#lucy comforting tim ALWAYS hits me right in the feels <3

[whumpypepsigal]

The Rookie s06e09: “What are you doing?”

[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.

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?

To answer that, let’s look at some specific examples – beginning, as the issue does, with Lucifer. From the very first panel of her, stood in a variation on her classic power pose, Luci is pretty much playing the Greatest Hits here. She lights a cigarette on her own inferno, holding a familiar eyebrow-cocked expression. She teases a finger-click, taking us back to the courtroom. Her threat of violence to Laura, framed side-on, recalls Lucifer’s murder in issue #5, and Ananke’s millennia of practice for that moment as seen in #36.

Lucifer wraps herself in motifs and echoes possibly more than any other character this issue, and it feels like armour. She’s the one member of the Pantheon clinging on to the lie of godhood, playing her role because it protects her from the consequences of what she’s done. She’s perpetuating Ananke’s cycle, and so she reaches for the easy iconograpy, the tropes, of the Lucifer myth.

It’s worth noting that most of these images are inverted. In that last example, Lucifer stays on the same side of the panel, but switches her role, from victim to the position of power. Even the colours of her outfit are flipped – white to black, blue to red – and her pose too, with arms up rather than down. Tim is going to be exploring the Two Girls in Hell sequence in his essay, so I won’t go too deep on that, except to point out that when Laura saves Luci, it’s by taking Ananke’s “I’ve missed you” and making it sincere.

#44 does this over and over, taking a familiar motif and inverting the meaning. We’ve heard a lot of variations on “it’s okay”. Minerva, begging Ananke to tell her it’s going to be okay, a conversation we’ve likely all had with ourselves at some point. Its answer at the end of that arc, laid out in black and white: “It was never going to be okay.”

Here, it’s Dionysus who wields the phrase, and for the first time “it’s okay” isn’t a lie. Dio isn’t pretending that death won’t come for us all, or that Minerva’s situation is anything less than fucked. Instead, he’s encouraging her not to fear the inevitable. He isn’t offering denial, but acceptance.

Then there’s the other character interaction Minerva has this issue, which inverts something familiar in a much uglier way – her relationship with Baal. Time and time again, we’ve seen Baal wrap his arms around Minerva’s tiny frame. It’s indicative of the role he thought he played in her life, somewhere between bigger brother and father figure, but he now knows this was just a way of manipulating him.

In #44, Baal takes Minerva in his arms one last time, with very different intent. That big hand, able to cup her entire head, used to comfort or protect her, is used instead to smother. That tight embrace becomes a murder weapon. The contrast turns what could be a triumphant moment – this is the defeat of WicDiv’s big bad, after all – into an unsettling one.

Of course, it wasn’t much better the last time WicDiv’s big bad got taken out, as #44 is ready to remind us. The issues it draws from more than any other are the series’ first, and its midpoint. #22 and #44 are both stories about what happens when you beat the minions and get to the dark lord in their tower to find them helpless.

Here the repeated image – Laura with arm outstretched weighing up whether to kill the villain – acts as a kind of mental hyperlink. We’ve been here before. Twice before, in fact, just a couple of issues apart. (The second also introduced the idea of Woden’s kill-switch video release, which is vitally important to where this issue ends up.)

Both times, Laura hesitated – and then acted anyway. Our expectations are primed for the same thing to happen again. But, as any comedian will tell you, you set up pattern on the first and the second beat, then break it on the third.

This time, Laura hesitates – and is talked down. We see how much she’s grown as a character, because she’s put in the exact same situation, right down to the composition of the image and the people around her – Cassandra always hovers over her shoulder like a goth Jiminy Cricket – but the outcome is different.

I’ve mentioned fan service already, but there’s an alternative term I’ve been skirting around: payoff. A good final chapter (depending on how you view the epilogue) should bring together the threads of the story up to that point. That’s as true of WicDiv as it is of Endgame, as it is of a Dickens novel.

I do still worry about accessibility – how much of this comes across if you’ve only read each issue once, like a normal person – but maybe that’s not giving enough credit to the fantastic work of Jamie McKelvie + Matt Wilson making these images so immediately iconic, so mentally sticky, that you can recognise their vague outline five years later. As Tim suggested when I raised this question, these connections are likely kicking around in the subconscious of a more casual reader, even if they couldn’t put together the full serial-killer wall I’m making here.

There’s another thing, too. The fact that all these echoes are backing up feels indicative of what Laura is trying to do: breaking the cycle. Ananke’s six millennia-long plan is in its death throes, and this is one final twitch. Over and over, the issue shows that while the circumstances and tools might be the same, intent can change the meaning and outcome.

I suspect we’ll be free of echoes next issue, for the first time. I wonder if I’ll miss them.

Enjoyed this essay? You’ve got like 24 more hours to throw a bit of cash our way over at patreon.com/timplusalex, before we close down the Patreon in August. Think of it as a going-away present. Or a tip.