I first tried to read The Wicked + The Divine in September 2017, and got through the first five volumes, but felt the series was weird and confusing. Earlier this month, I scrolled through my library’s entire adult graphic novel collection, and saw that the series was now completed, so figured this was as good a time as any to give the series another chance. And I’m so glad I did!
The core premise of WicDiv and the phrase that gets repeated as a central reminder is that every ninety years twelve gods incarnate as humans and they will be loved, they will be hated, and in two years they will be dead. It is 2014 in London, and the cycle has begun anew, and Laura is a major fan of the Pantheon, proud to say she has seen some of the earliest performances of the gods. The story starts when Laura is at one of Amaterasu’s concerts and meets Luci, who takes her backstage where Cassandra, a cynical journalist, is doing an interview with Amaterasu. When Cassandra challenges Amaterasu’s claims of being a god, especially as she has never experienced the divine the way fans of the Pantheon describe, Luci pushes back by challenging Cassandra’s identity. Things get explosive, but the truly explosive moment is when two assassins try to shoot Luci and she snaps her fingers, causing them to (quite literally) lose their heads. By trying to defend Luci and following closely along, Laura ends up more and more deeply embroiled in the world of the Pantheon and interacts with more and more of the figures.
This is a series that starts kind of slow and confusing, absolutely, and I do stand by my original assessment, but it’s amazing what seven years and hundreds of books read can do for one’s reading comprehension and ability to process stories in different ways. I really enjoyed this experience with WicDiv and I’m very glad I gave it another chance. The twelve gods alive in the current recurrence are Lucifer, Baal, Amaterasu, Morrigan, Baphomet, Minerva, Inanna, The Norns, Dionysus, Tara, Sekhmet, and Woden – or at least that’s who they understand themselves to be. And sometimes it’s not clear which iteration of the god they’re supposed to be; this is particularly evident in that Tara doesn’t know which Tara she’s supposed to be, and Baal claims to be Baal Hadad, a god of lightening, while Cassandra theorizes he’s actually Baal Hammon, god of sky and fire who also has a history of child sacrifice. I really loved the ways the characters were real people, and how they interpreted their role as a god and their experience being worshipped. There’s a lot of complex motivations and goals at play, and they get slowly revealed as the stakes increase – the fact the gods are running out of time and that there is a Great Darkness attacking innocent people.
An element of WicDiv that I really enjoyed is the use of history to build the world and mythos of the story. This especially comes into play in the later volumes as we start to have a better understanding of who Ananke (a mysterious old woman who says she’s been around for 6,000 years to guide the Pantheon, that she gave up her own divinity in order to stay immortal and help future generations) is and the creation of the original Pantheon. I also really liked seeing previous iterations of the Pantheon in volume 8, which collected several specials including four different periods in time when the Pantheon was in power. What was especially interesting across all the cycles of Recurrence was how Lucifer played their role and how cultural elements influenced the arc for the Pantheon.
There are a lot of characters to keep track of and many different storylines and personal histories to follow, but overall I found it all so fascinating that I could keep it in my head (and am in fact writing this review two days after binging the series, which, if you know me, is very unusual (I usually write reviews immediately after finishing the book because otherwise I lose details lol)). I especially loved the way the graphic novel medium was executed to tell the story and the way different designs for the characters told just as much as the story itself. One of the elements that worked especially well, in my opinion, was the different icons for the different gods, and how it changed as the story progressed. As gods died, their icon would become a skull, and when they awoke their icon would be in color when usually it was in black and white. This circle of icons showed up at least once an episode as part of the WicDiv title page, if you will. It was interesting to see how that graphic changed, and use it to keep track of the characters and what was going on with them in very broad strokes.
WicDiv does a lot with mythology and imagining it in a modern setting, but it’s also very much a story of the stories we tell, and how stories shape our reality. Laura was such a great focal character because in the beginning she’s a super fan but then her role changes and she becomes known as the Destroyer, until she realizes some things about herself and what she wants, changing her story once again. I also liked the different interactions between the Pantheon and how their dynamics were influenced by their roles, as well as the stories they believed from Ananke. There’s a lot to be explored on themes of influence and manipulation throughout The Wicked + The Divine.
For as exciting and big the story gets, in the end it felt like a story of relationships and living with choices and how an individual reality can have huge ripples of impact on others’ interpretation of reality. I found the ending of the series supremely satisfying, all said and done, and really like how it concluded things for the Pantheon. There’s definitely lots of heartbreak at various points and elements of the story that were hard to read. But I also liked that it brought up important topics like abortion, toxic relationships, and giving too much of yourself to your own detriment. It’s also an extremely queer series with a variety of romantic and sexual relationships, as well as not sticking itself into boxes about the gender of gods – Inanna is an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love, war, and fertility, and in the 2014 cycle Inanna is nonbinary. I really appreciated that the creators didn’t just have the various figures in a box, only able to be interpreted in a single way. And this ties back to seeing the previous cycles and how their figures were interpreted differently because of the time and culture they were living in.
I definitely recommend giving this adult graphic novel series a chance if you’re a fan of mythology, music industry, and the ways famous figures can influence people, both positively and negatively. This is a great example of storytelling and letting characters grow in organic-to-them ways. The way secrets are revealed and the history behind the Recurrence all came together to keep me engaged and unable to put the books done until I’d finished them all.