Spoilers, obv.



So, that was was a hard one.

This is the story about a lot of things. Many of those things are pretty fucking sledgehammer.

Tara was the last of the gods to be added to the cast. I was going to tell the story about how precisely the Tara of her came about, but I think that better wait for another time – it touches heavily on other ongoing plots, and I’d rather not give anything away. She was actually added to the narrative the morning after we announced The Wicked + the Divine, also for reasons I’ll save talking about until the end – don’t worry too much about trying to figure that out though. It’s not something internal to the narrative.

Pretty much everyone condemns internet harassment. Hell, even those part of hate mobs do so, while refusing to admit that’s actually what they’re doing. The sadness for Tara is obviously a big part of it, but “Oh, here is a sad thing” doesn’t necessarily teach us anything other than sad thing is a sad thing.

In other words, the cautionary, critical element – we are all complicit to some degree in this culture and we should be careful about what we say and do. That’s key to the book.

I’ve seen some people wonder whether the meta element was deliberate. Yes, it was. To be honest, WicDiv is a very difficult book to read too much into. We’re nothing if over thought out.

The story was there all along – it’s foreshadowed from the first issue, with that first Fucking Tara. The last year has only made things more pertinent. The obvious influence is far from the only one, but it’d obviously be a lie if what happened in games wasn’t there. I’m an ex-game critic. I’m friendly with several of the people who got some of the worst harassment. I spent a good chunk of last year with a ritual of following their @s, just to see what they were living through, and watching that steady churn and thinking about the steady erosion of the soul. Tara’s exit was a very literal one, but the idea anyone would remain in that medium with that and not just leave was amazing.

While that was primarily that sort of thing, it wasn’t just that though. At least part of it came from watching a minor creator I knew vaguely (who I won’t even say which medium they worked in – their identity is irrelevant, and I’d appreciate you not trying to work it out.) They fucked up, and then got torn apart by what I’ll vaguely bracket as the progressive side of their medium. Now, calling out is good. The creator’s response to the critique was knee-jerk and bad. And while there was all sorts of responses, there was enough that was brutal to the level of dehumanization made me pause. Because, I also knew how mentally unwell the creator was, specifically their depression. Would people have moderated the level of viscousness of critique if they knew? I suspect so. But, in a real way, who ever knows what someone else is going through? It’s very easy to forget the humanity of people we despise, especially when we reduce their entire existence to a single tweet.

So, while our primary thrust is pretty clear, I wanted to make it more difficult than “Oh, those misogynists are evil.” That can be powerful, but the point is wider. Without saying all things are equal, we are all victim to these tendencies. The smallest fragments of information from people (especially people we like, especially if it’s funny) can align us against people. If we’re on social media, we’ve all done this at different times.

“Try to be kinder,” is a small thing, but a pure one, and one worth remembering.

(Being kind, of course, is a different thing from being soft.)

So, all this is set up by the drip-feed of info on Tara. Laura’s hatred almost certainly based on having gone to a Tara gig and walked away disappointed when she quote-unquote Didn’t Play The Hits. Luci’s own defensiveness – one of Luci’s worst traits. Quotes from Tara which seem to have one meaning which she clearly meant in a different way. Most importantly, the Fucking Tara running joke – a little memetically sticky thing I suspected people would leap on, and they certainly did.

In other words, making the reader complicit in a small way to this fucking horrorshow.

I feel guilty a lot when writing WicDiv, and following fan response, because I know where it’s all going and can see things working. You feel cruel, because it is cruel. But it’s important. You get this strange idea from people who do a surface reading of what McKelvie and I do that it’s somehow pandering, when really what we do is tough as balls on our cast (and readers and ourselves). It’s the sort of reading which assumes that Young Avengers is about Evil Parents went it’s actually about Teenagers Fucking-Up And Eventually Realising It And Owning It.

WicDiv is about fandom in many ways, but it’s not a complimentary portrait.

Anyway – all that said, the response I got seems to imply that most people got why we did it, and found it powerful and meaningful, which is good.

Er… also worth noting that it’s not just about online discourse. It’s clearly the issue that’s most informed by the women in my life and my feminist reading. It’s a big complicated thing, that I tried to put in front of a bunch of people and make sure it was what we wanted to do. (Post Airboy 2, this only intensified. We felt our ethical intent was clear, but we use many more slurs than Airboy, and much more aggressively.) I was always pretty sure it was either really good or utterly terrible.

I’ve glad that the consensus seems to have come down hard on the former.

At the same time, it doesn’t sit comfortably to be praised for it. A lot of the power of the issues on the real abuse of real women. I feel a little like the Pirate in Watchmen, being carried along on a raft of bodies. I have the odd double think of being glad the book exists, but not liking it was me who wrote it. I’m also aware that I’d be more worried about myself if I didn’t feel like that. I should feel uncomfortable.

To stress, this is me being transparent – I’m not looking for anyone to comfort me. I’ve talked to this a bunch with friends (and thanks to them all for putting up with my shit) and came to a place where I’m secure in my insecurity. And certainly don’t let it stop you expressing your own response to the book around me. When people talk about the work, I try to step back and watch and listen. I’ve very Death Of The Author.

Er… this has been a long pre-amble, perhaps unsurprisingly.

Jamie’s Cover

One of the more over-thought of elements of the book. This is a story about objectification – but that isn’t an instant get-out-of-jail-free card for doing an objectification cover. Walking the line between making clear the point (especially in retrospect) and not going too far was what we were trying to achieve. We showed it to a lot of people, seeing if they felt it was too much. No-one’s said anything about the cover – perhaps predictably, against the background radiation of comic culture’s general presentation of women, it doesn’t even register. It’s only noticeable in the context of WicDiv covers, rather than covers per se. The cover frames Tara like she is sown by the cameraman in the one-pager. We lose her head – obviously loaded with how the story ends. Oh – and this was what Jamie did as the guideline for Tara’s aesthetic. The sci-fi mode is pretty clear – a god can get away with some pretty fancy fashion if she chooses. Tula took this, and riffed on it to create her later outfits.

Tula’s cover

Tula had various ideas, but we ended up talking into this – if one cover is about Tara as a body, this is her face. Tula is… well, she has many strengths, but one is that her women are almost supernaturally beautiful. What she does here is very simple and very powerful – how does Tara read at first glance here? I suspect somewhat different from after you’ve read the story. That gaze strikes me as quietly and powerfully accusing. J'accuse.

The morning it came out, I re-read the issue. I often do that with my creator owned books, just to see how it feels. I did, then flipped it over, and looked at Tula’s cover and then said my first spoken words of the day: “I’m sorry, Tara.”

Tula got me verbally apologising to my own characters. She’s quite the artist.

Page 1

First opening splash for a while. There’s a lot of space in this book, and that means when you want an image to feel even more open it has to be bigger. If you’re working on three panel pages, that means splashes.

The other purpose was to immediately put the reader in Tara’s shoes. This is her, staring out. We move from seeing Tara to being her. In other words, the PoV makes it clear this is about her interiority. The world looks at her and this is what she sees.

There’s also something really sad about the juxtaposition of caption and image – the implicit disaster before anything happened. “They loved me” has a very sad past tense to it.

Tula coloured her own work, btw, but it was flatted by Dee. I’m glad Tula had time – her own colour choices were one of the many reasons I wanted her to do this issue. They’re idiosyncratic in their effect and have their own mood. I wanted Tara to have her own mood.

The suicide-letter as narration is something I chewed over. It’s been done a few times, and works particularly well in comics. I suspect I was thinking of the excellent [SPOILERS].

I did less gigs in 2014 than in many years, but went to the Roundhouse a few times. I suspect I chose it because of the Manic Street Preachers Holy Bible gig I saw towards the end of the year.

Page 2

People ask me whether I change the script for the artist. Yes, always, but more so here. I knew the mood I looked for – stately, to say the least – but I had also picked apart Tula’s work for far. For my money, the most effective has been on SUPREME: BLUE ROSE with Warren. I shouldn’t be surprised. I think one of Warren’s greatest talents is unlocking artists – as in looking at someone’s style, then finding ways to transform them into superstars. I’d say you could make a list of artists whose careers can be sharply divided into BEFORE WARREN/AFTER WARREN.

Anyway – in Supreme: Blue Rose, Warren gives Tula a lot of space. It basically runs off Three Panel Pages, generally in a full-tier format.

I lifted it.

I suspect I was thinking something more griddy, but Tula (and I keep on typoing “Tara”, which is strange) wanted to play with space, which I think was a smart call and works really well.

I didn’t really see any Paul Pope influence in Tula’s work until looking at the third panel of this right now.

Page 3

We lose the colours – the full Tula experience is saved for the performances, and we go a lot flatter for everything else. The God Performances are literally above and beyond everything else. Everything else is comparatively mundane.

The mask comes into play, which is probably a metaphor or something.

This page is probably the most explicit reminder of what the gods do is not actually music. As said in issue 1, it doesn’t record – all they have from the 1920s is some film of people freaking out over nothing. Rather than this divine thing, Tara is about to play some music.

Page 4

Which doesn’t go down well.

As said earlier, you can probably assume that it was something like this which turned Laura against Tara.

And in last panel, enter the theme.

Page 5

The is the page we showed in previews in the previous issue. It was one of the ones which was completed, but it was also one which really showcases a lot of what Tula does. The colour sweep across the page, the incredible expression in the second panel.

Note how sparse the narration is here. Generally speaking, I cut it to the bone while trying to keep enough of her voice.

In the first caption, there’s an implication – yes, Tara is a physical powerhouse. We touch on this a few times.

Page 6

And time cut.

Back in 2010, I found myself in the somewhat odd position of doing interviews about cat calling. Specifically, the videogame HEY BABY, which had become controversial. If you want to know a bit more about that period, here’s what I wrote at the time, trying to explain male privilege and what catcalling felt like to a website with a predominantly male audience.

(It’s basic stuff, btw. I link for giving reason of background.)

Odd times. Clearly a lot of dudes were enormously defensive, but I was pleased with the number of people who actually Got It after reading it. Which is awful in a different way – that a man’s opinion about this stuff is listened to in a way that women’s is often not.

Eleven was hard. I could have gone younger. Equally, the shout. There’s far worse misogyny in this issue, but this is one that was a line of dialogue you had to read. Choosing where the what-is-acceptable line was a big part of trying to make this issue work.

Page 7

The second caption was tweaked to try and make it implicit she’s talking about cat-calling with her choices of example. The general point would hold anyway, but it felt necessary.

Lots more dialogue on this page originally, but all cut away, especially the more florid aspects. EditEditEdit.

Tula changed the time periods of the script a little – they were divided more equally across the years between 11 and 20. I see Tara as a second year university student.

The glances of everyone on this page breaks my heart.

Page 8

The dog is very small and hiding behind one of the men’s legs.

We discussed a lot about how to do bold in the script, and decided that underlining was the way to go.

The “Were They Really My Friends” line is a little like many of the ones I decided to cut. This survived the cull because I felt it brought to the foreground an aspect of her I felt key.

I considered that perhaps Tara should be asexual early on. The juxtaposition between how the world sees her and what she actually desires was an interesting angle. I decided to not do it, as I think the story would imply that she’s asexual because of her experiences, and by implication that asexuals are actually fearing sex and intimacy because of something that happened to them rather than an expression of their identity. As in, Tara is asexual as the world has fucked her up. Clearly, that’s not something I would ever want to imply in a story. I suspect I could have written around that, but even explicit in-text explanations don’t stop people taking an unwanted implication (e.g. Prodigy’s Bisexuality in Young Avengers – David’s explicit “No, I didn’t catch Bisexuality” statement didn’t stop people going that way) and when there’s so much else we’ve got to worry about in this issue (and things which if they went wrong, would have been disastrous) I decided it would be overloading the issue. It was one which needed to do everything it chose to do as good as it was possible for us to do it. The more you add, the more impossible that becomes.

Plus introducing an asexual character and her dying in the same issue is also a problem.

Anyway, I really like Tara’s pre-godhood costume here. Nice work, Tula.

Page 9

I didn’t originally have the fucking in the last caption. Chrissy suggested it strongly, and I agreed.

This is the first god transformation scene we’ve seen from an external view rather than the subjective view of the participant. That strikes me as interesting. It’s a very prosaic approach to that core bit of our mythology.

Page 10

And hey! It’s the gods! Plot progression!

This was originally a two panel page, but Tula pushed it to a three. It works great.

We originally forgot Minerva’s Owl in various panels, but managed to patch it in. Phew.

This is one of the heavier captioned pages. Originally had more, but was re-written a bunch of time. Core reasoning of Tara’s thought progress and how those were shaped by Ananke’s support. In a real way, it has to answer the “if you hate this so much, why did you do it?” The “You have two years to live – how do you spend it?” She wants to bring her art to as many people as possible. She feels she has to use what she got.

A few weeks ago, I was stepping out the shower, and I found myself thinking about what I’d do if I went to the doctor and I was told I had six months to live. My first thought was “If I cancel all other commitments, I think I have enough time to write the rest of WicDiv.”

I worry about creators.

Anyway – look at Amaterasu trying to be chirpy here. Amaterasu is totally stuck in the wrong comic for her temperament.

Page 11

Six panel grid. Basically sticks on six panels for rest of scene. For conversation, the three panel just isn’t efficient enough for me.

I love seeing Tula’s take on all the gods. Woden and Minerva are especially good here.

I suspect that last panel is the most emotion we’ve ever seen Sakhmet show.

Woden’s quote is the back quote. Some people came away from last issue with fonder feelings for Woden. I suspect they’re entirely evaporated at this point.

This sequence is obviously progressing the plot.

Page 12

Woden’s “enthusiasm” is really fucked up.

The fifth panel is us stressing one aspect of Tara which I wanted to make clear. Tara is tall. We reference her superheroine’s physique in the one page story at the end, and that doesn’t just mean “is extremely conventionally hot.” Baal is about six foot. Tara is a little taller, and more so in heels.

At least part of deciding to make her as tall as she is was for body diversity reasons, coming from the same place that lead to the Norns. We were limited in various ways, and Tara had to have a certain physical presence to work… but there was no reason she couldn’t be really tall.

People have asked about the influences of Tara. It’s a bit subtle than most. 50s movie icon turned sci-fi was one part of it. In some ways, I think of her as a Lady Gaga/Taylor Swift collision. Her height was definitely part of the Swift.

Page 13

Yet more Woden sinisterness, promptly upped by Sakhmet.

Page 14

A few most bits of information for the “what Tara is Tara?” riddle for people to chew over, obviously. All interesting stuff to think about. I think it’s safe to say that she isn’t Tara from Buffy.

Tara’s background is Hindu, and she’s anglo-Indian. The racial slurs in the DPS are racists being ignorant shits.

Page 15

First panel: yes, Ananke really cares about Tara, definitely, for sures.

Page 16-17

Ugh.

I put off writing this for as long as possible, and it took me a whole afternoon to write when I dug in, because I kept on having to stop. As mentioned earlier, I followed a lot of people’s abuse, but I deliberately dug out some logs of it, and based a lot of the style and format of the tweets on real examples of harassments. No 1:1, at least as far as I’m aware (though the simple ones almost certainly have been used.)

I hope many (in fact, hopefully most) people stopped reading it. It’s a visual effect as much as something to read. It’s an overwhelming wall of it. I hope people look away.

Honestly, just tried glancing at it now, and I can’t.

I wrote more than was included here, but the design led to less. Sergio had the idea of actually doing it as an actual tablet design, which has the interesting effect of turning the comic you’re holding actually into a tablet. For a second, you are Tara, holding that pad.

We used a lot of symbols in the usernames that can’t be used in actual twitter accounts, because we didn’t want to drag anyone into this or someone create a Tara account or something.

Page 18

Important glance there, obviously.

Sigh.

Page 19

Sigh.

There’s no really words here.

Page 20

Tara isn’t perfect, but I hope she’s understandable in her decisions and perspective. Life is hard and we are not perfect. “Try to be kinder. You have no idea what people are going through.” isn’t much, but it’s something I’m trying to remember in my own life, as hard as it often is. We’re stuck in this together.

I considered losing the Fucking Tara. I wondered if it was too much of a twist of the knife.

I decided no, sometimes you twist that knife, just to make sure everyone knows a knife has been stuck in them.

Page 21

Yes, the suicide note we’ve just read? No-one in the world of WicDiv will ever read it. No-one will ever know Tara like we know Tara.

Clearly, this is plot-y, as picked up in the tweets over the page. Who goes around killing gods and setting them on fire? Well, Baphomet.

Page 22-23-24

Had a few plans of how to do this, but this one works.

The fading of the colours is obviously a fade-to-black, but also matches the sunset timing of Tara’s death.

Click Holy came to me late. Sat down and listed all the site names of that sort, and tried to pun riff on them all. Click Holy was clearly the best.

Page 23 has things getting more complicated. Wanted to try and capture the game of whisper and response and knee-jerk and hot-take we all live in. Includes first notes of “It must be Baphomet.”

I wonder if 24 should have been a little further out – it may be close enough to make people think they should be able to read it, when this is meant to be a pure visual effect.

Page 25

And title drop for the arc.

Back-up story

Obviously inspired by the sexist treatment of actresses in interviews. There’s enough gif-sets that basically duplicate what happened to Tara here.

She’s actually at the Captain America: The Winter Soldier premier. We were going to stick it in the LOC CAP but decided it may be a little self-referential and/or we may get sued. Jamie and I actually went to that one. Sitting and watching all these beautiful men was the moment I went “you know – I probably should go to the gym for once of my life.” and started working out a bit.

(Went from a 37 waist to a 32 inch waist since them. Still not entirely sure how I feel about that.)

Jamie loved drawing this page, and Tara specifically. She’s fun to draw, apparently. Clearly, I spoiled any form of fun for Jamie by doing this story with her. I am the worst in many ways.

Back Cover

We use quotes from other people about the lead character on the back for this arc. It was bad in its original context, but at the end of the story, it’s obviously even worse. If the ending left you more sad than angry, I suspect the Woden quote may ignite that rage a little more.

And, in a special feature… here’s some spoilery questions being answered in private.



It’s a different sort of challenge, really. With the tweets, as horrible as it is, you’re writing a form. Harassment tweets have a structure. I can study what people do when writing them, and duplicate them. I don’t have to go into the deeper level of their thinking. This is surface stuff.

With Woden, you have to submerge yourself in his worldview, and try and make it coherent (or rather, coherent given his axiomic elements).

Obviously more on this next month. It’s a hard issue.

It’s planned out in a fairly robust way all the way until the end. There’s room for detours and improvisation in approach, but I could write most of the final issue right now.

That said, not sure if I’m killing them off that quickly given the mission statement of the book. Issue 13 and 3 gods are dead (EDIT: i.e. of the 12 on the wheel). At this rate, they’ll all be dead by issue 52, which is the top range of the 30-60 issues length of series we’ve said.

As a vaguely comforting thing, however, there are ups and downs on this road in terms of joy and sadness. This arc is an obviously dark one.

Really, it’s just research. To get out of it, you run as far away from the keyboard as possible and do anything, anything else.

And now back to work. Thanks for reading.