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A review by liesljrowe
The Wicked + The Divine: 1923 by Jamie McKelvie, Aud Koch, Matt Wilson, Kieron Gillen
5.0
So this was not what I was expecting. Despite being packaged like a comic, most of this is prose, which has the effect that the full-page drawings of the various murders are all the more shocking. Yet even if this is very different to the Wicked and the Divine issues I've come to know and love, this is probably my favourite in the series and would be the issue that I would shove at someone wanting to understand why WicDiv has such a claim over my heart and soul.
First off, And Then There were None is one of my favourite Agatha Christie stories, bleak as it is with the fatalism of knowing that all the characters you're reading about are going to meet a grisly end very soon. Recasting it with the gods and having Ananke as a vengeful Agatha Christie/Miss Marple type in the background is the perfect mash-up. Taking that recasting and using the 1920s setting of the original to have a discussion about the build-up to WW2 and popularism vs elitism as the future of art? Genius. You could easily write a dissertation on all the cleverness in here, the tiny allusions which let you know exactly what was going on. I personally had a bit of a moment at "The lights are going out".
Also the choices of each 1920s personality picked to represent the gods were absolutely perfect. Lucifer as Gatsby/Fitzgerald was particularly tragic, but I had a soft spot for the Norms as the trio of dystopian writers, foreseeing different visions of an awful future, and the cinematic duo.
First off, And Then There were None is one of my favourite Agatha Christie stories, bleak as it is with the fatalism of knowing that all the characters you're reading about are going to meet a grisly end very soon. Recasting it with the gods and having Ananke as a vengeful Agatha Christie/Miss Marple type in the background is the perfect mash-up. Taking that recasting and using the 1920s setting of the original to have a discussion about the build-up to WW2 and popularism vs elitism as the future of art? Genius. You could easily write a dissertation on all the cleverness in here, the tiny allusions which let you know exactly what was going on. I personally had a bit of a moment at "The lights are going out".
Spoiler
Also the train coming out from the projector (representing cinema, based as it is on a really famous short film) to move down one of the elitists made me chuckle.Also the choices of each 1920s personality picked to represent the gods were absolutely perfect. Lucifer as Gatsby/Fitzgerald was particularly tragic, but I had a soft spot for the Norms as the trio of dystopian writers, foreseeing different visions of an awful future, and the cinematic duo.