There's a saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, a poetic way of noting that it's difficult, perhaps even ill-advised, to translate an auditory medium to a silent page. But that's exactly what writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie have been doing in the world of comic books for nearly a decade, with music-themed series like Phonogram, a cult favorite comic about music as magic, and The Wicked and the Divine, a title where pop stars are literal gods.

"We quite like making things hard for ourselves," says Gillen. "Especially when we started, we were arrogant: 'This is impossible to do, let's try it.'"

It seems to have worked; The Wicked and the Divine not only earned three Eisner Award nominations last year, but attracted the attention of Hollywood, where it was recently optioned for television.

But the most recent issue of the series takes on a challenge just as daunting: detailing the horrors of online harassment, and how misogyny circumscribes the lives of women in the public eye, whether they're walking down the street or performing in front of millions.

The comic, which recently published its second volume, follows a pantheon of 12 gods who take human form every 90 years and transform their teenage hosts into charismatic icons with the power to change the world who burn bright but die two years later. In the modern era that means that deities like Amaterasu, Lucifer, and Baal have become pop stars, many of whom evoke shades of Rihanna, Björk, and Florence Welch.

Most of the characters in the comic are women, and the most recent issue focuses on Tara, a masked character whom we know almost nothing about. She's one of the modern-day gods, but the primary detail attached to her is the knee-jerk catchphrase tossed off at her by the other characters and the public at large: "Fucking Tara."

Image Comics

In the latest issue, we get a glimpse of what this sort of casual cruelty looks like when directed en masse at a visible woman online—and it's an ugly thing to behold. There's a devastating two-page spread designed to look like an iPad rotated on its side, displaying a Twitter feed of Tara's mentions. This is what Tara sees, a cumulative look at what the world tells her about herself, and it's an ugly thing to behold.

By design, the only thing that the audience has learned about Tara until this moment is that she is to be dismissed and mocked; like so many women in media and online, she is a target, a catchphrase, and a hashtag—not a person.

"In a real way, by this point people have been talked into a hate mob against a character they don’t know anything about," says Gillen. "Many WicDiv fans are complicit with the hate mob, and that's kind of the point: It's very easy to make people join hate mobs."

Drawing From Real World Harassment

It’s a phenomenon that has been elevated into the public eye often over the last year, particularly within the world of videogames. Gillen, who worked as a videogame critic before his shift into comic book writing, knows many of the targets of recent harassment campaigns against women online and has spent a lot of time reading the horrible social media attacks hurled at them.

"I had to sit down and spend an entire afternoon [with] those things, and I researched them," says Gillen. "I let that poison into my head because I wanted to be aware of what people were going through. Digging into that pit is not fun to do. I know that's nothing compared to experiencing it, but it was hard. It was a traumatic issue to do."

The comic also doesn't depict harassment as a problem exclusive to famous women. In another scene, for example, we see Tara walking down the street at age 11 as a car of men shouts sexual obscenities at her. "There are multiple statements in that issue," says Gillen. "Many of the works of art I love are saying several things simultaneously. And that is what life is like: if you boll anything down to a message on a card, it's not really saying anything."

Image Comics

Multiple meanings come up a lot when Gillen talks about Phonogram as well, his first collaboration with McKelvie and the book that helped make his name in the comics industry. First published in 2006, it imagined a world where music was quite literally magic, and fans called "phonomancers" used Britpop songs from the '90s as conduits for supernatural powers. It was, as Gillen says, "a weird fucking book," and while it never achieved mainstream popularity, it became a cult hit with a devoted following.

It's often been observed that Gillen looks a bit like *Phonogram'*s protagonist David Kohl, and he readily admits that there are clear autobiographical elements in both Phonogram and the The Wicked and the Divine. For years, he was an prominent critic who wrote about music and videogames—even coining the term "new games journalism"—before shifting into comic books, where he started creating entertainment of his own and made his way from cult indie titles to scripting flagship books like Uncanny X-Men for Marvel.

"Phonogram is about my 20s; it's about the consumption of art and how that changes you. It's aggressively not interested in musicians," says Gillen. "But The Wicked and the Divine is about my 30s. It's about that happened to me since Phonogram came out—that transition from somebody who is both a fan and a critic to a creator. And how you adapt when you get in that space. And why the hell would anyone want to be a writer or artist or musician in any way whatsoever?"

The newest volume of Phonogram hits shelves today, nearly six years after the last one, and almost a decade after the original book debuted. It's a bit odd now for Gillen and McKelvie to look back at their earlier work for reference, in part because so much time has passed. "If you ask me and Jamie to sign a copy of Phonogram, we do this great thing where we start flipping through it and mocking ourselves," laughs Gillen. "'Oh, isn't that a nice big caption!'"

They've changed personally as well as creatively; the first issue of Phonogram dropped when Gillen was 31, and now he's rounding the bend to 40. An earlier issue featured a character named Emily Aster declaring that "nostalgia is an emotion for people with no future." The new volume, The Immaterial Girl, not only casts a glance back at the classic MTV era of music videos, but returns to find Aster growing older and feeling the nostalgia she once derided in others starting to creep in.

Cosplay for Gods That Don't Exist

There are aspects of The Wicked and the Divine that measure the passage of time as well, though a bit more quietly. Gillen notes that most of the parents we meet in the book are now closer to his age, and he describes his 17-year-old protagonist Laura—who worships the pop star pantheon and would do almost anything to become one of them—as being both a bit like his child, and a bit like someone he used to be.

"She's a fan who wants to move from one world to the other," says Gillen.

And now that Gillen has completed his own transformation from fan to successful creator, the stories he tells about fandom do something strangely recursive and almost magical: They inspire fandoms of their own, simply by being told.

"The fan culture around each book is a pretty intense mirroring of what the book itself is," says Gillen. Where Phonogram developed a small but tight-knit scene of fans, the audience for The Wicked and the Divine is appropriately bigger and brighter, demonstrating their love with everything from tattoos and cosplay. Gillen says they've explicitly told readers to imagine the god they would become in the pantheon, and now some fans show up at conventions cosplaying as those personalized deities.

"We're almost trying to coach people into thinking about themselves a bit like Laura," says Gillen. "I love that people have started to cosplay these gods that don't exist."

There's something almost parental in the way Gillen describes The Wicked and the Divine. He speaks of it as a combination of his and McKelvie's sensibilities, but also a way of expressing all the things they've experienced over the last decade. It may even be a way of teaching a bit about what they've learned.

"By the time we get to the end, I would hope that I'll have imparted whatever wisdom the last 40 years has taught me," says Gillen. "And I hope there's some 17-year-old who's going to read it all, and come out the other end and create [something] awesome."