Spoilers, obv.

“Second verse, same as the first.”

I’ve talked about the origins of WicDiv a few times. As in, where I got the original idea from. However, in terms of constructing its initial vision, it grew while I was doing Young Avengers, and solidified in early 2014. It came from a period which I euphemistically describe as a heightened emotional intensity. As in, I was a hot fucking mess. I had far too much stuff to fit inside this year, and it’s bulged occasionally, hot metal about to rupture its veins. There’s stuff that I wanted that was strimmed away, but it’s mostly in there. I think I’m actually happier with the second year – it’s just as intense, but it’s a little more at ease and I don’t have the intellectual corsetary of THIS VISION.



The short version of it is that dual structure, where we spend the first year in these two cycles. We do this to Luci. Then we do this to Laura. And we dovetail back and forth, and create this whirl, by which point we’ve created what I tend to describe as the Drama Engine. All the characters now have a stakes we understand, and they’ll go tearing into each other. Yes, we have someone who seems to be the villain, but that’s only half the problem.

But yeah. Faust act is Faust act. Fandemonium is the rest of the Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, with the remaining tickets being found. Deal with disappointment. Oh, there was a final golden ticket. Oh, oh, shit.

We were pleased with this one. Everyone did well. There’s a lot of craft by everyone here, as I think people can tell by the response.

Anyway – let’s do this.

Jamie’s Cover:

I think we were originally thinking of doing this subversion of our own status quo well down the line, but we realised it sat much better at the punchline to the first year before we move off and do something else. Works worryingly well, shall we say.

Fiona’s Cover:

Fiona’s success across the last few years have been incredibly heartwarming. She’s got great style, use of colour, mood, romance. She asked if she’d made Inanna too angry here. I thought it fine. I mean, there’s a time to be angry, and this would be it.

1

Specifically this is Hilly Fields in Brockley, looking East. Laura would have walked from Brockley Station, and for some reason decided to head across the park. It’s dark here. I suspect she would have probably not gone this way in a normal state of mind. Except, evidently, she’s not exactly in a normal place. She is totally heightened Emotional Intensity.

Jamie and I went and walked the route and took reference photos for this. I think we’re putting some of them in the trade, but they may have dropped.



The Cemetry is the one I walked around before starting the first page of WicDiv. I was listening to Laura. Yes, None More Goth.

Only colour notes were adding the lights to the towers – which, of course, Matt didn’t know about. London is interesting.

Played with the lettering and pacing a lot here. That moving captions either side of Laura in the last panel, to match with the KLLKs was a late tweak, but a useful one I think. Gained us the silent panel previously, which helps pacing, and an interesting delay.

2-3

Another of the page expansion tactics. This is one page of content expanded into two. We do a lot of it this issue – we actually fill the whole comic with content via it – but it’s in a far less intrusive way than issue 8. You can pretty much see everything we’ve learned from the last year of comics in this one. Working out how to get space and page turns (and what page turns needed to be protected) was absolutely key.

Why not do this in one page? Because Ananke on page four is a page turn worth keeping. We need to create a meaningful cliffhanger to be excited for people to want to come back to Laura after cutting away to Inanna/Baphomet.

Have I ever mentioned that I do what Laura do? Clicking my fingers when walking is one of my nervous gestures. Well, now I have. My reasons are very different from Laura’s.

To state the obvious – the black panels in a six panel grid are the first of the issue’s many call backs to issue 5.

Page 4

Space = Meaning, etc.

Okay – I’ve talked about the dual cycle of the first eleven issues. This issue also has its own internal back and forth. We need to both intro Laura and her state of mind, and leave her in an interesting place. You could do it quicker than the space I gave it, but I suspect it’d lack meaning.

Page 5

Title last seen in Laura and Luci’s exchange in issue 4. With its other answer response, you may suspect this may be one of the key little refrains of the book. You know when we did what we did to Leah in JIM, and I started noting that words like “Forever” and “Change” will probably be underlined in everyone’s copies by now? Well, this is fairly obviously one of the core things the book is about.

Have I actually said where I got the phrase from? I don’t think I said it last time. If I did, I won’t repeat it. In time, I think.

Slight Return is a Hendrix nod.

Page 6

The Baphomet/Inanna sequence was tricky in terms of space management. It needs to be big and as showy as the Luci/Baal/Sakhmet fight in 5, but we have much more to do. As such, we’re really trying to work out how to cram stuff in.

This is actually sort of inspired by Stoke Newington Unitarian Church. In the WicDiv universe, it isn’t actually a church, and has a very different history, which we’ll get through in time. If you look who actually went to the Church back in the day, I suspect you’ll probably get a clue.

So, no, don’t go to there in real life and expect to see an orgy. Or, in fact, this layout.

Kate Leth has been asking for actual kissing for eleven issues. I guess this one is for her.

I think it’s interesting how Jamie has shot stuff. We’re an M rated book. We totally could show a lot more actual nudity than we do here. I do like the couple doing it doggy style on the far left.

Matt is doing wondrous things with the colouring here. That pink!

Page 7-8

First way of stretching the pages – only half the page is “real” panels. The other half are repeats with a zoom. In effect, it’s five panels a page, with three repurposes material. Clearly, this is still more than just two pages (and probably more in terms of work from Jamie) but I give some pages which are deliberately less demanding later. Jamie was fine with it. I had other ideas if it was too much – but I’m glad we was cool with it, not least as I’d have had to rework the whole pacing of the page turns again. Point being: it’s a dialogue between the team.

It was on this page when the floating Baphomet head realised that it may be some late-90s residual RED MEAT influence showing.

The sudden glow of a symbol in the last panel on page 8 is basically us doing a Spider-sense. There’s more than a little of Spider-man to Inanna’s fighting style too.

Page 9

The Baphomet colouring was really radical, but we’re not sure it quite worked as we wanted in print. We’ve tweaked some bits for the trade, though the dance between Baphomet and Inanna’s colours is still full on.

Worth noting, that the rest of the fans have got out. Phew. Baphomet isn’t a mass murderer.

Page 10

This is some of my favourite action storytelling from Jamie (and Matt, for that matter). I saw I had a page for the main “battle” part and winced, as I wasn’t sure how much of the balletic nature of the fight. I saw them flipping around the place, the fight-as-dance-routine brought to the fore. So I packed a lot in, and basically through my hands up in a “Hey – David Aja makes it work. We should give it a shot.”

Jamie nails it, for me. Look at use of storytelling and space. Those first four panels take something that’s really quite odd and esoteric, and show the emotions. I mean, we hadn’t seen Mad Max at this point, but basically that’s what Mad Max does for two hours.

This was written Marvel Method. Bits of dialogue were in that, but a lot of the arrangement was done when Jamie did a page.

Page 11

This sequence was at least in part inspired by dancing in a church. It was to Like A Prayer. I didn’t actually realise the Crucifix part of it when I thought it up. That came to me on me as I was writing it, in a weirdly gothic melodrama…

Page 12

And then I realised I had to invert it too. NONE MORE GOTH.

I sort of blinked at myself after I had the idea. This really couldn’t be more the product of a catholic boy who read the Realm Of Chaos Warhammer manual at an impressionable age.

In passing, Crucified by Army Of Lovers is very much an Inanna track, and every time I listened to it, I was thinking about writing this scene.

I saw one reader actually say that this sign reminded them a little of Kid Loki’s final speech in JIM – Pyrrhic victory. That’s explicitly the kind of the expression I called for in the script.

Page 13

You may note that this isn’t a page turn. Ideally it would be, but that’d have caused more problems later. I tried to work out how to do page 14 and 15 in one page (so 16-17 could be on the page turn), and had to sacrifice so much stuff that was required. You moved too quickly from the chaos of Baphomet and Inanna, etc. Pacing. Pacing.

Call back to issue 1, obv.

Page 14-15

And silence. We really do need these two pages.

Yes, with how the story goes, Ananke really is being a monster here.

First panel of page 15 is a device we do quite a bit in WicDiv – that full-tier single image, at the top of a page. We come back to it time and time again, and it’s normally to stress a key line. Space is meaning, and if you’re working on an eight panel grid, that (relatively speaking) is much more powerful.

Honestly, I think Sex Criminals was in my head quite a bit in Fandeomonium. We stuck to our traditional eight panel, but trying to find more, smaller moments was an underlying urge.

Page 16-17

And we get the falling sequence again, with a different colour take. Matt and Jamie went back and forth over the colour choices here – the poppies are an especially great touch, I think. Jamie was mailing me ideas when I was out and about, which is always a strange thing to get. “Hey, how about vines?”

Hmm. Memory is foggy for this for some reason.

Page 18

And hello, Persephone.

Her design pulled from a few places. I was thinking about Sky Ferreira, whose album was one of the bigger influences on Laura (All Sky songs on the playlist are Laura songs). MIA was in there, in terms of art school girls in London. Siouxsie Sioux I nodded to too.

And then when we were under way, FKA Twigs emerged. South London mixed-race girl with a background that wasn’t 100 miles away from Laura’s. An alien sex and death aesthetic. As I occasionally note in my tracks of the year list, Pop Music Provides.

Yes, Laura’s look was foreshadowed in her cosplay. Yes, Laura’s cigarette is finally burning. Yes, she does scrub up well.

We tried various colour schemes, with Jamie making the call on the reds.

Really pleased with this. Having to reblog all the fan art as links is killing me.

Page 19

White out page, as first seen in the first issue of The Singles Club.

The WicDiv folks have been chewing over Persephone in the tags, which is always good to see. Kayla Bird seems to be the center of the frenetic theorising. She’s also the one who’s been brave enough to dive into the White Goddess. No, she’s not wrong with pulling out those quotes, but it’s worth remembering the White Goddess is a very long, obtuse book which includes many, many arguments. I don’t really blame Cass for not realising which specific bit she should have been worried about.

Though it is funny.

That she turned up quite regularly in “If I was a god, I would be…” conversation also made me smile.

Page 20

Oh god. The turn of the knife in the “I can’t wait to tell Inanna! I hope he isn’t dead or anything! That’ll be terrible!”

:(

Page 21

This and the next page are abstractly the “easier” pages I planned to make up for those extra panels earlier in the comic. Of course, easier is relative. It’s a simple couple of pages in terms of layout, number of panels, its perspective, and a single slow pan, but Jamie has so much acting to do here, it’s not as if there’s many artists working in comics who could have pulled it off. I’m very proud of the fucker.

Equally, there’s a shitload of work put on Matt in terms of telling the story through the intensity in the colour (we started a little more reserved and amped this up, as this really is the most rhapsodic we’ve ever gone. Laura’s been on a long road to be here.)

Regarding the earlier page turn conversation, you can see this is one that I had to do everything to keep. It’s more important than anything else.

Page 22

Yeah.

Sorry.

Page 23

Once again, maintaining the page turn. Once again, with the call back. Once again, we return. What was more important? Which came first? Ideally, it’s impossible for the reader to tell. I’m not sure if I even remember.

Page 24

You know, I’m beginning to suspect that Ananke’s motives may not be entirely benevolent.

This page arrived when I was in bed. We were watching netflix on C’s laptop, and a DROPBOX UPDATE appeared in the top right. I grabbed my tablet, and dug it out, and this was the last thing I saw before going to bed. Brr.

Chatting to Dan Hart of Need To Consume before the issue dropped, he said that he thought there would actually be no body count this issue, because doing a stump on the cover would be a spoiler, and that’s not really our style. He would be right. If there was one corpse at the end.

At least one reason why the structure of the issue has been a shocker isn’t just that we did this to our lead. It’s that when we see the church explode, there’s a narrative assumption that Oh, It’s Inanna. From then on, it’s that rollercoaster of positive and negative beats, going from the height of the series to the backstab.

Page 25-26

This is, strictly speaking a double-negative beat, which is something I suspect you have to be careful about. Go google that kind of thing. Here, I think it’s necessary. This is the ashes in the mouth moment. Knowing that this was going to happen to Laura’s parents at the end of the arc probably in retrospect makes the reason for some of the work we did with them in this arc clearer.

Strong dressing gown looks from the Wilsons too.

There’s a tweak we’re doing on the trade on the colouring here, changing the flames to be red rather than the pink. As pink is so iconically connected with Inanna, having pink flames could lead people to jump all sorts of wrong theories here. When there’s enough to get confused about in WicDiv which is intentional, we like to minimise things which aren’t. Not that I’ve seen anyone pick up on it.

PAGE 27

And the second half of that key phrase.

Due to a last minute design miscommunication the Inanna skull was removed from this, and his symbol placed back there. Jamie caught it just before it went to print. This issue is brutal, but that would be just cruel.

PAGE 28

Credits! Again!

Page 29

And what’s next from everyone. First trade out, second trade is out July 1st. Issue 12 is also out on July 1st, which means people could abstractly pick up the trade and jump right aboard. It’s the first of the guest issues, with the main story from Kate Brown (who you may remember from issue 6 of Young Avengers). Here’s her alternate cover…

This probably makes what I mean by the Spotlight aspect of the book more key. Yes, it’s about Inanna – but it’s about everyone’s grief in response to Inanna.

No, Baal does not take it well.

I’ll save stories about Kate’s own grief over drawing this issue for next time. She was in tears drawing the above.

As well as the main story, Jamie and Matt will be doing a back up story in all the guest issues, featuring the cover star. So, yes, more Inanna. That knife twists so much it’s basically attached to someone spinning in their own grade.

The response to this one was overwhelming. I think you’ll be interested in where we take you in the second year.

Thanks for reading.