Spoilers, obv.

It’s a strange job, writing. You think you know something, and you do, and then you realise it’s something else. Or rather, something else as well.

While I’d advise against hard categories, there’s certainly types of writers. When I was on a panel with Hickman, I believe he described me as god. Which amused me. He was saying that I’m the sort of writer who works like a Christian god, knowing the place and positioning of every leaf, every tree beam, every mote of dust. I see writing as a sprawling machine. I’m the Watchmaker.

This isn’t quite the same thing as being a complete planner, but my decisions are deliberate. I’m not someone who doesn’t generally know why he’s doing something.

Writers who lean more improvisational talk often about looking back and realising what their theme was, or what they were mining and not aware of. I rarely get that. Or rather, it happens so rarely, that I tend to remember almost every occasion I get that perspective. Frankly, more common is making a decision for a reason, forgetting why, and then reverse engineering my own thought process years down the line and realising why past-me made what I felt was the only reasonable decision.

Which isn’t to say that’s everything. I know what I’m doing for a plan, but there’s also the magic of ideas. What hits me, what feels right, places I want to go, and then only realise along the way exactly what part of me is having a conversation with me. This is normally stuff that I’m hiding from myself a little. This is stuff I have trouble admitting. This isn’t just stuff that is bad about myself – there’s lots of stuff which is bad about myself which I’m explicitly interrogating – but stuff I may not want to deal with until down the path. There’s been a few of them. Not many, but a few.

Which makes this issue strange, as it’s ended up being both.

It’s an issue which was mainly conceived of before the first issue was drawn, set up entirely in issue 3, and has been thought about and talked about internally since (both internally team WicDiv and internally in my own head).

And then, only when the issue drops, do I realise what part of myself I’ve been mining for a character all along, while consciously thinking I was keeping her at arm’s reach, because I’m petrified of her. It’s actually a realisation that’s made me alter some things in my daily cycle, as I recognise the place they’re from, and why it’s bad for me.

As I said, writing is an interesting job. I don’t consciously do it for these reasons… but I must do, at least on some level. “What is wrong with us?” is at the heart of most my work, which translates to “What is wrong with me?”

Of course, this is also not exactly necessarily relevant for you, and not the primary thrust of any of this, but it’s there, and as these are writer notes, you’re going to get some of it. Weird issue.

Preamble over.

Jamie/Matt’s Cover: Foreshadowing the darkness section of the issue. We like doing a minimalistic one now and again.

Erica Henderson: This is just an amazing cover. After Squirrel Girl, you’d have an idea what an Erica cover would be, and it wouldn’t be this wonderful homage to the the Caravaggio picture. Having a Gentle Annie cover this late is a good thing as well. In love with this.

IFC

The “Ananke. Or Ananke?” was a cut and paste error. We’re just relieved it happens now, as I was petrified of typoing an Ananke when I meant Minerva or vice versa for the whole run.

Page 3-14

I suspect by now the past/present structure is pretty clear. We change it up considerably, with what they’re showing. Issue 34 was the (majority) of the structure Ananke is working under. 35 is an example of what she does when things go right. 36 is showing the scale of what she did, and a taste of the tactics and so on. 37 is showing what happens when it goes wrong. I suspect by actively saying this in the notes, this is where a certain stripe of reader will try and work out what the other two bits of information are, but relax, we’re nearly there and we’ll tell you soon enough.

I had drafts of this when the past sequence was longer, but I cut it to the bone. After last issue, I wanted to spend the majority of the issue in the present day. If I could do it in 2 pages, that’d give me 18 pages for the present day.

In my longer drafts, I played with having the opening being 2 pages – so the falling apart starts on a page turn – and the reincarnation was over two pages, so featured a more active freak out that the sensory deprivation is over. Even with space, I’d have likely lost it – scrambling and that kind of panic in comics eats up panels, and isn’t always effective. Cutting it to the three panels, showing the highly naturalistic magical appearance, and a single panel of the semi-comatose Minerva, clearly having been through hell.

(I’m going with Minerva as a name, as it’s the name we know her by.)

A few words about what Matt did in colours – this just makes me want to go on holiday. Just weird and sad and horrible. Also, a note about “freaking out not always working in comics”? An expression like that does at the bottom of the page.

And then we have the black pages.

So, we’re trying to show complete sensory deprivation for ninety years. How do you do it? I’ve seen people do deprivation comics, and they do it with a panel. For obvious reasons, because by definition nothing happens. In a standard comics world, we would do something like drop a CAP at the start of the page when she’s back…

CAP: I SPENT THE LAST 90 YEARS IN NOTHINGNESS.

And then perhaps, if we really wanted to hand hold, on panel 2 add a…

CAP: THEN I WAS BACK.

But we’re not a normal comic. Can we try and to show not tell? Try and get people to have the sense of what that actually is, and force a confrontation of the reality of it (or at least a fraction of the reality of it). Of course we can. As I joke in the back, if we were feeling really fancy, we’d have done 90 black pages.

As the issue was crammed with more interstitials than usual, there was no way this could possibly fit inside a normal sized issue. So we upped the issue size and, equally obviously, kept the price the same, because we’re not complete shits.

Now, we’re aware that some people won’t get it. Some people may not have realised, despite the fact we’ve done it all the way through, that we’ve never done less than 20 pages of comics. We’ve often done more.

We actually put more of a tell than we normally would, in that we mention in the backmatter about how this actually cost us more money than usual, which we ate. Our general go-to motivation is to try and give people stuff they’re not expecting, make them think about the form (and structure in life) from every possible angle. Yes, we’re over four years into the comic, and we’re still pushing stuff where we can.

There was a lot more here (as in, about a thousand words) but I’ll spare you – fundamentally, I was fascinated that even with me trying to leave more space for the readers in this final year, we still do those little pushes, which is a symptom of a streak of control-freakery. Thinking about that and my feelings around it finally made me have the realisation I mentioned above – specifically, a “Oh – I know what part of me goes into Morrigan.” All the characters in WicDiv are me, I say. She was an exception. I felt I was mining a lot of things with her, but not necessary myself. I was always scared of her, but she was me all along. Deleting the above is in part about recognising my own control-freakery. I’m increasingly suspicious about these Writer Notes. Yes, they’re about sharing and talking and craft, but I’m also aware it’s at least in part about not wanting to let go. I have to get over that. I’ll be surprised if I do Writer Notes like this for any future project.

So yeah. That was a journey.

Re: Page of blackness. Would I go back and not do it? Of course. I think it’s a neat idea, and fun. It’s the emotional mess that is me that I worry about.

15

NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF is a lift from Adam Ant’s ‘Prince Charming’ (whose video take on Cinderella is actually 100% a WicDiv origin sequence, which makes me think of the edited Disney Cinderella gif with the exploding head. Cinderella is very WicDiv.

Anyway – a lift from ‘Prince Charming’, but perverted and turned very literal. Minerva is evidently afraid of a literal nothing.

16-17

As I said last time, I decided to concentrate on Baph’s confession (and Laura’s reveal) last issue, so I had moved a bunch of plot beats from there to here. I knew I had 18 pages, so more space to work. I obviously played with the idea of doing the Cassandra arrest this issue, but realised I could do the reveal from Baph’s text at the end of last issue, to give an actual minor cliffhanger. As such, this means that we have to explain what happened here. How to do that?

Well, obviously we could do it with just Baph and Persephone chatting, but that seems like dead pages. I had the idea of doing it from the outside, to move the focus away from the pantheon out into the world. We don’t get many moments of perspective any more (though I suspect they’ll come back hard in the last arc) so this was useful.

It’s also another example of particularly pointed glaring at fan behaviour. There is a lot of casual cruelty here.

The scene they describe is literally Cassandra’s Cassandra moment. We see a little footage of this next issue.

I originally wanted this sequence to be at Elephant & Castle, as its curling mess of tunnels struck me as a good pace for such a confrontation. There’s no escalators though, which creates a few limits, and I realised it’d likely be better to return to Highbury & Islington.

You’ll also note the other thing this sequence does – which is orientate the reader with the layout of the station. When Morrigan and Baphomet actually fight, they go the opposite direction to where these two walk. It’s a fairly common action film trick – travel through the setting so you know where stuff is, and then blow it up.

I love the pinky purple shirt here. Nice call, Matt. If I wore colours, you could dress me.

18-19

This issue, despite the space, is cut really tight. I look at this and wonder if I’d have cut it a different way to get more pages to use later.

Back to the Underground, limited backgrounds, handy when you’re heading towards a visual showcase like the last half of the issue, both in terms of workload, and also to create a dark visual which is then exploded.

“Can everyone stop dying? It’s getting really fucking depressing” has been in the Baph dialogue file ever since issue 1, I think. “How to get ahead in show business” was one of the titles I played with for the end of issue 33’s interstitial, but went with Talking Heads. Clearly, it’s a very Baph line.

The Fancy Pager, as seen back in Imperial Phase II when Dio gave it him.

It’s good to see these two talking. It’s very strong moves by Jamie, with lots of tiny nods. The “why I like him” sequence is very human.

20-21

This is one I feel I could have cut to a page if I really wanted to, but when Minerva is only lightly in play this issue, giving her more screen time seemed worthwhile. Space = Meaning remember. Plus it means showing more of the heads as well. See what I mean? I could have cut it, sure, but I know why I didn’t.

Like the lighting here as well. Matt does great stuff.

I’ll say this – Minerva has been a delight to write this arc. I mean, horrible as well. I’m amazed at her casual villainy, and how she turns a scene. I realised early in the arc this is basically me flexing the Kid Loki muscles, in a different kind of workout.

Another text-based scene. I’m thinking about how we use text messages so much in this book. Hmm.

The last expression with the needle is golden.

22-23-24

And the gears start turning on this awful machine.

Second panel is a little like the “Morrigan merges from behind shot from issue 5 and issue 12”. I’d have made it a 1:1 copy of it, but it’s a space-jealous approach.

Persephone removed, leaving us with Baphomet and Morrigan.

From now on is an odd one. It’s what I can only think of as a set-piece. A series of beats we’ve been chewing over and moving around and talking about forever. The road is set in issue three. In anything like this, it’s complicated. When I talk about WicDiv becoming messier as it heads into its final year, it’s things like this.

Want to talk about structure? I don’t normally do this, but it strikes me as a useful focus.

As far as I can see, the rest of the issue is primarily wrestling with three main plot threads, to different degrees. There’s more, but I think they’re the main ones.

Firstly, and probably least, is Baphomet. It’s a little early to explicitly name his hamartia, but throughout Baphomet’s failings are primarily responses to his feelings around death, and as a sub-set to that, his relationship to violence. He’s killed accidentally. We’ve seen him try to kill repeatedly. Is Baphomet actually capable of cold-blooded murder?

Secondly, there’s Morrigan. I think Dionysus nailed Morrigan back in Imperial Phase. Dio wants the best for people. Morrigan thinks she knows what’s best for people. When people do not skew to her narrative, she turns frustrated, angry and uses increasingly immoral and abusive tactics to make people obey her. People make her so angry, because if only they would play their part, and do exactly what she says, it’d be better for everyone. She sees herself as the good person who knows what makes people happy. In the most basic terms, she’s a control freak who has a story she wants everyone to conform to.

Thirdly, there’s Baphomet and Morrigan’s relationship. Which is more complicated than I could put into a paragraph, but is mainly about the two lines of their bullshit intersecting. It can be compelling. At a distance, it looks like a gothic romance. That’s what Morrigan thinks it is. That’s what Morrigan needs it to be. She’s the heroine. Baph’s the hero. He just keeps on fucking up his lines. Morrigan does not understand or agree that her relationship is abusive, and does not understand that she’s using Baph as a narcissistic prop to satisfy her own needs.

While it’s important for all of them, I think only one of these three threads climaxes here.

Anyway – this sets up. We slow down, and Baphomet actually realises what’s happening. Baphomet, on some level, believes he deserves his treatment, as much as he chafes and pulls away. When he sees what Morrigan is capable of doing to someone else, he gets a moment of clarity.

Badb, the symbol of all of Morrigan’s frustrations when her self-image is questioned, arrives.

God, Page 24, depresses me. It’s such a stark page by Jamie and Matt. Everything slows down. Big panels. Big expressions.

25-30

When we originally conceived this, I thought it may be actually the whole issue, and do this, juxtaposed with a whole look at their relationship. In the end, I didn’t have space, and likely didn’t like it either. It’d have ended up juxtaposing more violence with sex, which I find distasteful and cheap.

Instead, it’s written in a Marvel Method structure. I write the fight sequence and the flashbacks in parallel – there’s a suggested solution to it, which Jamie went another direction on. I think it was basically a column on the right.

The original draft had more panels, and went on further in the flashback to the morning after. We then played with doing more periods – I had a version where it’d run through the entire length of Baph and Morri’s relationship (I even put the whole thing in a document). But, as I was writing that, I realised the best solution was to just crop to the initial meeting in a shitty university club.

Yes, there was dialogue to this exchange. I may find a home for it before the end of WicDiv.

I mean – that’s something odd about writing. For something like this, you generate so much stuff to even find what’s going to go on the page. Fraction was talking about this in the latest Image+, in terms of the stuff that doesn’t go on the page. Chrissy occasionally talks about comic writing having a lot to do with poetry, in terms of being about intensifying meaning into as small a space as possible.

Jamie and Matt do astounding things in this sequence. It’s a fight sequence, and in genre comics, fight sequences take the place that songs do in musicals. Jamie chooses his moments, and Matt finds a way to navigate between the dancing timelines. Things like the third panel on 25, with the uncanny greens of Morrigan and Baph’s red bisecting the panel says a lot. The divisions between the two in Jamie’s art is also fascinating.

Christ – the mess of people in the first panel, and what happens to bodies when they get in the way.

I had a draft where Baph making this a nod to Sandman more explicit, but cut it.

In the flashback sequence, Cam saying something and Morrigan wincing, and me not needing to say that clearly Cam is making a crap joke is pleasing. It obviously is Jamie, but it also speaks to the characters. You know exactly how the first flirtation would go.

Jamie asked me “Does the fight have to be on an escalator?” and I basically said no, but… escalators are liminal spaces between the underworld and the surface world. They just seem loaded. And just as importantly, it’s a place I just haven’t seen nearly as much action as I’d like in genre comics. It’s a space that many city people cross daily, and so will be familiar with, and so will perhaps think about as they go about. Jamie got it. Thanks, Jamie.

Morrigan as crow-beast is horrible.

Various people have asked what the notes are. It’s ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’. I think I wrote ‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise)’ in the script. I think Jamie did it as you can get the notes right with ‘Black Parade’, which is a good call. The ‘I’m not okay’ was a callback to issue seven, but MCR generally is good.

Top of page 28 is another one for Matt – just how he works the long horizontal space.

End of Page 29 – Baphomet has his moment. He could end this now. And he finds he can’t.

I don’t know about you, but – for all his posture – I don’t think Baphomet can kill anyone, and certainly not Morrigan. You can compare and contrast with Baal, if you wish. They’re very much the bookends of certain forms of performed masculinity.

I wrote this as an impaling kind of move – but due to the panel shape, you can’t show that, and capture the expression simultaneously. Instead, Jamie frames it as a swing, which does the same job.

30 – Baphomet may not be able to, but Morrigan certainly can.

This is horrible too, though Matt’s colouring makes it a little more distancing. I suspect if I did have an extra page, I’d have used it here, to both make Baph’s death clearer, and spend more space on Morrigan’s realisation of what she’s done.

31

This works, but I suspect for the trade I may change this interstitial to Baphomet . Baphomet’s symbol is a skull here, but a little more stressing would likely help.

Title here is an early Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds single.

32-34

Persephone’s captions are back – the stumble through an underworld path to find them made me think of the scene in issue seven, so the howl of the Morrigan, then comedy, now something else, is nodded to.

I love how Jamie and Matt have moved the mood from supernatural to hard disaster movie realism instantly. This is a tonal snap. The bodies, the people lying down. This is really horrible.

I suspect “Tragedy gives ‘clusterfuck’ ideas above its station” is one of my harder nods towards intent.

And back to Marian, the heroine of her gothic novel, confronted with undeniable evidence that she’s a murdering monster who absolutely was driven by her own selfish desires. She denies it anyway, finding a way to persuade herself it’s not true.

No, she’s the hero. She’s going to bring Baphomet back at the cost of her own life. That must prove she’s the good person, right?

Morrigan is continuing her abuse the only way she can, while preserving her all-important idea that she was the good person.

So, of the three stories I mention, the one which climaxes is Morrigan’s solo plot. She rode her own story off the edge of a cliff rather than face the reality of what she has done. The other two, and the other ones, carry on, especially Baph and Morri’s relationship. Baph has to live with this.

When I was first explaining this to C, it had the desired effect. I then talked about my actual concern with it – that Marian’s too convincing. Some people will take it as a “She loved him really” beat, and could then be taken as Abusers Love Their Victims Really. C got it, but noted, it’s just too good to not do. I agree. I think it’s one of the best scenes in WicDiv, and I had to hit it as hard as we could, and then go on to deal with the aftermath of it.

See you next issue.