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Antonomasia's Reviews > The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 3: Commercial Suicide
The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 3: Commercial Suicide
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Antonomasia's review
bookshelves: arc, comics-and-graphic-novels, music, decade-2010s, 2016, british, sff, netgalley
Feb 16, 2016
bookshelves: arc, comics-and-graphic-novels, music, decade-2010s, 2016, british, sff, netgalley
Reading all three trade volumes of The Wicked & the Divine over two days has been intense, and I daresay gives a different view from following the series over a couple of years. This volume, though I didn't like it at first, turned out the most varied and interesting of all in storyline, effect perhaps augmented by the variety of guest artists, and more depth for a few characters.
The hollowness, cynicism and meta-commentary behind the gorgeous mythical pop-tropes (which, as a big fan of Phonogram I both loved, and hated to see reused until hackneyed) seemed even more overwhelming in the first half of vol. 3 than they had in 1-2, knowingly illustrative of an internet youth culture in which everything is analysed, memed and problematised, and nothing can feel fresh and joyful. (Both the comic and this review are the work of jaded people born in the 70s, and I don't think it's possible to know exactly what it all feels like from the inside, no matter how many Tumblrs you read, without actually being younger and experiencing this stuff in your teens and twenties. Maybe the culture isn't quite so hopeless and recursive, and some of it does feel new, if you haven't been alive as long. )
Then I started to see that, via the characters of Tara, Woden, Amaterasu and Cassandra, issues 13-15 were a multi-sided commentary on internet social justice issues, including, but not limited to those affecting comics. (I mostly hear about the comics world second-hand, through friends and articles; it may be that commentary about these controversies within comics themselves has itself become a dull cliche. Meanwhile I haven't encountered it directly before, and some of the analyses here were interesting, and welcome in their balance.) This was part of a pretty dark phase of the story, in issues 12 to partway through 15. The title, exhaustively knowing as ever, alludes to the difficult uncommercial album that sees off some fans; the mood also evoked those bad-decadent periods of the typical rock biography when everyone's at each other's throats and getting paranoid from the drugs. (I usually find those albums & biography chapters interesting, but here I understood the more typical negative responses: early-teen WicDiv wasn't a type of darkness I found comfortable, and I was waiting and hoping for the story arc to go up again. It doesn't faze me that most of the cast are destined to die soon - I see things much as one character says later in the wonderful issue 16: We're all walking dead. we're all at the edge of that pit. But we get to choose what we do whilst we're here...I'm dancing. They say that having experienced not being able to choose anything, or 'dance'; so it's not naive thoughtlessness disregarding more limited existences, just a statement of how they feel, that day. Meanwhile, these darkest episodes of WicDiv were uncomfortable because there was precious little 'dancing'.)
Tara's story is one that's been frequently told in the last few years, about misogynistic bullying and a woman who feels she's only been valued - if and when she is valued at all - for her appearance and for who people think she is or want her to be, not for who she [feels she] really is. In vol.2 Amaterasu lamented (paraphrase) that she herself was boring because she was straight: meanwhile, this is the dark, unpleasantly media-worthy side of that. Tara also evokes those celebrities, who, sometimes for no apparent reason as here, have become love-to-hate figures and objects of derision, an invisible 'kick me' sign permanently pinned to them, and the story reflects how stressful it might be to be them, increasingly unable to do anything right in the eyes of the public and commentariat. She had experiences that make the following feel universally true to her, rather than merely the case with certain nasty pieces of work (my second clause is implied nowhere in the book): I heard "Hey goddess, hey beautiful" turn into "I'm going to rape you bitch" enough times to know that the former is just the latter with a bow on it. In the way it takes up a fourth-wave feminist mantle wholesale and perhaps as fanservice, I found this issue somewhat similar to the New Year episode of Sherlock. (Although it wasn't quite so out of step with established characters. And given its awareness of online social justice politics, had surprisingly little to say about Tara's pre-goddess life as a girl of Pakistani descent.) Where it was - depressingly - enlightening, though, was in the two pages of abusive tweets it printed. Often, I suspect, the worst of these things aren't shown, in press articles, and certainly not in a Reggie Yates documentary I saw recently in which he was shown interviewing Laurie Penny and looking at some tweets that the camera never focused on. Knowing Yates' oddly yet usefully innocent manner as a presenter, I suspect what he saw wasn't as bad as two of the 'tweets' here - which I was surprised actually to find quite shocking, and contained specifics that I'd never even seen mentioned as actions in popular serial killer or horror stories. (Some people would surely therefore want warnings re. reading that whole first page of tweets.)
The basically Vader-suited Woden (one of the less mythologically convincing incarnations) - though another GR reviewer rightly mentions Daft Punk as a basis for his look - has some surprisingly complex things to say. He's partly a portrait of a type of stubborn male commenter on feminist articles, and of a slightly different type, the perhaps sociopathic sort of cynical man who makes use of feminism for his own ends - but in these scenes he also becomes more than a caricature, and a way for the writers to make some worthwhile points. Importantly - and unlike Tara's story - the writing doesn't recycle the exact statements commonly seen from below-the-line commenters, those ones that mean you don't bother reading comments because you've seen it all before. Mirroring the authoritarian left's tactics to shut down and invalidate argument, Woden has his own nihilistic ways to do so from a different side, for example by acknowledging how patriarchal societies are bad for many men and then not caring about anything because he won't live to see the future - and with slippery, headfucky ultimate cynicism like the following, that could make the listener question everything he and others have said: You want to control someone? Give them a slice of the truth that confirms all their prejudices.
The gender-based power structure in WicDiv defies straightforward analysis, (view spoiler). And the underlying logic is dark, inspired as it was apparently by death and bereavement: (view spoiler)
The argument between Amaterasu and Cassandra is more easily encapsulated by its dialogue - and frankly it's an easier one to win (but then I would say that as I agree with its conclusions).
A: You're the one who sees everything in black and white. You care about ideals more than people. You don't care that your ideals are hurting people. You don't care that people are hurting.
The characters provide recursive, hall-of-mirrors, commentary on the offensiveness potential of their scene set in Japan, a scene ultimately created so they can talk about cultural appropriation.
Later, Cassandra, referring to a shared past on Tumblr: If you ever liked anything I wrote, you have to know this, you're doing it wrong. (Black and white again - she has a very all or nothing concept of liking. On here, people often like posts whilst not agreeing with every sentence. Though some particular sentences may be too disagreeable, so you withhold the like from the other 99%. Besides, likes can mean all sorts: "glad you enjoyed this, I did too", "thanks for drawing this to my attention", "yes I'm still speaking to you/ I hope you're okay".)
I've been wondering if Tumblr kids, queer / feminist teens and twentysomethings are actually quite a big audience for comics and to a lesser extent SFF - if all this content isn't just about who's been making noise, but about the stats, and producing stuff a significant audience will probably like.
I absolutely love issue 16, a mostly realistic comic about pre-fame Morrigan and Baphomet. (The Goodreads single-issue ratings suggest I'm far from alone in this. It's actually good, it's not just that on some level I've always been a bit of a goth, even if I don't have quite the matching wardrobe and record collection). Both Marian and Cameron are both hot, and romantic in an intelligent, stormy gothic kitchen-sink kind of way. Like Tara and Sekhmet, they appear to have reached their mid-twenties before the gods incarnated into them, more interesting for the reader well past their own teens. The art was great too, by Leila del Duca - who I was surprised to find does superhero type comics rather than realistic, so well does her style suit this story. I liked this episode so much, it was going to be difficult not to give the whole volume four stars in the afterglow of reading it. Sekhmet's backstory was good, a change from the mostly middle-class characters, and her incarnation's predatory nature provides a foil to Tara's sacrificial victimhood, but I wasn't sure about the art here. I don't go for 'messy' art styles generally, but whilst it really didn't work for gig scenes, it did give plot-appropriate visual chaos to the life of a character who previously looked sleek and fully in control. (I'm surprised so many other readers disliked it, as I thought high volume comics readers were well au fait with the idea of guest artists via webcomics, and were more open minded than I am about different styles.)
Oh yes, what it is these days with its having been cool to like The Bluetones? All these 'Slight Returns' here for instance - and it's not just here. Not bothered so much as baffled; I'm not aware of any other minor band (apparently bland at the time, though very definitely hummable) whose stock seems to have gone up in such a way.
In McKelvie's "video" shorts in the end gallery, I was very fond of Inanna's My regrets are the one thing I don't regret., although he seemed too young and too nice to have cause to say that. If you're older and you've pissed a few people off who didn't deserve it, it's only decent to have some regrets - and it may be a reminder not to make the same mistakes again. Yet it's unpopular in popular culture to suggest regret has any value. The series' strange mix of soundbite shallowness + wisdom continues.
Would I read more if I could, if vol 4 was around now? Yes. (view spoiler) (WicDiv has also made me keener to read Young Avengers.) The difficult third album sure as hell wasn't as pretty, but it was interesting.
This was a free advance copy received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The hollowness, cynicism and meta-commentary behind the gorgeous mythical pop-tropes (which, as a big fan of Phonogram I both loved, and hated to see reused until hackneyed) seemed even more overwhelming in the first half of vol. 3 than they had in 1-2, knowingly illustrative of an internet youth culture in which everything is analysed, memed and problematised, and nothing can feel fresh and joyful. (Both the comic and this review are the work of jaded people born in the 70s, and I don't think it's possible to know exactly what it all feels like from the inside, no matter how many Tumblrs you read, without actually being younger and experiencing this stuff in your teens and twenties. Maybe the culture isn't quite so hopeless and recursive, and some of it does feel new, if you haven't been alive as long. )
Then I started to see that, via the characters of Tara, Woden, Amaterasu and Cassandra, issues 13-15 were a multi-sided commentary on internet social justice issues, including, but not limited to those affecting comics. (I mostly hear about the comics world second-hand, through friends and articles; it may be that commentary about these controversies within comics themselves has itself become a dull cliche. Meanwhile I haven't encountered it directly before, and some of the analyses here were interesting, and welcome in their balance.) This was part of a pretty dark phase of the story, in issues 12 to partway through 15. The title, exhaustively knowing as ever, alludes to the difficult uncommercial album that sees off some fans; the mood also evoked those bad-decadent periods of the typical rock biography when everyone's at each other's throats and getting paranoid from the drugs. (I usually find those albums & biography chapters interesting, but here I understood the more typical negative responses: early-teen WicDiv wasn't a type of darkness I found comfortable, and I was waiting and hoping for the story arc to go up again. It doesn't faze me that most of the cast are destined to die soon - I see things much as one character says later in the wonderful issue 16: We're all walking dead. we're all at the edge of that pit. But we get to choose what we do whilst we're here...I'm dancing. They say that having experienced not being able to choose anything, or 'dance'; so it's not naive thoughtlessness disregarding more limited existences, just a statement of how they feel, that day. Meanwhile, these darkest episodes of WicDiv were uncomfortable because there was precious little 'dancing'.)
Tara's story is one that's been frequently told in the last few years, about misogynistic bullying and a woman who feels she's only been valued - if and when she is valued at all - for her appearance and for who people think she is or want her to be, not for who she [feels she] really is. In vol.2 Amaterasu lamented (paraphrase) that she herself was boring because she was straight: meanwhile, this is the dark, unpleasantly media-worthy side of that. Tara also evokes those celebrities, who, sometimes for no apparent reason as here, have become love-to-hate figures and objects of derision, an invisible 'kick me' sign permanently pinned to them, and the story reflects how stressful it might be to be them, increasingly unable to do anything right in the eyes of the public and commentariat. She had experiences that make the following feel universally true to her, rather than merely the case with certain nasty pieces of work (my second clause is implied nowhere in the book): I heard "Hey goddess, hey beautiful" turn into "I'm going to rape you bitch" enough times to know that the former is just the latter with a bow on it. In the way it takes up a fourth-wave feminist mantle wholesale and perhaps as fanservice, I found this issue somewhat similar to the New Year episode of Sherlock. (Although it wasn't quite so out of step with established characters. And given its awareness of online social justice politics, had surprisingly little to say about Tara's pre-goddess life as a girl of Pakistani descent.) Where it was - depressingly - enlightening, though, was in the two pages of abusive tweets it printed. Often, I suspect, the worst of these things aren't shown, in press articles, and certainly not in a Reggie Yates documentary I saw recently in which he was shown interviewing Laurie Penny and looking at some tweets that the camera never focused on. Knowing Yates' oddly yet usefully innocent manner as a presenter, I suspect what he saw wasn't as bad as two of the 'tweets' here - which I was surprised actually to find quite shocking, and contained specifics that I'd never even seen mentioned as actions in popular serial killer or horror stories. (Some people would surely therefore want warnings re. reading that whole first page of tweets.)
The basically Vader-suited Woden (one of the less mythologically convincing incarnations) - though another GR reviewer rightly mentions Daft Punk as a basis for his look - has some surprisingly complex things to say. He's partly a portrait of a type of stubborn male commenter on feminist articles, and of a slightly different type, the perhaps sociopathic sort of cynical man who makes use of feminism for his own ends - but in these scenes he also becomes more than a caricature, and a way for the writers to make some worthwhile points. Importantly - and unlike Tara's story - the writing doesn't recycle the exact statements commonly seen from below-the-line commenters, those ones that mean you don't bother reading comments because you've seen it all before. Mirroring the authoritarian left's tactics to shut down and invalidate argument, Woden has his own nihilistic ways to do so from a different side, for example by acknowledging how patriarchal societies are bad for many men and then not caring about anything because he won't live to see the future - and with slippery, headfucky ultimate cynicism like the following, that could make the listener question everything he and others have said: You want to control someone? Give them a slice of the truth that confirms all their prejudices.
The gender-based power structure in WicDiv defies straightforward analysis, (view spoiler). And the underlying logic is dark, inspired as it was apparently by death and bereavement: (view spoiler)
The argument between Amaterasu and Cassandra is more easily encapsulated by its dialogue - and frankly it's an easier one to win (but then I would say that as I agree with its conclusions).
A: You're the one who sees everything in black and white. You care about ideals more than people. You don't care that your ideals are hurting people. You don't care that people are hurting.
The characters provide recursive, hall-of-mirrors, commentary on the offensiveness potential of their scene set in Japan, a scene ultimately created so they can talk about cultural appropriation.
Later, Cassandra, referring to a shared past on Tumblr: If you ever liked anything I wrote, you have to know this, you're doing it wrong. (Black and white again - she has a very all or nothing concept of liking. On here, people often like posts whilst not agreeing with every sentence. Though some particular sentences may be too disagreeable, so you withhold the like from the other 99%. Besides, likes can mean all sorts: "glad you enjoyed this, I did too", "thanks for drawing this to my attention", "yes I'm still speaking to you/ I hope you're okay".)
I've been wondering if Tumblr kids, queer / feminist teens and twentysomethings are actually quite a big audience for comics and to a lesser extent SFF - if all this content isn't just about who's been making noise, but about the stats, and producing stuff a significant audience will probably like.
I absolutely love issue 16, a mostly realistic comic about pre-fame Morrigan and Baphomet. (The Goodreads single-issue ratings suggest I'm far from alone in this. It's actually good, it's not just that on some level I've always been a bit of a goth, even if I don't have quite the matching wardrobe and record collection). Both Marian and Cameron are both hot, and romantic in an intelligent, stormy gothic kitchen-sink kind of way. Like Tara and Sekhmet, they appear to have reached their mid-twenties before the gods incarnated into them, more interesting for the reader well past their own teens. The art was great too, by Leila del Duca - who I was surprised to find does superhero type comics rather than realistic, so well does her style suit this story. I liked this episode so much, it was going to be difficult not to give the whole volume four stars in the afterglow of reading it. Sekhmet's backstory was good, a change from the mostly middle-class characters, and her incarnation's predatory nature provides a foil to Tara's sacrificial victimhood, but I wasn't sure about the art here. I don't go for 'messy' art styles generally, but whilst it really didn't work for gig scenes, it did give plot-appropriate visual chaos to the life of a character who previously looked sleek and fully in control. (I'm surprised so many other readers disliked it, as I thought high volume comics readers were well au fait with the idea of guest artists via webcomics, and were more open minded than I am about different styles.)
Oh yes, what it is these days with its having been cool to like The Bluetones? All these 'Slight Returns' here for instance - and it's not just here. Not bothered so much as baffled; I'm not aware of any other minor band (apparently bland at the time, though very definitely hummable) whose stock seems to have gone up in such a way.
In McKelvie's "video" shorts in the end gallery, I was very fond of Inanna's My regrets are the one thing I don't regret., although he seemed too young and too nice to have cause to say that. If you're older and you've pissed a few people off who didn't deserve it, it's only decent to have some regrets - and it may be a reminder not to make the same mistakes again. Yet it's unpopular in popular culture to suggest regret has any value. The series' strange mix of soundbite shallowness + wisdom continues.
Would I read more if I could, if vol 4 was around now? Yes. (view spoiler) (WicDiv has also made me keener to read Young Avengers.) The difficult third album sure as hell wasn't as pretty, but it was interesting.
This was a free advance copy received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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February 16, 2016
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February 29, 2016
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Just finished it and found it interestingly-arted but strangely unenjoyable - I liked the pathos of the Tara episode, but found the rest of the volume mostly a chore. I should enjoy the goths but I find myself just not believing that Gillen takes the subculture seriously enough - I came here directly from Phonogram 3 where he's obviously so sympathetic to his characters that treating them all as huge, hollow, style-over-substance jokes as I personally feel he does in WicDiv is very disappointing to me.
Those characters took it more seriously than any goth I've met. Although I don't think he's as good on the incidental, not-immediately-stereotypical details of goth.
I did like the moment when it's clear that Morrigan really embraces life because she's had a brush with (and thereby become fixated on) death. That's a nicely sympathetic reading of goth. Of course you're right that many actual goths don't have a thought in their pretty heads, but let's not judge subcultures by their idiots, eh?
Of course you're right that many actual goths don't have a thought in their pretty heads, but let's not judge subcultures by their idiots, eh?Oh, I meant that every dedicated goth I've met (especially the ones who always look gothic, even if they're just putting the rubbish out) has a sense of humour and irony about it.
Ah yes, that makes perfect sense! Sorry. But you can be deadly serious and own a sense of humour at the same time, I hope. Not that any of the other WicDiv gods seems overly blessed with self-awareness - part of the reason I've gotten weary with it. Just a bunch of preening narcissistic kids whose two years I'm quite looking forward to being up.
I think he's really capturing the way that Andrew Eldritch is at once brilliant, a tit, aware of both these things, and yet somehow still a bit oblivious.
Good point I guess, though of course Andrew Eldritch isn't actually a Goth! ;)
(Tumblr kids are a very big audience for some comics, this definitely being one of them. Others are somewhat unfortunate, eg Rat Queens, the female-led D&D pastiche which to me felt very cynical even before the artist got had up for beating up his wife)
And remember, this is the volume where it becomes clear that there is a villain beyond fate…