A little TWATD: Woden in Hell

Oh, what’s this? It appears to some kind of tiny TWATD Easter egg, nestled in amongst your regularly scheduled programming.

The below is basically an addendum to Alex’s piece on Matt Wilson, an offcut he couldn’t quite make fit into the main essay.

Alex: This, from issue #25, is my single favourite sequence in all of Imperial Phase Part I. Let’s talk about why.

It’s absolutely packed with visual callbacks, so many I can’t be sure they’re all intentional. But in these seven pages I can see: Laura experiencing a Morrigan/Baphomet performance in #3. Persephone’s time in hell in #20. Her first performance, and the ensuing battle with Woden, in #18. The chiaroscuro of the Underworld gods. Ananke’s initiations into the Pantheon. Actual religious iconography.

All of that is present in McKelvie’s composition and figures – which are great, minimalist to the point of iconic – but again, the real star is Matt Wilson’s colours.

Look at how the first page plays off Woden and Persephone’s signature colours against one another. The two characters share green, so Wilson leans into the other half of Persephone’s colour scheme. 

Handily, that purple is on the opposite side of the colour wheel to Woden’s green, which means the two (based on my very basic grasp of colour theory) are complementary. 

Not only is this perfectly balanced aesthetically, it also suggests the characters are mirrors of one another. Persephone is opposed to Woden in these pages, but – as she crosses an ethical line into, arguably, torture – it also positions her more closely to WicDiv’s resident amoral scumbag. To paraphrase everyone’s favourite action-movie cliché: Perhaps they’re not so different, he and her.

Wilson also doubles down on the Christian imagery, giving Persephone a halo of Ben-Day dots, which have been part of the visual shorthand for godly powers since Luci exploded those first heads in issue #1.

And then there’s the balance of light and dark – something that has always been one of WicDiv’s stocks-in-trade. The sequence starts out dark, and gets darker as it goes, reaching its pitch with the spread of a single tiny Woden, lost in the black.

The darkness is a great chance for those signature colours to, literally, shine. Against the black, the neon greens of Woden’s suit really pop. It’s a way of highlighting the nuclear brightness of Wilson’s colours, in case you forgot during all the more well-lit scenes.

Finally, as Woden tumbles, those neons leave a ghostly trail, flattening the patterns of his costume and warping them. For me this effect is reminiscent of animation. Though I can’t put my finger on the exact influence – Ghibli? Fantasia? Music videos? – there’s a fluid sense of motion there that is remarkable for a static image.

It guides the eye down the page, it’s indicative of a lack of control for the character – but most of all it’s just gorgeous.