As I mentioned this in the back of the issue, I probably better do this, eh?

In short - here’s a bunch of commentary on the issue.

Spoilers, obv.

Actually, before we kick off? The cut-off-for-pre-order date for issue 2 is Monday, so if you dug issue 1 and want to make sure you can get 2, it’s worth having a word with your retailer over the weekend.

As it’s been a while since I’ve done the last one and I suspect, if only because of the plug, they’ll be a different set of eyes on this one, it’s probably best I restate what these notes are. They are, as you’ll soon discover, a ramble.

This will be craft stuff and random “where ideas emerged” stuff. I will do some tech stuff, but I’m going to try hard to avoid actually just explaining the whole card trick. It’s hard, as it’s the way my brain is wired, but I’ll try.

Also, they’re not normally this long. First issue, y'know?

Probably the main thing to stress: this isn’t everything there is to say about the book. It barely counts as the tip. Do not take anything said below as the sole reason we did anything.

I’ve been running a podcast for decompressed for the last year. It’s sporadic, especially recently, but I did a lot of talking to people in public. A lot of it was about first issues. In a real way, if you listen to them again, be aware I’m thinking about THE WICKED + THE DIVINE for the whole of that time, and what on Earth I was going to do with the first issue. The questions of “What should a first issue do” may as well be me talking to the mirror.

Right? Onwards.

Cover(s)

Jamie’s high concept, Hannah’s design. The designer Hannah Donovan is a long term friend of ours, and she did a little comic work with me on THREE. She wanted to be involved early, and we were glad to have her. She’s very much the high level aesthetic conductor of the book.

Jamie’s concept was portraits, done in the style of a fashion magazine, specifically with those colouring effects. The full-page logo is the sort of thing which retailers a decade ago would have been outraged about, I suspect, but didn’t get a mention now. Not sure what it says, but I think it’s a good thing.

We considered losing our names entirely from the cover, but had a moment of sense.

I’m still amazed we went with the name. We went through a mass of them – YOUNG GODS was the original title, but that would have been shameless for a half dozen reasons, as well as copyright infringing - and it sort a while to reach this. I thought we’d get something else, and it was only when I was backstage at the Image expo, about to go on stage, when I realised “Oh man! It’s totally too late to change it now.” I never said I was smart.

We played with some radical ideas, especially when we had the dual-cover concept. The duality of the title is key. We were considering releasing two covers every issue, one entitled THE WICKED and the other THE DIVINE. We’d never actually say what the title of the book was, so the book just existed as this Schroedinger’s title. Half the print run would have one cover on the front, the other half would have the other (And the other one on the reverse – we didn’t want to gouge). It’s a fun idea, but we realised it was probably a good idea for people to be able to walk into a shop and actually say the name of the comic they wanted to buy. To quote the e-mail I sent to Jamie that started this whole thing “For once in our life, let’s not be stupid.”

My fave minor thing? The idea of the “+” instead of “And/&” (Hannah’s, I believe), which both gives a nod towards christianity while also resembling a cross-hair right in the middle of the character’s face, in a Public Enemy fashion. This may just be me.

IFC

Black, black, black. GOTH AS FUCK.

This is our “standard” title page we’ll use throughout the book. As people learn to read the icons, it’ll act as a soft-re-cap of the state of play. Time is important because, as the high concept comes in, each of those days are incredibly important to the cast.

In passing, design pages like this in books are (for WFH books) pretty much free (i.e. don’t come from the budget). In books like ours, they take a magnitude less effort in terms of time than a drawn page (i.e. they don’t come from our “budget”). If you see a design page like this, it was never going to be a page of art. If it wasn’t a designed page, it’d almost certainly be a house-ad. I’ve never asked Hickman if it bugs him when reviewers complain about it, but if I were him, I’d be walking around the house with an axe any time someone said anything about wasting pages which solely existed due to the creator’s desire to give the reader more content.

But I’m a famously axe-stompy kinda guy. Jonathan is much more chill.

Actually, it was Hickman’s ownership of icons over the last five years that gave us second thought about doing this. We’ve been doing design based stuff since Rue Britannia, and I was specifically thinking about an update of the opening image of THE SINGLES CLUB trade – i.e. social group as circular diagram - but I was aware it’d be filed as Hickman-derived stuff, just because how much he’s made it his signature.

Basically, we decided fuck it.

Each icon is a god. No, we won’t be confirming – at least for a while – what god means what. In my script I said the icons would be the same no matter what generation of gods we were in. I did that as a “this could end up a lot of work.” Jamie said he wanted to do individual styled icons for each period, hence the art-deco vibe of these four. Jamie is a good one.

Note: No indicia. I didn’t want commerce to be the first thing anyone sees in a book. Equally, no creative team. Art first, commerce last. Art first, creators last. Yes, I know. We contain multitudes.

1



GOTH AS FUCK.

If you’ve read any of the interviews about this, you’ll know I’ve said it’s a book about death. I work this in a subtle, almost invisible subtext by having a big fucking skull on the front page staring at you.

We spent quite a bit of time deciding where the balloon should come from. Top right, so you read the sentence before you actually reach the skull was the decision. Top right, as that’s where the masked-lady is.

I called for the hyper-shadow hyper-real art-mode Jamie did for his Horror-Oubliette in Young Avengers, and he’s leaned into it.

This borders the “not pointing out cleverness” stuff, but this is very much me lifting from Watchmen. In Watchmen, the cover is the first panel of the story. Here, the transition from the alive face to a skull is the point. The “cover as part of the comic” is something Jamie and I do a lot in our indie work, though never as an actual panel-transition before now.

Originally had a LOCATION CAPTION on this page, but decided to lose it.

Several people have picked up on the line of dialogue’s similarity to the first line of 90s pop-comics counter-cultural classic THE INVISIBLES. They would be correct. As a general rule, if a line’s ringing bells, it’s ringing bells for a reason. However: the devil is in the details. It’s not the same line, and the stressing is always key. Also a good time to re-stress the “everything is done for more than one reason?” point I did in the intro? It’s not just an Invisibles riff.

THE INVISIBLES is great, btw. If you want a picture of the 90s, it’s one of the best, flaws and all. And no work of art worth a damn is without its flaws. Invisibles changed peoples lives.

Look at Matt’s colouring choices throughout this sequence. Sepia choices, which always reminds me of bone. The whole scene looks like bleached bone. Matt’s one hell of a colourist, as I’ll talk about anon. He wasn’t even pleased with the work on the first issue. As good as the first issue is, now that I’ve seen the second, I kinda see why. It’s an astounding rollercoaster structure based around hue – but I’ll talk about that next month.

2

You know, thinking about this after talking about Hickman earlier, this opening scene really is a Hickman move, at least for his Indie work. As in, dropping you into a situation with no explanation and trusting the audience to keep up with it.

I’ll admit, I was primarily thinking of the opening of Gangs Of New York, a film I have very little time for, but love that whole opening sequence. Fundamentally, we see the end of the previous movie. This is a little like that.

To return to a key thing in current-aesthetic action comics – space is importance. Could you have done this scene in less pages? Sure, but it’d bleed it of all meaning and impact. Space also lets us stress lots of the details. Yes, you won’t understand this all on first reading… but you probably will on the second, as there’s a lot of single images to let you dwell on it.

Christ, look at all the black going on here. Man! Jamie is owning the black.

Love the Gods of the Jazz age designs. Jamie outdid himself here. If I wasn’t planning to do more with them before, I would have when I saw them.

Obviously – circles and skulls are the shapes we’re playing with.

3

The masked lady is totes mysterious. She hasn’t been named yet in the story, but will soon enough. When designing her, I noted that she wouldn’t be wearing this outfit particularly often (as it’s a period one) so Jamie could go to town and do something that he wouldn’t want to draw every issue, but can just about handle for a scene. This is what results.

People talk about comics’ infinite budget on the page. It’s true, but only as far as it goes. The budget is what the artist is willing to actually draw without wanting to set themselves (and the writer) on fire.

Susanoo teases a line…

4

And goes a different way on the page turn. Lighter. He’s the only character named in the scene, which you have to presume is for a reason.

For those who never did French at high school, Au Revoir = Until we meet again.

Italics for foreign language. Use of italics, quotation marks and bold is a little off standard comic-forms in WicDiv.

I wrote a lot in the script about the implicit relationship between these gods, and their personal relationships, and Jamie did some wonderful things here. How do you think the guy in the second panel feels about Susanoo, y'know?

Like all the gods, I weighed what spelling to use for Susanoo before ending up with this one.

5

Various iconic, memetically sticky bits of the book are introduced: skulls, the finger-clicks (or snaps, if you’re that way inclined), 1-2-3-4.

Debating how we’d write KLLK was one of the better editorial debates herein. Me being me, I’d written it in various ways, and we standardised to this.

The page turn is really well done by Jamie here. Silence…

6



…Noise.

Colour, light, and a return to “Once again, We return.”



7

Title page, more icons, more figuring out. 1-2-3-4 is probably already sinister by this point, I suspect.

We’re not confirming to people which icon symbolises which god, so they’ll have to do a little deduction. It’ll be clear sooner rather than later.

January 1st 2014 is when we officially started work on WicDiv. I sent Jamie the first script a few seconds after the new year.

Hmm… this is probably a good place to talk about some of the more fucking oddball stuff I do. The – for want of any word to say this which isn’t even more fucking pretentious – shamanistic parts of it. The magical thinking parts.

The task of WicDiv is trying to keep the odd oblique power of the Too-Much-Information Too-Much-Us that you get when you try and funnel existence into art without a barrier, while not just collapsing into utter incoherence. As a writer, the part of me which works on instinct and the part of me that runs on numbers are always at war. You’ll see different books doing it to different levels. Uber is probably the one where the math brain is most in effect, as I tend to be just as coldly mechanistic as the characters and the world it portrays. There is no magic in Uber. The only pure magical thinking stuff are the short apocalypse romance stuff – even Phonogram has a hard structural maths edge to it, especially in The Singles Club.

WicDiv’s driving force is to make the two work together. It’s another iteration of the duality that’s clear from the title downwards, y'know?

Okay – what I’m saying is that’s what I’m thinking about when trying to make all the choices in the book. There are a lot of darlings and deciding whether they should live or die is the work. If I remove too few, the book doesn’t work as genre fiction. If I remove too many, the reason I’m doing the book disappears and I may as well have never bothered.

8-9

Brockley is near where I live. I could have set it anywhere, but as Laura is primarily inspired by the Girls On The Bus, I wanted to be precise about it. Also this is me buying in emotionally. As I walk about the area, I’m thinking “What would Laura make of that?” when I see something.

It also obviously makes it easy to get photo-ref.

Why London at all? I was considering making it worldwide, but knew that it would reduce Laura’s normality (and so the contrast between her life and the gods) if she had to travel internationally. If she has to go to (say) Glasgow, I can have her hiding in a toilet, dodging fare. Doing something like that with a plane turns her either into a very rich girl or someone who’s basically the Black Widow.

I was also aware that, culturally speaking, I can write London better than I can write (say) New York. The book requires a certain literacy with how a city and its people work, and having the experience matters.

Also – why not London? I’m a Brit. I’m interested in Jason writing the South. I’m interested in anyone writing about where they’re from. I always think when writing that my own tastes can’t be that unusual.

Basically, shamanistic reasons and easy photo-ref. You know us.

(I joke: once again, there’s a shitload of other reasons, some I’ve just deleted.)

The 1-2-3-4 panels an early idea, which I often considered whether it would be a good idea to kill to do other things with the space. In the end, I’m glad we didn’t. My main worry was whether Laura’s intro would be too bitty. I played with other choices of what to show her doing – subway stuff, approaching the venue – but ended up focusing in on those two key scenes. The leaving the house and the transformation.

Laura’s our abstract lead, and PoV character. As such, my worry is always having her too passive and not clear as a person rather than an observer. However, there’s the secondary urge – the story requires us, as readers, to be interested in Lucifer’s fate at the end of the issue. As such, we need to sell Lucifer as hard – or even harder.

Anyway – what I mean by all that is that when the pages came back and panels 4 and 6 of page 9 were there, I felt a lot better. Jamie saves the universe with another perfect pair of expressions.

Laura’s name comes from Bat for Lashes’ Laura, one (if not not the) key WicDiv songs.

Hannah’s choice of font is epic. We considered different colours for the 1-2-3-4 background, but settled on the boldness of the white.

10-11

We said we weren’t doing many double-page spreads from now on. They were Young Avengers thing. But – y'know – occasionally they’re called for.

“1-2-3-4… She was just Seventeen” is the first of the classic rock references in the issue. From I Saw Her Standing There. First track on the first Beatles album. 1-2-3-4 and… pop music.



Not on the WicDiv playlist because the Beatles aren’t on Spotify.

This image – obviously a key one – was one of the Shamanistic pieces of it all. On a trans-atlantic flight. Listening to the plane’s music system, and Shake It Out by Florence drops and it’s just one of those moments when a record which I’d felt conflicted over suddenly transmutes into something else, and I’m paralysed by it. The fact the lyrics are carved from purest doggrel ceases to matter, and the words take on a power above and beyond everything else that’s happening. I’m crying and get the key image – the girl on the stage and the girl in the crowd, the space between them.

(Clearly, for all their lack of subtlety, Shake It Out’s lyrics are extremely WicDiv, and when they’re at their best and sung with all the force she can muster, it feels like something we’re aspiring to)

So, yes, there’s a lot of Florence in here, but not just her. We try and keep the archetypes we’re touching on relatively wide – there’s a lot of Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks in the mix too.

Jamie just kills here. Matt does too. The composition of the one face in the crowd and Amaterasu on stage. Fuck yeah.

12-13

Oh, the pose is great, but it’s Matt’s colouring that takes center stage here. The original idea was a little more conservative and realistic, but we urged Matt to press more towards the emotional effect. And then in comes all the whites.

First rush of names here. World buildy-build-build.

Hmm. I do like using brackets in captions. Hmm.

First appearance of “orgasm” in WicDiv. I suspect it won’t be the last.

I think Jamie’s got something really powerful with the expression in the last panel of 12. Amaterasu is divine, but here she looks terrifying and a little terrified. And Matt nails those eyes-as-solar-eclipse effects. Eye-effects are kind of a motif for all our indie work. They’re all over Phonogram.

Pags 13, Panel 1: See the face on the left? You know Jamie often takes photo ref of himself for expressions? Now imagine Jamie, at home, trying to pull an O-face. I’d like to think he committed and method-wanked the expression, but that’s much more Zdarsky’s style.

Page 13, panel 3: Originally had extra captions on, but we realised that it was much more powerful in the single one. One of the things about captions in a panel is that it renders it timeless. You have literally no idea how long that moment is. The second you add dialogue, or even thought balloons, it implies a certain length of time. Anyway – that, here.

Page 13, Panel 5: I love Laura’s freckles here.

Last panels were originally a fade to black, but when the colours started coming in, we realised a white out is a far better idea.

Page 14

And hello to Luci.

You know my Uncanny X-men character Unit was originally based on a character I had lying around since I was 21 or so and I decided to just drop him to the MU, as he’d never work outside any large shared universe and I had no desire to make one? A gender switched Lucifer who preferred Luci dates from the same period. Good to get her out in front of a crowd.

The big influence on Luci is obvious, as we’ve said it in interviews – namely Thin White Duke era Bowie. To be honest, there’s stuff I’ve taken from different periods as well. But there’s certainly a lot more in the mix as well, not least… oh, we’ll get to that in a minute.

Anyway – introduction is important. Trying to get the cross between the divine and the normal, which switches mid-page. What kind of book are we doing? This kind of book.

Laura’s legs in Panel 2 was redrawn after Matt Fraction said Jamie would regret it if he didn’t. Turned out much better second time.

Page 15

We’re meeting a god for the first time, as a human. Clearly the relationship is going to be key going forward. The push and pull is key – Luci being outrageous and Luci showing a little bit of humanity before letting the mask take over again.

Editor Chrissy added a lot to this page – it was one we argued about in terms of aim versus effect and all that. Let Luci be her deliberate attempt to be an outrageous troll early on, but in the original draft Laura didn’t call her on it nearly as hard. I’ll be saying this for the whole run, but this is a book about problematic people who will do problematic things. The book is about problematic things. Making sure that “about” is present is always on my mind.

Originally didn’t have quotation marks around the Beatles or Larkin quote, but we decided we really had to make the scene clear. Even if you don’t know the quote, you need to know it’s a quote. The quote marks with italics is our style guide for direct quotation of something famous, versus the straight speech marks without italics we use for more normal ironic distance.

Eight panel grid. Our first one, and not the last. I love eight panel grids. I fucking adore them. Jamie wants to kill me, but they’re the very best.

Page 16

I really like how Jamie handle’s Laura trying to stumble to apologise.

Panel 3 – you know, we really do a lot of hand-reaching out gestures in our comics.

Panel 5 – Hmm. The guy on the left looks like Kid With Knife has been juicing.

Page 17

How did they get to the afterparty? Who cares, sez I. Cut to the chase.

What I quite like about Jamie is how we’ve simultaneously got what’s clearly a fancy room, but he’s presented it objectively. This is an establishing shot without glamour. All the subjective angles of the gigs to sell the glamour, and now we go behind the curtain and… it’s this.

It obviously works as an establishing shot as well – the layout of the room is key for the action sequence. Both Jamie and I are very much in the school who likes our fight scenes to be follow-able.

And we meet Sakhmet.

I initially considered Bast/Bastet for her, but I felt using her would have been basically like using Thor or Loki. Thor and Loki is always going to be in part about the Marvel Universe, and Bast would always be taken in part as Sandman critique. I dug a little further into the Egyptian mythology, and Sakhmet – there’s various spellings, obv – stood out for a number of reasons.

The pop star archetype is spottable, with a major influence (Rihanna) perhaps a little too visible here. There’s another influence worth noting, which is my own cat Lemon. Having Lemon in my life has made me think about cats a bunch.

18-19-20

Doing a comic about gods as pop stars does mean that we can do interviews and use them in a similar way. This is, in terms of cold, hard details of the world, the most exposition-including scene.

In the original sort of rough draft when I was still doing the larger scale world-building, the interviewer was a one-off character. This would obviously would have been a mistake. This scene is an interview, and clearly about the gods generally – but it’s just as much about Cassandra. Cassandra is just as key to the book as Laura is. They’re opposites, the fan and the hater, the unquestioning devotee and the critic. Here, she’s the book’s autocritical voice.

It’s the scene which (as I suspected) has proved to be the rorschach test in the readership, normally based on how they feel about Cassandra. I could write more about that, but it’d be wiser to not.

Obviously this whole section was worked to death. What is too oblique? What is too obvious? What is too many fucking words? I managed to get page 18 down enough so we could have that silent panel at the end.

18, panel 5 – quoting my own series’ tagline in the story is a very me move, innit? I’m despicable.

Page 19 has some of my favourite panels in the book. Panel 3 kills me – there’s little of the girl there, and a lot of the god. The casual arrogance. I believe her there.

Page 20 is the poster-child for “This book is about problematic people doing problematic things” lampshading. There’s nothing that Cassandra says that isn’t correct. By putting it in the text, it’s our way of giving the nod to the readership that this is what the book’s about rather than blundering around with no awareness. In short: if you want to do a story about something, it has to be included as an element in the story. This is us saying “We know, you know, go with us.” It’s also a sign to say “if you’re not willing to go with us, you probably should get off the train. The book is only going to frustrate you.”

Last panel of 20 – I’ve only just noticed that Luci’s shoes have fell off, which is an amazing detail.

Page 21

Yes, the idea for this whole scene came from playing with Lemon.

Sakhmet’s expression in panel 4 is just great. Nice work, Jamie.

Page 22

And a sudden change of mood, innit? We’ve frontloaded the possibility of violence with the opening (one of the structural reasons for having it as the opening before going into the real world) and now we’re diving in.

Lots of lovely art details you can pick up on – the curving of the bullets around Amaterasu is one of my faves.

That’s totally a Jack Kirby sort of pose in the last panel, innit? Also – look at the panel break. Jamie doesn’t do it often.

1-2-3…

Page 23

…and 4! We talked about including one, perhaps in a caption, perhaps coming out the window, but decided it would be ugly as hell and had faith that after all the 1-2-3-4s so far, you’d fill the four in yourself in your head – and the 4 would be the explosion.

When the gods are using their powers, it was Matt’s idea to up all the lights. Everything is brighter. Showtime, etc.

Nice view of London in the background. We’re looking towards the South Bank, which is just one of my favourite places.

Page 24-25

Panel 1 is the first time “Lucifer” is explicitly mentioned in the book, which gives us the chance for Luci to do the Rolling Stones reference.

Nice use of background in the second panel. Was that Jamie or Matt? I can’t remember.

When was doing Phonogram, I had the urge to do a comic that basically took the structure of a musical, but applying it to superhero comics. You know – in musicals, when people are feeling something, they just burst into songs. We’d do that, but instead of songs, we’d have fight scenes. A fight scene would always be about that. While we’re not doing that in WicDiv (it’s more like what we did in Young Avengers, to be honest) there is a lot of the idea that the combats are also treated like performances. The timing, the pop art colouring, etc.

In terms of first issues saying what the book is about, I considered this whole sequence necessary. This isn’t Phonogram, that primarily used genre as a structure to drape philosophy over. This is genre. In its own warped way, this is a superhero story, at least as much as Buffy or the Matrix were.

When I saw Jamie drawing panels of Teddy punching apart the goo-people in Young Avengers, I suspected Jamie would handle the violence fine. This is horrible stuff, but with the eye on the emotional effect of it – that distant shot after the two pop-art head-explosions is what sells it, for me. The headless body on fire, falling to the ground…

Last panel on 25 may be my favourite Luci expression in the issue. I wish I could have lost the caption and had it just as a one-liner panel, but without it, the transition loses people. It’s a really hard cut, and needed to be softened.

26

The captions being a late add meant that the word EXACTLY was used in both here and in Luci’s dialogue. The last change I made to the issue was getting Clayton to change the dialogue one to PRECISELY, at about half-eleven.

The captions serve another purpose. Laura has been very quiet for a while in the book. It restates that she’s our view-point, and we’re following her. Her captions on the last page serve the same purpose.

I think the rough take for Luci’s speech was the first thing I actually wrote for WicDiv. Just playing with the voice, playing with the concept of a miracle, etc. Luci is a glorious troll here, bless her.

27-28-29

In terms of panelling, you’ll probably see that WicDiv is a lot more restrained than a lot of our work. There’s lots of mad stuff down the line, but while we’re inching people in, we don’t want to distract them. Just very clean storytelling…

Actually, changed my mind. Luci’s expression in the last panel of 28 is my fave of her expressions.

Or maybe it’s the first of 29.

(Those motion lines make me laugh in that panel – just the implication of the back and forth tease)

Three panels on 29. Why doing this? Well, there’s the practical thing. I want the page turn before people discover what actually happens. But as much, it’s about extending the moment as much as we can.

It’s also one of those sickening things you realise that give an artist who can do what Jamie does a simple three-tier page, and they will create something that works, every single fucking time. It’s a bit depressing, in many ways.

30

More Jamie violence. More Matt leaning into the pop-art for the non-realist colours. Non-realist colours as parts of our performances is a very WicDiv thing.

When looking at Jamie’s art doing violence, I find myself thinking about Brian Talbot circa Heart of Empire, if you see what I mean.

31-32

Sitting and looking at this page, and the only thing I don’t like about it is that I should have asked Jamie to have a few small bits of fire as well as the smoke. Man! I suck.

Lots of key expressions. This is always Jamie’s secret weapon, and you fucking use it. Luci has been in control throughout the book (with the exceptions of those rare flashes of vulnerability). This is not something we’ve seen before. A trickster god being played.

In a strict storytelling fashion, we don’t actually need Laura’s captions here, but they re-connect us to her, and hint towards what’s next in the story by implication.

And on 32, full page cliff-hanger. I don’t always end (or start) WicDiv with a splash, but it’s rarely a bad idea. It does create closure.

And a cliffhanger – as much as the combat, another signifier that this book is going to be working in a certain way. “Lucifer is apparently framed for murder” is a plot hook that you could comprehend even without any of our worldbuilding. I could talk about murder-mysteries as a plot-driver, but perhaps I’ll save that for next time. This has already gone on a long time and my eyes are very tired.

33

And credits! Including Indicia, but I’ve already mentioned that. Designed by Hannah.

34-35

Just want to stress you should write to our letters page address so we can have a letters page: wicdiv@gmail.com

36

The cover of next month’s issue, which you should all please buy.

Inside Back Cover

An advert for our own book, but that does make the whole thing totally 100% TEAM US.

Back Cover

Quotes from the character on the cover are totally our thing. My only worry is that I write such long sentences, will they fit?

Right, that’s enough for now.

Thank you for reading. The response to the book has been overwhelming. I want to hug you all, but if I did that, I’d just infect everyone with everyone else’s germs, and that’d be rubbish.

See you next month.