The following contains spoilers for Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine, both available now from Image Comics.
I remember Neko Case better than I remember most things.
It was my birthday, I was feeling a little sad(der), a little fat(ter), a little down, a little out of it, and then suddenly there was sound. Low and quiet, the ambient sound of nature and the falseness of silence, before the drone of a voice, high and low at once, where did I leave that fire? It’s seared indelible in my memory, everything from the bandana to the skeleton pants, to the side of the stage she entered from, Neko Case in all her glory, and then – nothing.
Not nothing, certainly – there’s flashes, memories, calling out “The Virginian!” even though it’s a hella deep cut, and my friend joining in despite not knowing what song it was but charging through anyone on my enthusiasm. I remember a few jokes, I remember Kelly Hogan being fantastic, but for the most part the joy of live music is euphoria. A song washes over you like a wave and fails to abate until the tides have changed. For some people, this is the first time you go to a gig. For me, it took a while. I was blah with Cut/Copy, I got damn close with Gary Numan, I was miles away with Glen Hansard, but boy, Neko Case? I was there.
The best pop music is revelatory, like a little consistent reminder that you and yours are a beast to be affected. It’s hard to avoid that little flutter that I get from about 2:20 onwards in Taylor Swift’s Out of the Woods, as her voice turns onto the attack, crying out until it hits 3:05 and she screams “Oh, I remember!” The first time I heard it, I was driving in my car. I’d pulled the early release track down and tossed it onto my driving playlist full of chaff that I don’t immediately want to skip through (I skip through 50% of it regardless). I was stuck on the motorway, about 5:15pm, home in sight and yet lines of traffic blurring it before me. Suddenly my car feels lighter, my heart skips a beat, and it’s another moment I don’t remember but that I remember, ephemeral and eternal yet vague and feel-y.
This seemingly eternal preamble brings me to Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen’s two defining works – Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine. It seems a little odd to call The Wicked + The Divine (henceforth WicDiv) their defining work – they had a very successful (pop-culture-wise) run on Marvel’s Young Avengers, both Gillen and McKelvie have their own ongoing series in the form of Uber, Angela: Asgard’s Assassin, Long Hot Summer, Journey into Mystery, Gillen has runs on Thor, Uncanny X-Men and Iron Man, even McKelvie has the short-lived but lovely Suburban Glamour; across their entire output, how can a 7-issue, 1-trade currently-ongoing series be their defining feature? Part of this comes down to the inescapable, fundamental feature of the McKelvie/Gillen collaborative world: it’s not comics, it’s pop music.
To understand what makes The Wicked + The Divine so special, it needs to be read in relation to it’s spiritual predecessor and thematic progenitor Phonogram. Both of its installments, Rue Brittania and The Singles Club (chapter three The Immaterial Girl coming late 2015), rotate endlessly around Pop Music. This is Pop Music the concept, not just the charts, it must be noted. Pop Music being the shining ephemeral mess that rotates around you at any given time – the radio, the links you get tweeted, the contents of a Spotify ‘best of the year’ playlist that’s half Perfect Pussy and half repeated entries of Anaconda, but most importantly – it’s the bands. The real live touring bands that it’s almost more fun to complain about not being able to see, those beasts churning out music while you live and breathe. I still remember the first time I was into a current band – not just the songs on the radio, when I knew I liked this person who sang words I recognised and spoke to me and all that adolescent noise that I climbed my way up to almost embarrassingly late. This is at the heart of Phonogram – overidentification with a subject matter breeds both beauty and contempt.
That’s not a light thing to say. In Phonogram: The Singles Club, buried deep in the story of hipster artificers Lloyd and Laura Heaven, the latter drops a truth bomb that changes a lot. Lloyd has a plan – classic, out of copyright songs with filthy lyrics subbed in where the original words were, that he sells to anyone who listens. He pitches it to Laura, and she tells him the fundamental truth of pop music – “This isn’t about changing the world… this is just overcomplicated masturbation. This is about getting you off”. It’s a heavy axe to swing against someone pitching you an idea, but it’s a truism that pervades the rest of both Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine; the status quo of music is that it works entirely on feeling – neither bad nor good, but predicated on the reaction mind and body have to it. Pop Music feels extraordinary when you truly identify with it, but it’s not some divine connection that really fixes anything. There is no true, deeper understanding of the universe gleaned from a Nicki Minaj verse, even if Anaconda feels like a long-forgotten gospel. Phonogram begins playing with this idea with ‘phonomancy’ – sound is magic, music is spellcasting, and Britpop is a goddess who can meet an untimely death just because Blur and Oasis got a bit shit. There’s nothing non-literal about it – a phonomancer hears music, channels music, functions with music to create a desired effect, be it a high, mind control or intra-dimensional travel (at the series’ stranger heights). Magic is creation and destruction, beauty and contempt, and to spin a -mancy out of it is to study, dissect, and ultimately see its internal edges to the point of overidentification and intense reaction. If music is magic, however, then The Wicked + The Divine takes it one step further by making an entire pantheon of gods into pop stars.
This, finally, is circling my point. WicDiv is the story of 12 gods, returned to the earth once a century(ish) to whip the masses into a follower frenzy. No dry mass can pass muster – the Pantheon, as they’re known, hold concerts for their worshippers (Inanna alone has a Camden residency) that culminates in, beloved be the pun, fandemonium, a breaking point in which the reality of pantheistic divinity is contrasted against abject atheistic cynicism, raging fanaticism and sheer brutal pop snobbery. It’s the story of a girl, Laura (unrelated to miss Heaven above), a mild mannered fan of Shinto goddess Amaterasu who finds herself in the eyeline of everyone’s favourite heavenly betrayer, Lucifer (Luci for short, the devil herself with a britpop vibe). Laura already knows the washing wave of music, passing out at an Amaterasu concert along with half the rest of the crowd, but it’s Lucifer who changes her. Not necessarily for the better, but not necessarily for the worse. Lucifer represents the reality of meeting your idols – they’re never what they should be.
Nothing feels more solidly 21st Century than the idea that your heroes will disappoint you. That’s not to say it’s a new development – it’s hard to name a perfect figure in history, let alone consider the possibility that no one was ever disappointed by one of those supposed greats – but as social media means there is now an extra minefield full of casual slurs and iffy political stances that’s accessible 24/7. The very concept of social distance means that the celebrity has to remain consistently filtered to prevent the alienation of an audience. Flick through any A-List celebrity’s twitter account and you’ll find #brand #content, but little substance (except maybe for Lorde).
When Laura meets Luci in The Wicked + The Divine, she loses the filter that keeps her personal god as a divine, ethereal presence. Instead, the walls start crumbling. First Luci, then Amaterasu, whose show she so beautifully collapses at. Within time, the entire Pantheon are human beings, just as prone to mistakes and mischief as she is, and the pallor wears off. The Fandemonium arc starts with her numb and tired, fully aware of the flaws of her heroes, and decidedly the worse for it. She still gets the small thrills of new contact – a phone call with adrogynous Prince-type Innana rekindles the fire in the brief respite between hearing his voice and learning they’re just a wallflower like her – but is fully aware that the wonder of it all is a magic given to her that she can’t summon up quite the way she could (a metaphor made curiously literal). The music of Innana’s voice, seductive as it may seem, wears off just as quickly as his celebrity persona. Both aspects of the figure enchant her – the ethereal magic of his musical voice, and the celebrity person of a walking god, but neither sticks with her in their meeting. It wears off once it’s real, no longer a floating external stimulus but instead a real person experiencing grief.
Phonogram’s magic is quite similar to WicDiv‘s, drawn from the outside of a person but entirely happening inside themselves – even the minor mind control a Phonomancer wields is an expression of desire to achieve a goal, never unprovoked. The point isn’t some grand fantasy narrative about witches among us, nor is The Wicked + The Divine really about gods who walk amongst mortal folk. Music is ethereal, and celebrity is fragile, but that celebrity is always second to the magic. Even when Innana and Luci give up their uniqueness, they still have their power, bound up in the pop iconography they represent. Luci, even as an imprisoned criminal, is the thin white duke of hell, a legacy of mod glamour behind her. Innana, even while grieving, even while exposing themselves as a shy teen wallflower, stands as a Prince-style sex idol. The celebrity aspect is a fragile building of legend, but the magic remains inside. It doesn’t really matter who it is. Celebrity is fleeting, I don’t need to meet my idols to get their music. It’s inside. That’s what matters.
WicDiv is the ultimate expression of the Gillen/McKelvie metaphor: Music is magic, and magic is personal. I might not be able to light a cigarette with a flick of my fingers, but I can remember the special way that I reacted to Neko Case. I can close my eyes and remember that wave rushing over me; more than a memory, more than a feeling. Your heroes can taint a memory if they mess up, but they can’t erase it, for better or worse. Laura can close her eyes and click her fingers. Laura Heaven can close her eyes and conjure images of Penny dancing to the Blessed, Fucking Pipettes. I can close my eyes and run on a high of 5 minutes and 14 seconds of Ragtime, silence and all, and it’s overcomplicated masturbation of the highest order, but it’s mine.
I think it might be magic. Phonogram thinks so too. The Wicked + The Divine? It knows it.
The second arc of The Wicked + The Divine is currently in progress. Phonogram, Volumes 1 and 2, are available from Image Comics, while the third volume will be released over the latter half of 2015 . Further nonsense from Jon D Arthur can be found .
