The Wicked and the Divine #41: Getting The Band Back Together

After the explosive events of issue 40, issue 41 takes some time to decompress, gather notes, and re-position key players.  Thankfully, Gillen has enough command of how to effectively play and pay off his characters’ relationships and arcs that there are still some substantive emotional beats and character moments to be had in this installment; ones that feel truly earned extremely satisfying.  

I tend to worry whenever a writer returns to a character they haven’t written in a while.  There’s a concern that this returning, long-absent character may feel weird and different or that the the writer may take some liberties with their characterization and dialogue since ‘so much time has passed’.  Fortunately, Gillen knows his characters and seeing Lucifer, Inana and Tara again feels very much like meeting up with old friends at a bar. The situation is different, we (and the characters) know so much more, but these are still the same characters we’ve grown to love (or hate).  Lucifer’s trademark narcissism and compelling selfishness remains intact. Inana leads with his heart and that’s very much evident with his first inquiry to Laura (where’s Baal?, no, you’re crying!) and the tender, blink and you’ll miss it moment he shares with Negral.  Tara’s main driver remains, as always, her fraught relationship with her body and her physicality; a trait that lead her to tragedy when we saw her last, but here serves as a way to create a lovely moment of camaraderie and tender moment with our relative newcomer Mimir.  If I may indulge a musical simile for a moment, Beyoncé, Kelly and Michelle have finally reunited for an actual album, and it feels so, so, so good.

Of all the characters in the story, Laura is the one who’s had the most growth, which is fitting.  She is the ‘main’ character of the book, if we needed to identify one. Moreover, she is the reader’s POV character, so her character arc serves as a nice transmission device for what the reader should be feeling and experiencing as Gillen peels back more and more layers of what is, essentially, a thousand-years-long con job orchestrated by Ananke.  The way she functions in this issue, leading the group, coming up with a GOOD plan to move forward, having reasonable priorities and ceding the floor to Cass when necessary, is a far cry from the Laura we met when the series started. And that is how it should be. Laura acts like a character who’s been through the journey she’s undertaken, someone who’s really reached the depths of their lows and emerged on the other side perhaps not ‘100%, but not 1% either’.  It’s a satisfying (almost) conclusion to her arc that also serves to convey a key theme in WicDiv’s overall story. Maybe the point, the way to avoid tragedy and to finally escape the tragic cycle begun by Ananke so long ago is to finally let go of fame, power, and excess; to embrace what makes us lowly humans rather than divine/wicked demigods.

Negral also reaches the climax of his series-long character arc in this issue so it makes sense that he share that moment with fellow achievement-unlocker Laura.   Laura needs Negral’s cooperation to provide 3 of our 4 living godheads with new bodies. In order to do so, he needs to sacrifice the chance of resurrecting his three-in-one love the Morrigan, as her divine bodies are the only viable candidates upon which our three exile heads can find a new stoop.  To convince Negral, Laura pleads with him to not make ‘then, now’, outlining the many ways in which his relationship with Marian, The Morrigan, has been so tragically unhealthy. After the a tense moment of build-up and page-turn, Negral agrees to Laura’s request.

The scene nicely emphasizes the same thematic refrains we see with Laura: of letting go of the past, setting forth new paradigms and letting go of our old familiar habits. Our earlier horrid mistakes and our screwed-up decisions don’t need to define our futures.  The notion that this very sentiment might also be the key to putting the kibosh on Ananke’s horrific, cyclical run of murder that feeds her immortality makes this moment absolutely irresistible.

While Gillen does most of the heavy lifting here, series artist Jamie McKelvie gets to take home the MVP medal with this panel:

Yes, it’s just a gothification of their earlier looks, yes they will only be used for the last few issues of the series, and yes who cares about new costumes anyway, but giving Luci, Inana and Mimir some new threads was such a nice jolt of story-telling, comic booky energy.  The scene was a real f’ya moment that isn’t the least bit diminished by it’s predictability. A comic like WicDiv, after all, is one where appearance and surface things matter a whole lot to the story and its characters. In this universe, nothing else better conveys a moment of great import and significance than giving some key players new, well-designed/conceptualized, and great looking costumes.