Tim + Alex Get TWATD — 30 Days of Getting TWATD: Day 17

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30 Days of Getting TWATD: Day 17

The 30 Day Challenge is just 17, do you know what I mean?

It’s also about 24 hours late, because Alex went to a brunch place with all-you-can-drink prosecco, and is only just now recovering.

DAY SEVENTEEN
Favourite friendship

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Tim: Alex and I didn’t become friends because of The Wicked + The Divine, but it’s not far off. While we originally knew each other online through Brian K Vaughan’s wonderful and much-missed message board, it wasn’t until we decided to brave the stranger danger and meet up at Thought Bubble that we truly became friends, and that was a decision largely driven by a mutual love of Phonogram, Gillen and McKelvie’s other look at music, fandom and art through a supernatural lens.

We’ve attended every Thought Bubble since then together too, tearing up the dancefloor in spectacular fashion (enough to warrant coverage on a comics website). We’ve infiltrated each others’ circles of friends quite thoroughly. Alex got me a job with his company, meaning he is technically my boss (the fool) which has also led to us travelling to Germany and Spain together. I’ve dog-sat for his adorable Shih Tzu, Lucky. He DJ’d at my 30th birthday. And we’ve started this ridiculous endeavour.

I consider myself very lucky to have a friend as loyal, caring and fun as Alex, and his creative energy and ambition pushes me to be a better writer and a better human being.

And after all that gushing, now he has to look like an arse by writing about comic book characters. Check and mate, Spencer.

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Alex: Yeah, I am brilliant. But you know who’s even better? Laura & Cassandra.

I realise this are the two characters I’ve previously identified as my favourite and least favourite, which makes it a bit of a weird choice. But, as I said in my moan about Laura, I think her personality bends to match who she’s spending time with, and Cass brings out the absolute best in her.

They’re two people pretending not to like each other, and without much in common – Laura is the Pantheon uber-fan, Cass is the doubter – but who spend a lot of time together anyway. They have a lot of cute interactions, mostly as the affection peeks in from behind all that verbal sparring.

Their relationships has been through some rough times – most notably the jealousy Laura can’t help feeling when Cass gets elevated to godhood (I went to check, and of course Morrissey’s “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” is on the WicDiv playlist). But issue #10 shows Laura is able to get past herself and just be happy for her friend.

It’s also a rare moment of vulnerability and emotional openness for Cass. I have to admit, maybe Laura brings out the best in her, too.

Of course, where the comic is right now, Cassandra and Laura are no more. We haven’t really had chance to see Urðr and Persephone’s relationship yet, but the events of issue #22 look set to put it to the test before it’s even begun. I can’t wait.

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The Best of the 2010s

Tim + Alex pick the ten things they loved most in the past decade.

We decided to (belatedly) mark the end of the 2010s by writing about our twenty favourite things from it. You… um… may be able to guess what’s in the top spot, and Tim’s writeup makes for a lovely post-script to doing TWATD for pretty much the entire back half of the decade. 

In all likelihood, this is probably our final transmission. We love you all. We’ll miss you.

Getting TWATD at the Wake, ii: The Eulogies

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Every month, two writers returned to this blog. They did an essay each. For five years. And now it’s all over.

The Wicked + The Divine #45 came out a month ago, and we’re still at the metaphorical wake. In this part, we pick out two characters we haven’t written much about, consider the paths their lives ended up taking, and write their obituaries. It could get emotional.

Spoilers for… well, for the entirety of WicDiv, I guess, below the cut.

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The Wicked + The Divine: a story obsessed with endings reaches its own

Gillen and McKelvie on their five-year spectacle
Alex Spencer
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Alex: So this is a whole thing. Polygon gave me a stage to say goodbye to WicDiv, with a nice big interview feature. Many words from Kieron Gillen + Jamie McKelvie both within, but the one I reckon best summarises the whole thing is this, from McKelvie:

“Making a book this long — which neither of us have ever done before and probably will never do again — you are trapped in the decisions you made five years ago. And you’re not the same person you were five years ago.”

I started to write about writing it, and that unravelled into a whole thing I’ll post later, but for now: go, read the article. People seem to be liking it, which is certainly better than the alternative.

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Alex: So, having just done the link thing, I’m going to write about writing this a bit. I decided to keep myself out of the article as much as possible which means I’ve got a lot of messy personal feelings I never committed to paper (or Word doc, whatever). Prepare for a heavy dose of the first person.

I’ve been talking with Polygon about some version of this piece for three months now. Naturally, it all ended up coming together in a weird rush. I sat down with Jamie + Kieron last Friday, wrote the whole thing in one 12-hour sitting on Monday, and it went up on Wednesday. As someone who does most of their work for print magazines these days, I am very much unused to that kind of turnaround.

At the start of those three months, I was planning to make this my official retirement from comics journalism. For assorted reasons but mostly because, y’know, drama.

It would have been a nice circle. When I read the first Phonogram, it was at a time I was falling out of comics a little. It’s a common cycle, I think, and I would probably have wandered back – but Phonogram ensured I was paying close attention.

I first met the lads Gillen & McKelvie at the end of 2006, I think, over a table at a slightly shabby con in my hometown of Birmingham. I told them off for getting me hooked on Kenickie, and Kieron – bless him – basically splurted out his plans for the comic that would, nearly a decade later, become The Immaterial Girl.

The setting for this interview was a little different. We were on the fifty-second floor of the Shard, a few floors away from Baal’s apartment and temporary Pantheon HQ. McKelvie was fresh off a flight, in town for one night only to celebrate the comic being done with the London division of Team WicDiv. Gillen was wearing the trademark skull suit because, in truth, the Imperial Phase never ended.

(Honestly, it was a little like the three of us doing a cosplay recreation of one of the Pantheon Monthly interviews from #23, right down to the couple sat next to us attempting, with zero subtlety, to figure out who these rock stars were with a twitchy journalist pushing a recorder into their faces.)

Anyway, they kindly gave me two hours of their time. Team Phonogram Team WicDiv have always been good like that – the whole ‘lowered stage’ thing – even if I’ve never quite figured out how to navigate it, the odd thing of being acquaintances with someone you also know incredibly personally through their work. And that’s before you throw in a professional relationship – I don’t think there’s anyone, in comics or games or any of the other things I write about, that I’ve interviewed more than Kieron, mostly because he’s normally stupid enough to say yes.

Also, me doing this job is kind of their fault in the first place. Constantly checking Gillen’s blog to find out when the next Phonogram was coming out led me to Rock Paper Shotgun, the PC gaming site he co-founded the next year. Reading that site was thing that convinced me I had to be a games journalist.

It was only during WicDiv’s life span that I started writing about comics. Professionally speaking, anyway – I’ve been running my mouth off about everything I watch/play/read/etc since roughly the first moment I met the internet.

It was writing this blog with Tim which convinced me I was good enough to knock on the hallowed doors of ComicsAlliance. I got there just in time to become comfortable before the whole site was demolished.

It was that closure which led me to other venues, taking in refugees from the ComicsAlliance exodus. CBR, where I tried and failed at being the populist word-machine that site requires, and Polygon, where comics editor Susana Polo was open to stuff that was a bit weirder. The first article I ever wrote for Polygon was a piece abandoned during the ComicsAlliance closure. It quoted Kieron, naturally.

So, yeah, calling this my last piece of comics journalism would have been a nice way to close the circle. And frankly as I keep alluding to, I’m crazy busy at the moment. I tried to write the piece in that mindset, treating it like my final word on comics.

It would have been a good retirement. But honestly, rushing this piece out was just too much fun, and I’ve already started to think of the next thing I might want to write. This is good, I think – making life decisions based on the pretty patterns they’d make is exactly the kind of thing that WicDiv is designed to talk us out of.

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Getting TWATD at the Wake, i: WicDiv #45 Reactions

Every month, two writers have returned to this blog. They did an essay each. For five years. And now it’s all over.

The Wicked + The Divine #45 is out, showing us what the gods did after the cycle ended. We’re following their lead and breaking our own rules. We won’t be writing the normal essays about the issue. Less a remembrance of WicDiv’s death, and more a celebration of its life. 

Let’s start with our initial reactions. Once we’d both read the issue, we sat down and discussed our feelings on where everyone ended up, and how the story finished. Here are the highlights of that conversation.

Spoilers for… well, for the entirety of WicDiv, I guess, below the cut.

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Once Again

We return. WicDiv is in the final stretch, and so is TWATD. The first of our two essays on #44, focusing on the issue’s echoes and callbacks. Spoilers – like oh so many spoilers – below the cut.

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Alex: Remember issue #14 of The Wicked + The Divine? The Woden remix issue? I reckon, with a bit of ingenuity, you could use the same method – cutting up panels from elsewhere in the series, pasting them in new contexts – to make a fan edit of #44, front to back.

The issue is crammed tight with echoes of old images. It put me in mind of Avengers: Endgame, the way it’s constantly calling back to moments from the past twenty-one movies, and the criticism of that tendency as ‘fan service’.

In WicDiv, this echoing feels inevitable. The series has always had its repeating motifs. Going  back to the very first issue, we get a whole host of phrases we’ll be seeing over and over: “Once again, we return.” 1-2-3-4. “I’ll miss you.” “Don’t.” Kllk. And images, too – from that very first cover, with its carefully-framed headshot echoed on the first page inside, something the first arc plays with again and again.

But what is the purpose of it, other than reminding us of something we’ve seen and loved in the past?

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The Tim + Alex Patreon: An Announcement

Alex: As you may already know, Tim + I have a Patreon to help support TWATD, and the rest of our blogging projects. For assorted reasons (detailed in the linked post), we’ve decided it’s time to bring the Patreon to a close at the end of this month.

Tim + Alex Get TWATD (and most of our other projects) will be continuing, just at a slower pace and without bonus bits.

If you’ve ever considered pledging and didn’t get round to it… Now could be a good time to throw in a one-time payment. 

And, as one final over-committing-self promise: if we pass the $100 mark during these last couple of weeks, I’ll make one last TWATD ebook. I think I’ve got a fun idea.

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PanelxPanel #24 - The Wicked + The Divine

PanelxPanel is a digital magazine celebrating the medium of comics. It’s edited by Strip Panel Naked host Hass Otsmane-Elhaou, and features a rotating set of writers ranging from critics to professionals, fans and comic stores. Each issue has two halves across its 100+ ad-free pages.

Tim: This month’s PanelxPanel is focused on The Wicked + The Divine, and I was lucky enough to be included as one of the writers exploring the series as a whole. My article takes a look at the storytelling that McKelvie and Wilson achieve using just the covers.

As always, Hass has put together an amazing magazine that delves into the art and craft of comics, and anyone who reads this blog is going to find plenty to enjoy in this issue.

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Tim + Alex Kill the Marvel Cinematic Universe – Guardians of the Galaxy

The MCU turns ten, and decides it's time to leave home and head out into space with Guardians of the Galaxy. But how well does it cope with going cosmic?

A quick plug for the other big Tim + Alex blogging project: our film-by-film reevaluation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This time out, the movie we’re looking at is Guardians of the Galaxy. And, frankly, reader? We do not care for it.

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