Stop All The Clocks
Tim has just wrapped up his excellent 6,000 Years of Murder, but we’ve still got two regularly scheduled essays for you on issue #36. Never say we aren’t good to you.
First up, you’ve got Alex on time, relativity and death – all the old classics. Then, once Tim has emerged from the mists of time, he’ll be writing about everyone’s favourite Pantheon bad boy, Valentine Campbell.
Alex: We’re three issues deep into “Mothering Invention” now, and less than six hours has passed. Maybe that’s a little misleading – after all, in one sense the arc has spanned nearly six thousand years – but all the present-day action is taking place on 9 March 2015. And I’m not sure we’ll ever reach tomorrow.
Since the beginning, The Wicked + The Divine has been very
concerned with exactness of time – those interstitial pages almost always come stamped
with a specific date – but I’m not sure the passing of minutes, rather than
days and years, has ever been foregrounded quite this much before.
Issue #34 gave us three short scenes in the present day, with a clear temporal relationship to one another: “20 minutes ago”, “10 minutes earlier”. These time captions are a rarity in WicDiv, putting a firm emphasis on the importance of exactly when ‘now’ is.
These captions are dropped in the subsequent issues, but we’re still given precise times, thanks to characters’ phone screens. (On that note, I think WicDiv is the first comic I’ve seen really tap into the potential of the smartphone as an incredibly efficient visual storytelling device – but that’s an essay for another time.) The timestamps on Urdr and Minerva’s text chat tell us that the sunrise showdown with Woden took place before 6am. Laura checking her phone after her own face-off with Baal informs us it’s gone 9 o’clock – finally, a reasonable hour for all this drama.
The compression is especially obvious due to the structure of “Mothering Invention”. One half of each issue tumbles through millennia of Pantheon history. In the other, we crawl forward, minute by minute. It’s a stark contrast, and one that makes perfect sense thematically, because the entire cast is rapidly approaching its expiry date.
However, this split structure also means that the new pacing is a practical consideration. After all, the page space available to tell the present-day story is essentially halved. This hasn’t stopped Team WicDiv from packing in the plot revelations, but they mostly have to be confined to single scenes. There’s no room for transitions, or quieter scenes which just restate character or theme.
As a result, the reading experience can be a little frustrating. That final black-page title always feels like it’s arrived too soon, even though the cold-open sequences are lengthy and satisfying in their own right. This is structural necessity, sure, but it’s also a common storytelling device – slowing readers down as the climax approaches, teasing them just when they’re most desperate to see what happens next.
I say slowing down, because that’s how it feels to us as readers – relativity or something at work, probably – but really what’s happening here is acceleration.
Looking at my timeline of previous arcs, “Mothering Invention” certainly isn’t the first to take place over a very confined period of time. The events of “Rising Action” all took place between 23-24 September 2014 – but, vitally, that arc was followed by a three-month gap, before catching up with the Pantheon on New Year’s Day 2015. The last three arcs, meanwhile – each taking place over a shorter period than the last – have picked up directly after the previous one finished. There’s no breathing room any more.
That sense of relativity, of time slowing down as events accelerate, puts us right in the doomed shoes of Persephone and co. In Baal’s flashback, entire months can pass in two words and a single red page, but every moment counts considerably more when you’ve only got a handful of them left.
The 1923 Special recently namechecked ‘Memento Mori’, the art term translated by Baal with characteristic bluntness as “remember that you have to die”. Its most prominent symbol, the skull, has always been front and centre in WicDiv, but Memento Mori paintings also commonly feature blown-out candles, ripened fruit and, vitally, timepieces.
Clocks aren’t a common image in WicDiv – one of the few Watchmen riffs it hasn’t indulged in – but these last few issues have been a reminder that series itself has always been a ticking countdown.
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