30 Days of Getting TWATD: Day Five

[Insert pithy intro to the 30 Day Challenge here.]

DAY FIVE
Favourite ‘B’ cover

Alex: I mentioned yesterday how the A covers do such great work establishing characters and fleshing out the setting. One thing I didn’t mention, though, is how they feel like artefacts from WicDiv’s world – magazine covers, or tour posters, or album photography.

The B covers are remarkable collection of imagery (GIF-y proof, if proof were needed, here) but they also manage to feel like an extension of all that. Each artist (except Zdarsky, obv) finds their own approach to the whole artefact thing – shots from a gig, or fan art, or something from the archives of the WicDiv universe’s Mick Rock.

Look at how believably Kevin Wada’s #4 and Becky Cloonan’s #5 could be New Yorker illustrations for their cover-story profile on these Mazzy-Star-cross’d lovers. How Stephanie Hans’ #3 and Brandon Graham’s #8 are the world’s best camera phone pics of events we saw within the comics, stripped of the metaphorical light shows of the gods’ powers. The way David Aja’s #21 and Olly Moss’ #22 feel like physical objects from a world with these pop-gods.

But I’m picking Kris Anka’s cover to #19, featuring Baal at his eye-popping Daniel-Craig-emerging-from-a-pool best.

It feels like exactly the kind of picture of a male celebrity I’d stumble across on Tumblr – a GIF of Chris Evans’ Captain America popping the bicep in Civil War, or those first pics of Chris Hemsworth on the set of Ghostbusters – and pass around friends with a ‘there goes the last lingering thread of my heterosexuality’ caption. Which is, of course, exactly what I did with this cover.

The Inanna tattoo? Just the bittersweet icing on the (beef)cake.

Tim: In much the same way as the A covers, the variants provide such a glut of riches it’s hard to pick out a favourite. As Alex says, they do an amazing job of displaying each artist’s unique style and approach to the character while simultaneously feeling like the sort of real world reactions we’d see to the gods appearing in print and online.

For a while I considered the covers to #5 and #16, both terrific depictions of the second-best doomed romance in WicDiv (sorry, but Baal + Inanna 4eva) by Becky Cloonan and Leila Del Luca respectively. In the end, though, I decided on issue #10, and Frazer Irving’s perfect portrait of the newly-emerged Norns.

To start with, it portrays all three of the Norns, not just Urðr/Cassandra. I’m intrigued to see if we’ll explore Verðandi and Skuld in more detail as the series goes on, but in Irving’s cover we get a real sense of the three of them acting as a unit, tugging at the strings of fate to see what unravels.

Secondly, it’s a beautiful image, that deftly blurs the line between god and rockstar. Are those the lines of fate, or a spectacular lightshow? Are the Norns weaving the lives of mortals, or weaving shapes on the dancefloor? It straddles that divide effortless, evoking so much of the character and even the ‘sound’ of the Norns in a single illustration. Gorgeous work.