Baal So Hard

In the midst of everything else that’s swirling around in issue #25 – the Great Darkness, Matt Wilson’s absolutely great darkness – there’s this one quiet moment that lodged into my brain, and impacted how I read one character in particular. 

I’m talking about this sequence of panels:

And, yeah, I’m talkin’ Baal.

There’s something fascinating to me about the way he chastises Minerva for swearing here. On one hand, it makes sense: he’s adopted the parent role since Mr and Mrs Minerva got splatted (one he was arguably already fulfilling better than they were even in their solid forms) and like any good dad, he wants to raise her right.

On the other hand… ‘raise’ kind of implies an end result, and Mini isn’t supposed to make it past fourteen. Keeping her language age-appropriate feels like a pretty ineffective finger in the dam, given they’re all damned.

And somewhere in the friction between those two sides, Baal’s character comes through in a way it rarely has for me.

For someone who is apparently going to be the co-lead of this arc, we haven’t actually seen that much of Baal. Over two dozen issues, his character has been defined by one relationship – with Inanna, hidden, conflicted, tragic – and one action – the violent way he took that tragedy out on The Morrigan.

Nevertheless, he’s still one of my favourites, and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on who he is. The weight of that – like the enlightening moment with Minerva – has been delivered through Baal’s use and control of language.

Now, when I mention ‘Baal’ and ‘language’ in the same sentence, you’re probably thinking of one thing:

This verbal tic is something that has occasionally irked me. Even in Gillen’s playful dialogue, these constant elaborate nicknames feel too written, too overwrought to be part of natural speech. I mean, Nick Batcave? But looking back, I suspect that’s the point.

These lines are a little too neat and clever to be thought up on the spot. Baal is a dude who sits up at nights really thinking about all this, you feel. Tangled up in the silk sheets, brow knitted, considering where he stands among his peers.

There’s a lot of Baal’s dialogue that makes sense looked at through this lens. Revisiting that first moment I fell for the character, the opening of #4, where he says:

There’s no way that’s not a pre-prepared line. He drops it in the middle of half a dozen brilliant soundbites (“I stop your heart if I look at you in the right”, “When I speak, people know that in my gut, I’m bad. They feel better about being bad in their guts”). It feels like he’s giving Cassandra the press tour, and Baal basically says as much himself. 

“Here’s your quote,” he tells her. “‘I’ve always claimed I’m a god, even before I knew I was one.’” The only difference with that line is that he’s admitting to the quotation marks.

And, speaking of journalists being given the full Baal show… You know who sees right through this carefully-controlled performance? Dorian Lynskey. 

Lynskey’s article on Baal in issue #23 is peppered with references to the artifice of his interviewee. “You’re being sold a message.” “Theatrical pride.” “Like a curtain dropping.” “Schtick.” “The facade.” “Baal’s spin for the day.”

(What’s interesting about this is, it’s not just the in-universe character who spots this about Baal, but the real-life writer as well. Like the rest of #23′s interviews, Gillen provides the words but the journalists fill in the rest, with themselves. It’s criticism, of both person and text.)

That performance is all there in the way Baal speaks, he way he tries to exert control over both his own language and Minerva’s. It’s also present in his trademark page-dominating entrances, of which (I think, I haven’t counted) Baal gets more than anyone else in the cast.

Now I can’t stop imagining him dorkily practicing these poses in the mirror, and it’s adorable. 

…Right. To stop myself from just endlessly screencapping bits of Classic Baal, let’s try and work out what showing his persona as carefully constructed achieves as part of The Wicked + The Divine as a whole.

Well, firstly, the idea that Baal isn’t naturally as uber-confident and cool as he presents himself provides a way into the character. 

That side of the character is especially apparent when his little performances fail. Like when he tries out “Satan’s Little Helper” as a nickname for Laura in #7 and she storms off. Or, in #10, when he overwrites his own dialogue so much that he has to translate.

That’s a lot more relatable to me, at least, than someone who drops constant perfect one-liners.

Also, it creates an immediate point of tension for the character. Baal is cool, calm, collected – so when he loses it, that really means something. 

Note how Clayton Cowles reserves the bolded lettering and jagged-edge speech balloons for these moments, which tellingly tend to revolve around Inanna’s death.

Finally, the idea of control is pivotal to Baal, on a number of layers. He emphasises repeatedly that he is the oldest of the dogs, that he was the first. It’s a masculinity thing, too, placing himself as the Pantheon’s patriarch, but that would require another couple of thousand words to fully unpick.

This is a theme Lynskey’s article underlines, with a fat red marker, twice, and then draws a loose circle around so you don’t forget. The opening and closing paragraphs both make reference to it.

Note, though, exactly how Lynskey frames each of these references. “You’re being sold a message, and the message is this: everything is under control.” “A flamboyant reminder of what he was insisting all along: everything is under control.” Telling people that this is the case, of course, is significantly different to everything actually being under control.