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A review by stgts
The Wicked + The Divine: 1923 by Jamie McKelvie, Aud Koch, Matt Wilson, Kieron Gillen
2.0
I'll gladly admit that when I first picked up WicDiv, I skimmed the writing. I started this series a little bit for the concept and a lot for the way the art jumped out at me anywhere I saw it. The art is still good but I've adjusted to the writing, I think, as we've gone on. It's no Black Panther, but what is?
So of course they had to test me with a largely text-based special issue that forgoes the brilliant color of a normal chapter of WicDiv. The greatest benefit I could see coming into it was overcoming my own anxiety about listing individual comics issues on my Goodreads. Look at all those words! It counts as a short story at least.
The comic itself is. Fine. It's fine? It's no Agatha Christie, and I think it suffers from drawing the comparison so starkly. The characters suffer from the time period too, just familiar enough to us now that they feel compelled to hit all the era-appropriate references. Harlem Renaissance! Cubism! Vaudeville! Shirley Temple! One of them's a Nazi! Cool. (Also a Great Dictator reference, in 1922? Come on. That doesn't even need a professional researcher.)
An issue like this might have been more effective earlier in the run, but at this point, a regular reader of the comic already knows so much about The Way Things Play Out, to put it vaguely. Spoilers don't necessarily ruin a work, but mysteries live or die on the balance of tension, on hanging onto the confession until that final minute. Even a bad Christie novel doesn't use the halfway point to hand over what secrets it has left.
So of course they had to test me with a largely text-based special issue that forgoes the brilliant color of a normal chapter of WicDiv. The greatest benefit I could see coming into it was overcoming my own anxiety about listing individual comics issues on my Goodreads. Look at all those words! It counts as a short story at least.
The comic itself is. Fine. It's fine? It's no Agatha Christie, and I think it suffers from drawing the comparison so starkly. The characters suffer from the time period too, just familiar enough to us now that they feel compelled to hit all the era-appropriate references. Harlem Renaissance! Cubism! Vaudeville! Shirley Temple! One of them's a Nazi! Cool. (Also a Great Dictator reference, in 1922? Come on. That doesn't even need a professional researcher.)
An issue like this might have been more effective earlier in the run, but at this point, a regular reader of the comic already knows so much about The Way Things Play Out, to put it vaguely. Spoilers don't necessarily ruin a work, but mysteries live or die on the balance of tension, on hanging onto the confession until that final minute. Even a bad Christie novel doesn't use the halfway point to hand over what secrets it has left.