Tim + Alex Get TWATD — We Didn’t Start Recurring

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

We Didn’t Start Recurring

Tim: In the Writer’s Notes for WicDiv #36, Gillen mentioned “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and, well, sometimes that’s all it takes to have a really bad idea that turns into a writing project.

As with the original song, some of the words get a bit stretched or squashed to fit in. I’ve tried to indicate some of the stretched ones, and the squashed ones I’m sure you’ll find when you try to read it through in your head.

And I’m sorry if this gets stuck in your head. Just imagine what it’s been like for me writing it…

Exploding heads, fingercuffs, Ragnarock, Christian toughs
Packs of suitors, motorcycles, A-mater-asu
Dionysus, Baal Hammon, Lake Geneva, parents gone
Underground, cats of sound, Laura’s feeling blue

David Blake, meat harp, Marian is great at LARP,
Cassandra Igarashi, Sakhmet’s on a killing spree
Lightning bolt, Twitter hordes, Valkyries with giant swords
Hiroshima, neon nunchuks, Elea-nor Rig-by

We didn’t start recurring
It was always turning
Since before Rome’s burning
We didn’t start recurring
No we didn’t buck it
But we almost fucked it

Dancefloor that walks like a man, hidden ketchup pentagram,
Constellations, defamations, Umar’s got a beard,
Gondul, Eir, Brunhilde, teenage blood getting spilled,
Ananke tried to take a head, Inanna interfered

Zeitgeist, moonbeam, Beth has got a new team,
Great Darkness, New Year’s Eve, Urðr loves to disbelieve
Cubism, power play, Emily Greenaway
Valentine, ancient shrine, I’m not fucking o-kay!

We didn’t start recurring
It’s always been going
With no hope of slowing
We didn’t start recurring
We did not request it
And we’ve kind of messed it

Holloway, death bed pics, upside down dark crucifix
Broken phone, setting sun, pissing off the The Morrigan
Fighting Babylonian, biggest Fandemonium,
Hitchhiking Cameron, Highbury & Islington

[guitar break]

Gentle Annie, pop art, giant ape eating heart
Mimir, endless snark, capturing the divine spark
ShinTwo, Baphomet, coffee and four cigarettes
Queen of heaven, Hyde Park, snapping fingers in the dark

We didn’t start recurring
It was always present
Since the Fertile Crescent
We didn’t start recurring
We could not resist it
But we wish we missed it

Mini’s wise, telling lies, holograms from Owly’s eyes
Wo-den, Lon-don, Kerry’s smuggled in a gun
Death in the Egyptian Wing, Tara just wants to sing
Nergal, Robert Graves, twenty-seven hour-long raves
Vandals, mosh pit, Prometheus Gambit
Laura’s family set ablaze, feels like the end of days

We didn’t start recurring
It’s always existed
Please don’t get it twisted
We didn’t start recurring
No we didn’t choose it
But we’re gonna lose it

White Goddess, finger click, candle-skinned needle dick
Bacc-hus, Za-hid, Mini’s parents full of greed
Ruth Clarkson wants a bite, killing cities in a night
Not much chance of getting old, where’s Verðandi and Skuld?

Neptune, Aruna’s mask, Luci’s got something to ask
Valhalla’s gates, circled dates, Norns untangling the fates
Passion or hegemony, Destroyer or Persephone
Do not trust Ananke’s tears, we’ll all be dead in two years

We didn’t start recurring
It’s always existed
Please don’t get it twisted
We didn’t start recurring
But when we are gone
Will it still turn on, and on, and on, and on

We didn’t start recurring
It was always turning
Since before Rome’s burning
We didn’t start recurring
No we didn’t buck it
But we almost fucked it

We didn’t start recurring
It’s always been going
With no hope of slowing
We didn’t start recurring
We did not request it
And we’ve kind of messed it

Like what we do, and want to help us make more of it? Visit patreon.com/timplusalex and pledge to gain access to exclusive blogs, ebooks, mixtapes and more.

The Wicked + The Divine the wicked and the divine WicDiv Kieron Gillen Jamie McKelvie Billy Joel stupid ideas

See more posts like this on Tumblr

#The Wicked + The Divine #the wicked and the divine #WicDiv #Kieron Gillen #Jamie McKelvie #Billy Joel #stupid ideas

More you might like

timplusalex.com

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

image

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.

Keep reading

WicDiv The Wicked and The Divine The Wicked + The Divine TWATD Tim + Alex Get TWATD
twatd
polygon.com

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

Gillen and McKelvie on their five-year spectacle
Alex Spencer
twatd

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.

twatd

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.

WicDiv The Wicked + The Divine The Wicked and The Divine TWATD

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.

image

Keep reading

WicDiv The Wicked + The Divine The Wicked and The Divine TWATD

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.

image

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?

Keep reading

WicDiv The Wicked + The Divine The Wicked and The Divine TWATD
patreon.com

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.

gumroad.com

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.

The Wicked + The Divine the wicked and the divine WicDiv PanelxPanel
timplusalex.com

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.

MCU Marvel Marvel Movies Guardians of the Galaxy
See this in the app Show more