Ever since she was a baby, Zuli has lived in the tree that holds the souls of dead birds. It’s an idyllic existence — surrounded by beauty and the love of her spirit parents (and the concern of a slightly fussy alive owl called Frowly), she spends her days clambering around the tree and chatting with the souls of dead birds before they head off to be born again the lives of new bodies. When the souls of birds stop coming home to the tree, Zuli is determined to set out into the world to find out why. If you’ve…
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tl;dr, this is the sweetest book I’ve read all year, and I see no prospect of any book knocking it out of that spot in the back half of the year, and you absolutely must read it After numerous sightings of Mariko Tamaki’s latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I broke down and bought it from an indie bookstore near the beach. Endcaps work! Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is about a girl called Freddy whose extremely cool sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, keeps breaking up with her. No matter how many times Laura Dean proves herself to…
Leave a CommentMy project of reading 15% comics this year proceeds apace, and I have taken the opportunity to catch up on The Wicked + the Divine. One of the issues (ha ha ISSUES geddit it’s a COMICS PUN oh we have fun, my friends) with following a longterm comic is that you never feel resolved. There are always ongoing story lines, and you are waiting for years and years to see how any of the plots turn out. So I am happy to bring you, the discerning comics reader, a good jumping-off point for The Wicked + the Divine. Stand by.
The premise of The Wicked + the Divine is a little strange, so bear with me. Once every ninety years, twelve gods become manifest on earth, taking over the bodies of twelve humans. They have a variety of supernatural powers; they are loved and famous; and within two years, they all will die. Our protagonist is teenager Laura Wilson, who wants nothing more than to be around the Pantheon at any cost. Also, someone is murdering gods.
If you are interested in The Wicked + the Divine based on what I’ve just said, but nervous about the comics problem I mentioned in the first paragraph, I can wholeheartedly recommend the first four volumes of this title. The fourth volume, Rising Action, wraps up the major storylines that we’ve been following since the first issue, and then you can be on break until the next arc wraps up. (You probably won’t want to, though, because this comic is really fucking good.)
Writer Kieron Gillen and author Jamie McElvie have worked together on a number of projects before, including a run on Young Avengers, and they’re a well-oiled machine. The third volume of WicDiv has guest artists (presumably to cut McElvie a break because good God drawing a monthly comic seems like a lot of work), and they are all talented people, but there’s just a really great marriage of writing and art when these two dudes are working together. The character design is great, and each volume opens with cameo pictures of the major players (which I always appreciate because I’m a goldfish for faces) so you won’t forget who’s who.
(Has anyone here read Phonogram? Would I like it?)
If you do decide to continue past the fourth trade paperback, there’s a special issue mocked up like a magazine that is just a delight. Gillen and McElvie got a series of real journalists to conduct interviews with Gillen in character as various WicDic characters, then write up profiles with those characters. So Laurie Penny interviews Woden, Ezekiel Kweku interviews Amaterasu, and so on. One of the things I love about the comics format is that creators have room to do special issues like this where they take a break from the main story and just play around with characters or worldbuilding.
tl;dr, it’s been a minute since I checked in with The Wicked + the Divine, and I am thrilled to report that it’s still one of the weirdest, best-plotted comics out there. Much recommended.
A spoiler here follows under the cut.
Leave a CommentIs everyone here familiar with the NPR Book Concierge? The most magical and glorious of end-of-year book lists? And I say that as someone who loves end-of-year book lists and never, ever tires of reading through them. The NPR Book Concierge is the The Millions Book Preview of end-of-year book lists. I get so many book recs from it that it is a Problem. Among them this past year was Gengoroh Tagame’s My Brother’s Husband. It’s about a guy called Yaichi who lives in Tokyo with his daughter, Kana. But their lives change when a large, bearded, lumberjacklike Canadian called…
26 CommentsUsing a Marvel Unlimited gift code from my beautiful pal Memory (thanks Memory!), I finally read Marjorie Liu’s run on X-23, just in time to know a bit about the character before watching OLD MAN LOGAN MOVIE. The run went through several artists, my favorite of which obviously was Sana Takeda, with Phil Noto as a close second. If you’re not au courant with what was happening to the X-Men around the time this series came out (early 2010s), there’s kind of a lot to catch up on, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend this series as a starting place for…
4 CommentsMy DC project is officially launched! Not only has 19% of my reading been comics so far this year (though it’s early days), but I have also now completed half of my New Year’s Resolution re: DC comics, which was to read two substantial runs on two different DC comics. First up: Gail Simone’s Batgirl. Gail Simone’s run on Batgirl follows Barbara Gordon as she’s getting back into the game of fighting crime on the streets after several years away. My main takeaway here is that Batgirl cannot cut a break. Every time she arrests one criminal who’s determined to…
14 CommentsI’m going to start keeping records on how many books that bloggers scream about for one million years before I get around to reading them, and then when I finally do read them, it’s like “Well I should have done this a while ago.” Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s book Monstress, which in my defense has been checked out steadily from my library since the trade paperback came out (but I didn’t put a hold on it so it’s still my own fault), is one of those. You see that cover? Every page of Monstress is of equivalent, if not…
25 CommentsSince the theme of today is Not Being a Dick, this is your annual reminder that there are very few April Fool’s Day jokes that are actually funny (though Social Sister is in the midst of perpetrating one now), so you should probably just not do them at all. How to not be a dick to women who write comics criticism. (Good news: It ain’t even that hard.) Yes, Lovecraft was a product of his times. That doesn’t mean we have to be okay with his racism. A thoughtful response to the recent “I don’t want to be Black Spiderman”…
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