogram series explored pop fandom, and McKelvie’s clean-lined, emotionally expressive style has been seen on posters for Chvrches and Tegan and Sara. We met in London last week to talk about pop archetypes, death, and why superheroes are so badly dressed. The Wicked + the Divine is out on June 18, available online and at your local comic book store.
A preview page of The Wicked + the Divine. See the full preview here.
Pitchfork: How does The Wicked + the Divine fit into this comics boom?
Kieron Gillen: It’s our awesome stadium rock album. This is [Daft Punk’s] Discovery—this is what we want to be our incredible pop statement of what we are. That defines the next ten years of pop music, obviously. With The Wicked + the Divine, we know we literally could not have done this ten years ago. This is every single thing I’ve learned about pop music, and life and art and culture and comics in an issue. It includes 40 years of living pop culture. Why did I fall in love with the Lord of the Rings as a 10 year old? Why did I go completely go crazy over Purple Haze, which is the first record I remember going all out-of-body over? I’m analyzing how and why.
Pitchfork: If you’re a pop fan—there are more music fans than comics fans!—why pick up this strange thing with pictures and speech bubbles?
KG: This is all about translating the effects of pop singles into the comics single. These are mediums which are based around very short-form statements, with aesthetic and intellectual coherence and every single idea you have in the world thrown into it. They’re both very democratic forms. You can do the greatest comic ever on a bit of paper, folded up. At the same time, the interaction between the two forms has kind of gotten interesting. Comics are a place people come to take stuff from. You should pick up the Wicked + the Divine just to see what music videos will be ripping off in three years time! [laughs]
Jamie McKelvie: I’ve always thought that if comics are a part of pop culture [then] they should reflect pop culture, but a lot of the time comics, superhero comics especially, just feed on themselves. For me, comics should take from every bit of pop culture that they can; they’ve got the same DNA as music and film and TV and fashion and all of these things.
KG: It’s a bastard medium.
Pitchfork: Imagine that The Wicked + the Divine #1 is someone’s first comic. What are your tips for reading?
KG: Start at the top left. Move right. You can look at the words and pictures at the same time—I’m not even joking! We’ve made it very readable. We’ve kept the panel structures quite simple.
JM: We deliberately do that. Again, going back to comics feeding off themselves, a lot of superhero stuff now looks great but it’s so difficult to read if you don’t know how to read comics. I deliberately focus on the story.
Pitchfork: You’ve done a comic before that was explicitly mirroring the structure of a particular song, the “Wolf Life Me” issue of Phonogram.
JM: That’s always in our blood, I think. I mean, it’s a book about, on one level, being a pop star, so it’s something we’re always thinking about.
KG: We do fight ourselves. We always joked that with Phonogram we were making a comic about music in a medium with no sound. We will deliberately choose the hardest thing to do.
Pitchfork: You’ve said this is a comic about death, but it’s also a comic about pop, and pop archetypes as Gods. Could you explain a bit more about that idea?
KG: Basically, my Dad died and the idea came the week after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And it was the idea that Gods, these recurring archetypes, they have two years to live, and it seemed a really interesting way to talk about life and death. The point being, it doesn’t matter if it’s two years, or ten years, or seventy years, we all fundamentally have a brief and finite time on this earth, what the hell are you going to do with it? And for somebody at my stage of life, the question is why the hell be creative anyway? Why is anyone a creator? What’s interesting is that people who haven’t read it think it’s meant to be anti-celebrity and all that kind of crap.
Pitchfork: The Wicked + the Divine starts off in Britain. Is it going to stay in Britain?
KG: Mostly. The more you globetrot the more you lose Laura. Laura getting on a train and hiding in the toilets trying to get up to Glasgow? That’s interesting. Laura being able to buy a plane ticket? That’s a different girl.
Pitchfork: Do you think it’s also the case that pop icons are what Britain had instead of superheroes?
KG: Yeah! One of my standard quotes I drag out—it’s to do with this idea you get in superhero comics that superheroes who are like celebrities are bad, and to show they’re bad they might do a bit of coke. Fuck it, I don’t care if they do coke, David Bowie saved my life. David Bowie has saved more people’s lives than Batman!
Pitchfork: Another vital element of the pop archetype is fashion. Is it fair to say that fashion is pretty important to this comic?
JM: I’ve always believed comics should bring in things like that, and they haven’t for a very long time, in general. If you look at the 80s X-Men stuff, Cyclops looks like he’s stepped out of the video for “Rio”! That was so current, and we’ve lost that. You always get people complaining, “What’s it going to look like in 10 years’ time?” It’s ridiculous. Everything is going to age. If you try and avoid dating it, you just end up with something that doesn’t mean anything.
KG: You cannot care about posterity. You have no idea about it. Posterity is literally a dead man’s game.
Pitchfork: You’re settling down to read The Wicked + the Divine for the first time. What album is on the stereo?
KG: There is a Spotify playlist! If you play the actual playlist you’ll get a sense of how we want the issue to sound, the music playing on the dancefloor. It’s a history of everything about death and life and pop music and everything that occurs to me, and occasionally I throw in a Fall record because I can’t help myself. What album, though? [long pause] Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love. That’s where I’ve gone in my head.
JM: Weird covers of Madonna, that’s what I would recommend.
KG: There is a lot of Madonna in it! The urge that made Madonna do “Like a Prayer” is a very wicked and divine urge, I reckon.