Superhuman After All

Once again, after a particularly long hiatus, we return. The gap between the last volume and this gave us some time to build up momentum. We’re hungry, we’re back and we’re mixing metaphors. It’s like we never left.

Tim: I’ve written before about how WicDiv plays with the generic conventions of superhero comics. Obviously it’s not a straight-up superhero tale by a long stretch, but all the creators involved are familiar enough with that genre to be able to bring some of its tools to bear, both in direct and subversive ways.

Rising Action is the most action-heavy arc we’ve seen so far, as tensions that have been building since more or less the first issue explode in a series of violent confrontations between super-powered gods. Any comic book that deals with this kind of content is going to have a whiff of the superheroic about it, even if the characters we’re dealing with could hardly be called heroes in the classical sense.

McKelvie’s taken the lessons he learned from Young Avengers’ envelope-pushing and refined them into superb toolset here, deftly rendering the clashes with a huge amount of energy as acrobatic cat women, lightning bolts, spectral vines, flaming batons and murders of crows dance across the page. Characters get new, battle-ready outfits, with Woden turning into even more of an action figure, and even shy Amaterasu donning armour.

But what’s the purpose of all this action? Ananke is the arch-manipulator behind it of course, and while we know her plans are now considerably off course, thanks to the actions of Persephone et al, her decision to tackle this all-guns-blazing seems an odd one, given how heavily she’s relied on coercion and working behind the scenes before.

More than any previous arc, these three issues have seen the gods demonstrating their abilities, their so-called miracles, more regularly and often in more explosive fashion. Apart from The Norns, Dionysus and, to a certain degree, Minerva (though we’ve seen plenty of the adorable Owly), everyone has been throwing wonder-dust around like crazy.

In the previous piece that I mentioned to above, I noted how, when Luci makes use of her powers in the first issue, the comic becomes more stylised, with Ben-Day dot effects blooming forth as the extraordinary bursts in upon the world. Similarly, as more and more powers swirl about the page, McKelvie’s pulled-from-life London streets and pubs fade into background noise until only the gods and their powers remain.

The gods are supposedly here to inspire humanity, to use their short two years of life to spark the ideas that will sustain culture for the next century. But if they are all busy fighting each other, they could well end up dead before triggering any great insights in their potential audiences. It may even be that this is part of Ananke’s plan. After all, the world that WicDiv presents hardly seems more cultured or progressed than our own, and it’s supposedly been having a booster shot of creativity every 90 years.

The focus on action has more personal consequences as well, though. The idea of super-powers isolating their bearers from humanity is an idea that fiction, in particular comics, have touched on before. It forms one of the central themes of Watchmen, which Gillen often cites as a major influence. Could that be true for the gods in The Wicked + The Divine too?

The characters certainly seem more focused on their inter-pantheon struggles than performing at the moment. Admittedly, a lot of them feel their lives are at risk, or are pursuing vengeance, but perhaps there’s more to it than that. Embracing these identities, channelling these immortal deities into human form, must take a psychological toll. 

The last arc was about the ways in which the characters’ human backgrounds influenced their current choices. Perhaps this one is about the way their divine arrogance and fury drives them?

Circling back toward my original point – the success of modern superhero comics, especially since the dawn of the Silver Age, has been in balancing the mundane civilian lives of secret identities with the iconic, symbolic action of masked heroes. In many ways, the characters of WicDiv are walking that line themselves, and this arc seems intent on tipping them over towards the immortal, awe-inspiring figures they could be – but at the cost of their humanity.

(Writer’s Note: Some of the above may sound pretty familiar if you followed this post thread. I’m cribbing from my reply there, as it drew on a lot of the stuff I was already thinking about with these three issues.)