In addition to our extended interview about the end of “Young Avengers”, the 90-minute interview session continued as we talked all about his new book with Jamie, “The Wicked and the Divine.” Announced at Image Expo, the book finds the gods of old returning in new human forms to be worshipped like pop stars, and we follow Laura, who is a fan of the gods and their spectacle.
Read on as we talk about the book, its impetus, the collaboration between Jamie and Kieron and more.
Alright, let’s talk about your new book with Jamie, “The Wicked and The Divine.” In the first interview you did for the series on Comics Alliance, you mentioned you’re still having a bit of trouble explaining it to people (because it was the first interview). Is it probably a fair guess that you can explain the book a little bit better now, specifically to me, here?
KG: Oh, no, this is the second interview! [Laughs] The second one which was longer than five minutes, anyway. It’s one of those things, I was aware that when I was getting on stage — is the video up of that yet?
No, I’ve not seen anything. There might be a YouTube cellphone video or something, but there’s been no official “everyone is blogging this now” video, no.
KG: Ok. I did that interview before I did the stage thing, and that kind of taught me, what Andrew was picking up on the interview. I realise… OK, I’m kind of over-stressing the “gods reincarnated” aspect to it. So when I was on stage, I kind of brought the “gods as pop stars” aspect to the fore, something I’d mentioned earlier, and made that much more of a key idea. In the actual press release it’s still a bit vague, more on that gods returning part of it. How you explain your story is a reiterative process. You should have seen how my 1-min pitch version of Phonogram mutated over the years.
Everything everyone got is right: it’s about the gods returning, etcetera, etcetera, but the fact that I based a character on… I don’t know, on Prince, is more important that I’m basing it on the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, or anything like that. Or, it’s as important, is probably a better way of putting it. The core of the thing is the same; every 90 years, 12 gods reincarnate on Earth. They’re brilliant, they’re loved, they’re hated, they create miracles, they send people in rapture, and in two years they are dead. This is their story. It’s basically gods as pop stars. That’s my twenty second introduction.
And our lead character Laura is somebody who just desperately wants to be one of them; she’s a fan, she’s a believer, she loves them entirely, but she wants more. She doesn’t care about the terrible costs, she’d be willing to pay it. So the story starts with eight of them actually already reincarnated, with more to come, so it’s a bit like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but with a death wish. All the people want who want it are desperately hoping they’ll be one of the people. And the basic structure is, these kind of quite self-involved pop-starrish gods who are rumored to be able to perform miracles, but at the very least they perform speaking in tongues before a crowd and the crowd enters this psychological rapture. Some people, it doesn’t effect at all, though.
And for me, it’s kind of like the intellectual flip of “Phonogram,” in that “Phonogram” was about essentially how you consume art and this is kind of about creating it. This is about being a creator and your relationship with audiences and the desire to become a creator, and what you’re willing to give up to do it and all the Faustian pacts along the way. So it’s kind of like everything I do in that it’s sort of biographical, but it’s about that area and what it’s about anyway, why the hell do we do what we do? Why are you interviewing me? Because if you think about it, the concept is sort of ludicrous. [Laughs]Continued below
So, yeah, it’s sort of everything I’ve experienced since 2006, via this metaphor. And as always it’s self-critical and hates itself.
Speaking of, you mention it as sort of inverted-Phonogram, is it fair of me to say — at least looking at the broad strokes of this book — it seems to connect with other ideas you’ve explored in other books as well, certainly “Journey into Mystery” and the way you handled gods in that book.
KG: Yeah, it’s a logical extension of everything I’ve ever done, in that it feels like the next step. “Journey into Mystery” is one of the really big, obvious influences. The question of whether they are gods or not is over them, as in when we start, people are cynical and rightly so. They’re cynical to whether they actually mean anything, no one has actually done a public miracle yet, though as you might imagine this might change quite early in the story. This is about our relationship with stories, and our relationship with those who create stories and gods and all that kind of stuff. I’m an atheist, in that … Actually, that’s kind of irrelevant.
So, yes, this is a logical extension of everything I’ve done, and I think it’s basically a distillation but still says things I haven’t said before. It comes at it from a slightly different angle. It’s cleaner. It’s the fact that I’m going to build a universe from the ground up, so it’s cleaner than “Young Avengers” — because obviously for that I had to do a lot of dimension skipping to try and create this space to tell a story. In here, these are the most important people in the world, these are the singular entities and the world has never seen anything like it before. The mythology is very important to the book, in terms of the story and the ritualism, and there’s lots of ritualism in terms of how things happen. I’ve got to do that from the ground up; it’s not like I’m on scaffolding over someone else’s design. This is kind of a purpose-built bespoke fantasy universe for 2014.
All joking aside, I want people to get tattoos. [Laughs] And I want, there’s very minor gestures in the book and I kind of want to see, in a magical world, if the story is done as well as we can, I want any time anyone does certain things, people go, “Oh, Wicked and Divine.” You know? Can I take over an imaginary space based around certain gestures. At least fans of the book, when they see someone doing a certain thing they’ll think, “oh, that’s Lucifer.” That kind of stuff.
I suppose the real thing is that I just wanted to do something new. Even Three I think dates back to 2010 in terms of the idea. This idea dates from, like, April 2013? And it’ll be out in just slightly over a year since I had the original core idea when I wrote a frenzied late-night e-mail to Jamie. And that feels really necessary. I said it earlier about Young Avengers being about the spirit of the new, and this feels like me at least making some kind of karmic debt to that statement. Something like that, anyway.
Also, I think it’s — we mentioned something as being “pop,” it’s also fucking warped. In some ways, I think this — despite being deeper and darker and more mature, that kind of stuff — I actually also think it’s more accessible than “Young Avengers.” It’s a new universe from the ground up, it’s a very clean story to follow. And while I have all the formalist experimentation of “Young Avengers,” it’s not in the same way. Repeating ourselves twice is tedious. It just feels exciting and clean and possibly very good, which is worrying. [Laughs]
So with the gods being such a huge part of the book, and obviously like we said you’d written gods before (albeit in a specific pantheon), is that idea, that classical idea of a god, something you plan to incorporate into the book as well? Or is this really a very focused take on the gods? You mentioned Prince as the inspiration for a god over a Sumerian goddess.
Continued belowKG: It’s a bit of both. There’s a character in the first issue who is a journalist reporting on this, Cassandra, and she’s incredibly cynical about this. She basically thinks they’re all idiots. The characters haven’t got the memories of their previous lives, they’ve taken on aspects of them, but they’re simultaneously a reincarnation and not the same person. Or so it seems, anyway.
They’ve got the sense that they’re living this story that has been lived before and… OK. Lucifer. Lucifer is very at home playing the role of Lucifer, and she expresses all these interests in the dialogue of the concept of Luciverian characters. She’s Lucifer in that kind of way, but she’s Lucifer with David Bowie. And so there’s a dialogue between archetypes in fiction, which is a better way of putting it, and with pop stars and our imagination of fiction.
It’s one of the things we did with “Phonogram,” you had these gods that only really existed inside Kohl and whomever’s heads. So in other words, when you met Damon Albarn or whoever in ‘Rue Britannia,’ it wasn’t really Damon Albarn — it was people’s idea of Damon Albarn. And the gods are the idea of people’s gods in terms of how people respond to them, and the idea of the pop stars as well. It’s the big iconic resonance, is the way I would put it.
There’s also fighting! And kissing!
I wanted to ask you — so, Lucifer, in many people’s heads, I think this is just sort of how our culture is or how our stereotypes are, but if I were to say Lucifer to an average person the street and they’re probably going to think of a male figure.
KG: Oh, yeah, we just gender-flipped people for the fun of it! [Laughs] Well, not fun. It was more interesting in a lot of ways.
Well we have books like “ODY-C” by Matt Fraction and Christian Ward, and that’s a very purposefully gender-swapped of Homer’s Odyssey. I think now, with such a huge focus, at least in our comic culture, on upping diversity — is that something you took into consideration when picking who the characters of the series will be?
KG: Less than you would think. When you see the cast, you’ll probably find it hard to believe.
I suspect we’ll get the whole “Young Avengers” thing again. This is a very diverse cast, but it’s just the kind of people we want to make. If we can create a fictional universe from scratch and have a big cast of, like, the twelve gods who reincarnate and then the mother goddess who hangs around between generations and whoever else — we’ve got a really big cast! I would be more surprised if — oh, and we have pop stars. Look at the variety of people from there. So, no, it wasn’t as on my mind as you may have think it would have been, but I suspect people won’t believe that when they see the actual range.
There was a point, actually, early on that I had seven of the characters so far and they were all women, and I’d thought that maybe all of the gods were women. There’s no reason not to do that, but maybe it was going to be that kind of way… and then I came up with an idea for the first male god and thought, ok, at least there is one bloke. And it eventually became seven to five, I think, in the spread? Women to men. The first male god was basically the Nick Cave god, and you can gender-flip Nick Cave, you’ll just end up with PJ Harvey. The gender-flip there just wasn’t as interesting … That sounds cruel. I’m just thinking of my mid-90’s period, I love PJ Harvey.
For Lucifer, female devil was just a fun character. She has lots of good one-liners, and she has a variety of one-liners on that point in that the paternalistic church admitting Lucifer is a woman would probably give the idea that women have too much power. She’s pretty hard on a lot of theologies as you would imagine a Luciferian character would be. And, it’s explicitly a feminist book, but all my books are at least implicitly feminist. I can’t believe I said that sentence with a straight face. Man!
Continued belowThat’s going to be the one sentence that is picked out of this interview and plastered all over Tumblr and everywhere. [Laughs] So this is a question I believe I’ve asked you before, but I want to ask it now in the context of “The Wicked and The Divine” —
KG: It’s a very long title, isn’t it? [Laughs]
I was kind of thinking, before this interview, if there was a good abbreviation for it. And there really isn’t.
KG: TWATD is the one we’re going with. Like, “lets get TWATD!” WicDiv we kind of like. TWTD is probably the one we’ll end up going with.
WicDiv isn’t bad, right? That works on other books, too, like “SexCrim.”
KG: “SexCrim” sounds like a “1984”-style… “Do not commit SexCrim.” [Laughs]
So in the context of everything I’d previously mentioned, what is it that fascinates you about pop stars?
KG: Wow. I wasn’t sure if you were going to say gods or pop stars.
I feel like I’ve asked this question before, especially about “Phonogram,” but just left out the word “stars.” And now, with “Wicked and Divine,” you’re mentioning all these different pop stars, it’s gods as pop stars, so what is it about pop stars that fascinates you.
KG: I think pop stars, and of course I’m stressing I’m using a very wide definition of the words pop star — I mention Nick Cave in there or whatever. This is kind of the mid-90s of pop music idea that pop music is basically all music.
At the surface sheen… There are people who never liked music at all who liked “Phonogram,” and they were able to make the jump from “here’s somebody’s obsession over music” to “here’s somebody’s obsession over art.” They got that. It’s a bit like that, in that pop stars are a very visually compelling, emotionally complicated example of the creator. So that’s part of it, you know what I mean? And they have a very genre-specific thing they do, as in they get in public and stand before people and they change their lives. It’s not like writing a book, which is a very private magic, and the writer’s public performances are of a very different sort. It’s basically created art that just sits there and then you come to it.
In the book, there’s obviously tropes of performance, the gig or whatever, but this is the new art. I don’t say, “X god sounds like Prince.” This isn’t music. This is kind of these emotionally magical experiences that people in the audience have. I use the range of pop stars to talk about art generally, and it works very well in comics because that’s kind of comics for you.
Pop stars and gods are very much alike. These are interesting stories that allow us to talk about parts of ourselves and ideas which we imprint on. Some of the ideas are true, some of the ideas are false, but all of the ideas are fundamentally human. I suppose that would be it.
That’s a good answer.
KG: The sound byte at the end is a good one! It’s a weird thing, because I get the sense when I talk to people, the stuff at the beginning is the more cold stuff, the more logical reason why I made my decisions. The other stuff is the theology of it, the more sociologic and the theological core statements. There’s normally lots of reasons why I do lots of things, but pop stars make sense in comics. Especially in my comics.
I would like to talk about Jamie for a bit, if that’s OK.
KG: Beautiful Jamie McKelvie.
When coming up with “WicDiv,” is it fair to say that the language you and Jamie communicate with now is just absolutely different after having collaborated so many times?
KG: We take the swear words as given now. There’s no need to swear, we just know when we hate each other.
My scripts to Jamie are like no one else’s to the point, like, in the first issue script where I’ve gone, “Ok, I’ve done this, we can completely lose this.” As in, we can tear this out now and put something else. Jamie doesn’t like me saying he’s co-writing the book, and I think we’d both agree I’m the writer. But in terms of the implementation, there’s a wider variety of how it’s actually done which, to some degree, means writing.
Continued belowWe were laughing at Image Expo, everyone comes on stage and everyone comes on stage individually. Matt Fraction! Kelly Sue DeConnick! And me and Jamie… Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie! We’re one person, and we’re the only person to come out together on stage, which caused a problem with the microphones. We’ve definitely reached the sort of hive mind stage of our development, which is a bit scary.
Poor Jamie. Will he ever escape me?
I was going to say, you don’t actually really see too many long lasting partnerships like this in comics anymore, especially across multiple books. It’s fair when you have a book like Tank Girl that has a couple volumes of Alan and Jamie working on that through different iterations, but you and Jamie are a bit more special in the way you do books together. So what is it about working with Jamie that makes you still crazy after all these years?
KG: That’s good. We have a very shared instinct in both storytelling aesthetics and the stories that interest us. It’s one of those band moments, as in there’s a big overlap in what we do, and it’s also the things that I like and Jamie doesn’t and vice versa. But we seem to work very well together. And even from the very beginning the sort of scenes I like writing, Jamie likes drawing. I enjoy having an artist who tell a story with an eyebrow raise, or a scant glance. I can delete so much dialogue with Jamie. You want to delete as much dialogue as possible as a writer. We’re better together than we are apart, and that occasionally scares me.
I’ve never managed to find … There are lots of artists I’ve worked really with and that I like working with, but in terms of what I have with Jamie, there’s never been anything quite like it.
With this book, you mentioned it earlier that you’d frantically e-mailed Jamie the idea, but did you guys come up with the rest of it together? Is it just a mix of things you both wanted to work on?
KG: No. Jamie is much more of an execution over idea sort of person, and this is why Jamie is quite resistant to the concept of co-writer, but I’m quite into the idea of co-executor. That’s the first time I’ve said the phrase, but that’s kind of how it feels. All the cool ideas are mines. [Laughs]
I’ve asked Jamie, are there any pop stars you want me to riff on? We did this early enough and the cast is big enough that I asked if there was anyone specifically he’d be interested in drawing. And he gave a few suggestions, I think Prince was one of his suggestion that I’d for some reason not thought of, but it’s more than just that. It’s Prince and everyone who is in that archetype. Prince is the one that comes to mind for me. So there’s probably more of it than before, but not very much. I’m saying Prince a lot in this interview.
It’s much more about how, OK, look at Laura. I set her background, what looks like, where she lives in London, I set her education level, her age, what she likes as a person and all these kinds of things and where she might venture in a few years time, and Jamie then works out what she wears. I’ll give a few suggestions or who I’m thinking about, but Jamie will say, “I’m going to give her dip-dyed hair.” That sounds like an incredibly shallow way of putting it, but, you know, it’s more about here is one part of her and Jamie completes her.
I guess this might be a better question for Jamie, but is the book going to feature as strong a sense of design and fashion as “Young Avengers” did?
KG: Oh, probably more so, I think. Have you seen the style blog?
Yes, and I remember when you posted it without a name or anything.
KG: Yes, Random Visuals or whatever, yes.
It’s a superhero comic book in a real way, this is people with powers and all that stuff. There are at least some conventions of that genre, but more of in a Matrix/Buffy kind of way. These are very superhero tropes, but we’re executing it in a very different way. One thing about pop stars is, and one advantage they have over writers is if we’re going to talk about pop stars, is they look amazing. [Laughs] You can put them in ridiculous costumes, and ok, you’ll have the Nick Cave character who won’t be like that, but you have another character who leans more heavily on, say, a Gaga-esque archetype or something like that. You’ll have costumes that are impractical according to the laws of physics. So in terms of design, in what people wear, it’ll be all over the place.
Continued belowIt’ll also be downkey, and low as well. When they’re out of costumes, it’ll have that kind of vibe. The use of pop stars is kind of an anchoring element to ground it, so when they’re in a ridiculous costume you can kind of know why, as that’s part of who they are. When they’re performing, quote unquote, and performing can mean a variety of things. But, yes, with the book it’ll be as visually striking as “Young Avengers.” At least.
The fact that we have complete and utter control over everything we do and everything that goes in the book means that we can make it as sickly beautiful as we wish. Whatever the book looks like it’s because we’ve chosen it. And the first issue is going to be oversized and all that, so it’ll be pretty cool.
This is very much a long shot, but as an idea that fascinates me — do you believe in that David Mitchell idea of the Verse, where everything kind of occurs in the same place?
KG: You’d have to elaborate, I’m not 100% sure I understand.
I forget where Mitchell — and obviously, this is not just singular to him, it’s something many use. Wes Anderson has said it, Joe Hill has said it, but it’s this idea that all of these works that they’re doing, you take all of Wes Anderson’s films and they all take place in the same space.
KG: OK, that’s what I thought you meant.
So do you like that idea, is that something you think of when looking at your own work?
KG: I find that fun, and I love seeing it in creators to a certain degree. But no, I don’t. I might see all the books in the same multiverse, but not specifically on the same place. If it were in the same place I couldn’t blow up the world, and any story where I can’t blow up the world is not a story worth writing. [Laughs]
That’s a fair argument!
KG: I know what you mean just me and Jamie’s stuff, but I love the idea of “Uber” being in the same dimension as Kohl and Kohl going “Shit! 80-foot Nazi ladies just attacked me and broke all my 7″s.” I did think of doing a vaguely music-related Uber issue, just as a kind of homefront low-key kind of thing.
Well, OK, I’ve definitely asked you this question before, but just wrapping up talking about Wicked and Divine, if you were to recommend music to people to sort of get them in the mood for this book, what would it be?
KG: Well, there’s a playlist online! I actually had a Secret Project playlist which I put up without notice on my Spotify, and it was just called “Secret Project.” And after the announcement went live, I changed that to “The Wicked & The Divine.” So, anything on that, and it will continue to expand.
So looking at the thing’s you’ve established about the book: it’s an ongoing, Jamie is drawing the first arc and then it’s a different artist — or is it different artists, plural?
KG: Different artists plural, is what we’re currently thinking. It could be just one artist. At the moment we’re planning multiples, I’ve got it written that it would work quite well with single artists, and that works well for a variety of reasons. It’s how we do things, and it would be cool to get a whole mixture of people, artists people know. People who are a bit like Jamie, artists of a similar background and that level of person. And we’d also like to work with complete unknowns and with people you’d never expect. That’s the kind of thing we like doing, like the jam issues, all that kind of stuff. It sort of makes sense here, basically. But if we don’t, we won’t, if we suddenly think we should get XYZ to do all five issues.
Do you have any ideas or thoughts on if the book is going to have backmatter as well?
KG: The first issue won’t because we will every single page with comics, but yeah, there’ll be some backmatter. We’re currently thinking of something different. One of the ideas in play — and, if I say this, don’t hold me to do it — I’m thinking of doing interviews with the gods. Just put on my blog, what questions would you like to ask Lucifer? And I’ll literally write up an interview in the style of universe, and it’ll be an in-universe document. Of course, the cast could lie because that’s what people do in interviews, Matthew. [Laughs]Continued below
But something like that might be quite fun. And also, in the issues that Jamie isn’t drawing, we’ll be doing a short story in the backend. There will be, like, two pages per issue that will form a larger story across the back five issues. That way Jamie is still in all the books, and we have an awareness so you don’t forget who he is. We’ll put somethin in there. It won’t be “Phonogram 2” because that killed me, but we like having the space and we’ll do some fun stuff.
Last question. To close, I just wanted to ask about other things you’re currently working on. There’s the second Avatar book, I don’t think we’ve heard any new news on that. Future plans on “Iron Man,” though I don’t know if you want to talk about the Malekith arc.
KG: I can’t really talk past the Malekith arc, but it’s called ‘The Rings of the Mandarin’ and I’ve introduced the whole Mandarin ring stuff happening at the moment and the mystery of the ring bearers will continue on as it’s kind of a nature-driven plot of the second year of the book. Which is fun, because who else could possibly have one?
Avatar Project 2, “Mercury Heat,” was announced… re-announced really at New York Comic Con, and that’ll be coming out later this year. I’ve written the first six issues and it’s just a question of when Gabriel Andrade, who is doing a few “Uber” issues between now and then, such as the annual — and he’s really good, I put up a few pages on my Tumblr recently, and he’s got a really, really beautiful clean style. He’s an incredible storyteller.
Obviously, there’s the end of “Origin II,” which is fun. Adam’s killing on it.
And that’s it, really, which is a lot: “Iron Man,” more “Uber,” end of “Origin,” “Wicked and Divine,” “Mercury Heat”… that’s a lot of books.
And “Phonogram 3.”
KG: Oh, yes, of course, “Phonogram 3” coming out before — or, really, after New York Comic Con. It’s Summer for “Wicked and Divine,” it should be out by San Diego Comic Con as that’s sort of our rough plan, though we don’t want to tie ourselves to anything yet.
