Page 45 Review by Stephen
The most contemporary comic imaginable, inclusivity is its middle name.
"A documentary about public grief can never show too many crowds of people freaking out about people they've never met."
Previously in THE WICKED + THE DIVINE:
You know how the likes of Bowie and Kylie are referred to as pop gods and pop goddesses? Turns out some of them really are.
"You are of the Pantheon.
"You will be loved.
"You will be hated.
"You will be brilliant.
"Within two years you will be dead."
Every 90 years a Pantheon of a dozen gods is born anew, activated by ancient Ananke who finds them in young individuals previously oblivious to their fate. She helps them shine brightly for their brief two years. If they're lucky. Because some of those lights have been snuffed out already.
It's a brilliant conceit. Of course the Pantheon's role in this modern age would be as those most worshipped today, and Gillen takes the opportunity to examine journalism, fame, fandom, aspiration, envy, competitive back-biting, fear, mortality and manipulation. Some are putting ideas into other people's heads.
Please don't imagine we're treading water in these six short stories focussing on individual members of the Pantheon. If anything, events are escalating in the hunt for the killer. Prepare to drown in dramatic irony.
Since McKelvie was on sabbatical while he drew PHONOGRAM: IMMATERIAL GIRL, his chapter starring Woden is craftily composed entirely of panels repurposed from THE WICKED + THE DIVINE volumes one and two. Which itself involves a substantial amount of time and no small degree of artful judgement. Enhanced with colour filters by Matt Wilson which partially reflect their original source (explained in the extensive process-piece back-matter), it's so successful that if you have no idea that it's a collage you'd barely twig. Having this foreknowledge, each page made me smile, and I imagine some soul with enough time on their hands spent an entire afternoon identifying each panel's specific source.
What's particularly clever, however, is that the remix / reconstruction is entirely apposite since it's Woden recalling a side of the story you never saw in volume two after that gun was put to his head and he ran back to Mummy to tell tales. By 'Mummy' I mean Ananke, and this may make you want to re-read the whole series with fresh insight from the start. There's a very funny sequence in which Luci and Baal's actual exchange in volume one is replaced by satirical overdubs. There's also an awful echo of the previous chapter as Woden comes clean about his sexual proclivities:
""How can I do it?" It's easy. You take women and just forget that they're people. It's not hard."
No, it seems appallingly easy given the deluge of mob-mentality male hatred thrown like so much repugnant, foul-smelling shit across the internet at female comics' and especially games' journalists like Leigh Alexander simply because they are women. Gillen pulls no punches in reproducing its sexually explicit venom here as social-media men-children bombard pop goddess Tara with a barrage of Tweets whose infinite, incessant, babbling inhumanity is represented by a final full page of these cold, callous rectangles receding into the distance and disappearing off the edges.
I cannot show you any of those pages - as in, I won't. But, trust me, nothing has been exaggerated for the sake of sensationalism.
They're presaged by Tara's treatment by men long before she could sing - the casual sexism and worse which is faced by women walking the street or in bars - and presented in stark contrast to Tara's softness, vulnerability and individuality as a human being, the flesh on her face drawn so warmly by Tula Lotay along with the pain and tears in her eyes. It's an individuality no one was ever interested in, only her looks. Her fans hate it when she puts on the mask, depriving them of their pleasure, or sings anything she wrote herself.
"Fucking Tara." It becomes a mantra of sorts.
Individuality is exactly what each artist offers here, and after you've read each chapter you won't be able to imagine them being drawn by anyone else. For sheer, unbridled fury Kate Brown takes the biscuit and I'm not just talking about the line art, either - there's a cacophony of colours and you too will see red. What Brandon Graham brings could hardly be more different. His Sakhmet is sexual, sybaritic, reclining like a cat, hunting like a cat and disinterested too. Her performance is phantasmagorical.
Individuality is also what you'll enjoy more of here as we learn a lot more about some of the Pantheon and their lives both post- and pre-activation. Plenty of revelations, all of which make perfect sense, particularly and at times hilariously the Morrigan and Baphomet drawn by Leila Del Duca. Heritage also comes up for combative review before artist Stephanie Hans draws Amaterasu going nuclear in the skies above Hiroshima.
"You are a literal artificial sun above Hiroshima! Fuck! Are you even aware of how offensive this is?"
We've not seen much of Minerva until now. She's the Goddess of Wisdom, aged twelve. Out of the mouths of babes etc, I'd say she's one to watch. I certainly wish they would listen.
