The Faust Act The Wicked + The Divine, #1
Paperback, 144 pages
English language
Published Nov. 11, 2014 by Image Comics.
Every ninety years, twelve gods incarnate as humans. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are dead. The team behind critically thermonuclear floor-fillers Young Avengers and Phonogram reunite to start a new, ongoing, superhero fantasy with a beautiful, oversized issue. Welcome to The Wicked + The Divine, where gods are the ultimate pop stars and pop stars are the ultimate gods. But remember: just because you're immortal, doesn't mean you're going to live forever.
Collects The Wicked + The Divine #1-5.
Guess I would've enjoyed this more if I were still an edgy 20 y/o in 2014.
Re-reading this knowing how it plays out is an interesting experience, you can see the foreshadowing quite clearly. That said, I'm not entirely sure why I kept following this series, could be the art or the buzz, but the characters are all insufferable one way or another and the mystery doesn't seem that engaging. There are moments of brilliance in the series, and this is as good an intro as any series gets, but I'm not sure I care enough to read the rest again, there is a lot of adolescent squabbling to suffer through.
I've had this on my Goodreads to read list for years, and finally got the whole series via Humble Bundle. I like the art a lot. It's beautiful and exactly the kind of visuals I love. I'm a bit hazy on the story, though, but that always happens when I'm reading graphic novels, so I kind of expected it to happen. We'll see how the story develops after a few editions with more worldbuilding to feed my imagination.
Color me VERY interested. That's definitely a strong start, story-wise, and I really want to see where it's going - and the art is GORGEOUS.
I picked it up because I liked the art and the premise but I finished reading it because it's good. I may have been influenced heavily by how pretty it is. Reading some other reviews maybe the story might be lacking. Impossible to say for me I was just so captivated by the beautiful images.
(Immediately followed up by running to bookstore to buy the next one). I <3 Luci.
Gods come back every 90 years as pop stars and have 2 years to live. What a great concept. Can't wait to read more.
I enjoyed that a lot more than I thought I would! I like Laura, I really loved Luci, Baal is a bamf and the Morrigan is really intriguing. I can't wait to see where this goes!
Volume one, The Faust Act is a good introduction, the deities are from various mythologies reincarnated every 90 years but only to live for two. The Pantheon are worshipped as pop stars in the modern world and this introduction mostly follows a girl who meets Lucifer and tries to help. I’m intrigued enough to read more.
There were things I loved about this volume and things I did not. The artwork was pretty good, but I didn't feel like the story was amazing. It seemed to jump around a bit and at the end of issue #5 I am not completely sure I understand what exactly is going on. I did like the concept of Popstars being Gods, and the premise is still sound. There just seemed to be a little too much going on in this volume. Still, I will likely pick up Volume 2 just to see where the story is going.
The Wicked + The Divine takes celebrity worship to an extreme and imagines a world where the gods reincarnate in human form once every ninety years, oftentimes as the biggest stars of their generation. They are always young, beautiful, famous (or infamous) and dead within two years. Our window into the lives of the “pantheon” is Laura, a seventeen-year-old Londoner with a fan-girl crush on nearly every member.
When Laura faints at a concert performance given by a god named Amaterasu, Lucifer – incarnated here as a blonde girl with an androgynous Bowie look – takes her backstage and irrevocably tangles her life with the affairs of the gods. Laura’s time backstage ends quickly thanks to an assassination attempt on the gods, which Lucifer foils by snapping her fingers and exploding some heads. This results in Lucifer’s arrest and trial, and Laura decides that she has to do everything she …
The Wicked + The Divine takes celebrity worship to an extreme and imagines a world where the gods reincarnate in human form once every ninety years, oftentimes as the biggest stars of their generation. They are always young, beautiful, famous (or infamous) and dead within two years. Our window into the lives of the “pantheon” is Laura, a seventeen-year-old Londoner with a fan-girl crush on nearly every member.
When Laura faints at a concert performance given by a god named Amaterasu, Lucifer – incarnated here as a blonde girl with an androgynous Bowie look – takes her backstage and irrevocably tangles her life with the affairs of the gods. Laura’s time backstage ends quickly thanks to an assassination attempt on the gods, which Lucifer foils by snapping her fingers and exploding some heads. This results in Lucifer’s arrest and trial, and Laura decides that she has to do everything she can to help her idol, no matter the danger.
Before I get into the writing, I think I should state for the record that I absolutely love Jamie McKelvie’s art, which the best part of this book by far. The lines are bold and strong, and his style is so distinctive that I can identify it immediately when I come across his work. Combine McKelvie’s lines with Matt Wilson’s vibrant coloring and you’ve got a book that is absolutely gorgeous to behold. That said, The Wicked + The Divine isn’t just a pretty face; it’s also exceedingly British and peppered with Kieron Gillen’s wicked sense of humor throughout. The problem is that the story is a bit muddled and the plotting occasionally feels rushed.
Laura’s introduction to the world of the gods feels a bit arbitrary; Lucifer picks her out of a pile of fainted teenagers and then she’s neck-deep in weirdness and danger. I never quite bought into the idea that a seventeen year-old super-fan could do anything significant to help a group of supposedly all-powerful gods or that any one of them would ever rely on her for help. Lucifer reads more as a teenager play-acting the part of a butch bad girl and not the Lord of Darkness, but it still rings a bit false when Laura keeps insisting that The Devil Herself desperately needs her help.
Despite these hiccups, I did enjoy reading the first volume of The Wicked + The Divine, and I do think I’ll check out more volumes in the future. I just hope that the story gets a little tighter as the series continues and that Laura has a more active, crucial part in events as they unfold.
Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Net Galley.
Absolutely brilliant. Just go on & read it already.
http://fedpeaches.blogspot.com/2014/12/not-gods-you-want-but-gods-you-deserve.html
