Well… let’s see… where to start–the issue is two and a half scenes. The first has our protagonist, the human girl detective investigating on Lucifer’s behalf, with her sidekick interviewing Baal. He’s evil but irresistible. Only it’s not really an interview scene, it’s to get the protagonist into see all the gods and ask them for help with Lucifer’s wrongful imprisonment.
McKelvie makes a very interesting choice with the gods’ hangout chamber. It looks like Tron. Not a little like Tron, exactly like it. Only the protagonist is too young to make the reference.
So then there is a lot of talking and a lot of banter from the various gods and none of it’s good. Gillen spends almost half the issue on exposition he could summarize in a paragraph.
The second scene is the protagonist and Lucifer. It’s even slighter.
It’s all about the gimmick, not the protagonist.
B-
CREDITS
Writer, Kieron Gillen; artist, Jamie McKelvie; colorist, Matthew Wilson; letterer, Clayton Cowles; editor, Chrissy Williams; publisher, Image Comics.
Something is a little off this issue. Gillen has maybe run out of establishing stuff to do and he’s getting underway with the actual story. This young woman investigating the gods and just happening to see some amazing stuff like a god-fight.
The last few pages are mostly text. It’s decent text, so Gillen can kind of get away with the hard cliffhanger and not actually have to do much. He doesn’t really do much in this issue all together, except write really good characters. He has his protagonist discovering the whole returned god thing as she goes along, which is great since the reader’s doing the same thing. It’s not heavy lifting.
I read a few scenes in The Wicked + The Divine too fast and got confused about whether Jamie McKelvie was drawing boys who look like girls or girls who look like boys. It’s the latter but, dang, was it confusing for a page or so.