I Am The Resurrection?

Alex: Ever since Rising Action was first teased, something has sat uneasy with me. Ever since the first cover was unveiled. Ever since the final issue of the last arc, in fact. 

Since those immortal words, scribbled in sharpie on a notepad:

Look: as far as I’m concerned, issue #11 of The Wicked + The Divine is a sacred text. Starting with that cover, which essentially says ‘steel yourself for the worst’. The contents quickly deliver on that promise and then, just when you think you’re safe, do it all over again. It’s an incredible one-two punch to the vital organs. 

I remember shakily putting down the tablet after I finished, pausing to collect my eyebrows from their new position on the ceiling, and immediately firing up Bat for Lashes’ Laura with a lump in my throat. It wasn’t a happy moment, but it’s one I remember fondly.

So I wasn’t ready for anything for mess with that issue, that memory. And it seemed like bringing Laura – sorry, Persephone – back would do exactly that.

Issue #20 reveals how McKelvie & Gillen did it, and it’s inarguably smart. It takes a gap in #11’s storytelling you probably didn’t even realise was there: the all-black page between Ananke kklking her fingers and her stood over a flaming corpse.

And inserts a scene, so that the sequence now runs:

It turns out that when everything went dark  – neatly matched by the black panel borders of the new scene – it wasn’t because Laura died, but because she was knocked out.

What happened in-between? Inanna (sweet, blessed Inanna) and Baphomet (twice-damned Baphomet, one less now it’s been revealed he didn’t actually knock off my beloved) came crashing in, knocked Persephone out the way and, in Inanna’s case, took a magical bullet for her. (Insert image of me in meme-ready Darth Vader 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’ pose here.)

That strangely anonymous corpse we saw in #11 was Inanna. The fact that we never saw Baph kill him on-panel is because he didn’t. Persephone has been alive the whole time, and the book technically never said otherwise.

Ta-daaaa!

It’s an impressive magic trick.

Given that Rising Action is dabbling in the tropes of superhero comics, more than any WicDiv story before it – something Tim has already touched upon – it makes sense for the reveal to sit where it does, right in the middle of this arc. Hero resurrections are familiar territory over at Marvel and DC: Jean Grey, Superman, Bucky, Jean Grey again, any version of a hero who was popular when Geoff Johns was a kid… 

Even the method of going back to an old story and altering it is common enough that we have a shorthand for them: retcons.

It’s probably worth noting that, technically, neither of these are what WicDiv is doing. Laura isn’t being resurrected, because she never died. Retcon carries an implication of one author going back and meddling with the work of another, and it’s pretty clear that this has been Gillen & McKelvie’s plan all along. Still, these are the tropes that Rising Action is playing with.

The thing is, decades of superhero stories have taught us that there is an important risk attached to undoing major plot events this way. 

It starts to erode the feeling of consequence, which is how you end up with the refrain, being deployed with dizzying frequency at the moment, that nothing is permanent in superhero comics. When you object to a unsavoury plot development – whether it’s the murder of a prominent black character to give weight to a crossover or a Jewish-created paragon being associated with Nazism – the reply automatically comes back: well, it will all be back to normal in a few months.

WicDiv is fresh ground, a fictional universe where those rules haven’t been broken yet. More than that, it’s a series explicitly about the horrifying transience of life and permanence of death, something mainstream superhero stories struggle to convey. With every character’s end we see undone, the message is reinforced: death isn’t the end. Which is the precisely the opposite of the truth, and of what makes death so scary.

The way that McKelvie & Gillen have reintroduced Persephone to the series sidesteps that problem but it is now written into the DNA of the series.

So the question becomes whether bringing back Laura is worth the risks: of lowering the stakes for future conflict and of retrospectively lessening the impact of issue #11.

For me, that hasn’t been answered yet. The action-first approach of these issues means there hasn’t been much chance to get to know Persephone as a god yet. We know she’s in hell, and issue #20 showed what that means – potentially flipping the book’s themes of mortality to focus on grief – but right now the main plot requires her to be a leader and a fighter, which is harder for me to grab hold of.

Still, if this blog is testament to anything, it’s the fact that I trust Team WicDiv’s decisions implicitly. I’m fascinated to see where Laura’s story goes, and I’d be willing to bet it’ll eventually prove worth the cost of entry. The cost of resurrection.