Coliseum: How long did it take you to develop the concept for The Wicked + Divine?
Kieron: There’s two answers to this. In a more prosaic way, the immediacy was the thing. We wanted to do something new. It was an idea I had in early 2013. I suggested it to Jamie in summer, in a slightly demented e-mail I’m sure we’ll release at some point. We announce it in the first week of 2014. It’s out by Summer 2014. So, in a basic way, less than a year. It’s a book running on high energy.
The alternate, less literal answer is thirty-eight years. This is the book I’ve spent all my life working towards. It includes everything I know about pop, about art, about love, about life, about death. It’s that kind of thing.
Coliseum: In all your titles, but especially Phonogram and Young Avengers, music plays a central theme. Do you ever find it difficult to communicate music in a soundless medium?
(As an aside, I think you do communicate it very well and it always surprises me)
Kieron: (Thank you)
With Phonogram, the challenge was always the attraction. Comics and Music are in many ways opposite medium. Yes, one has sound and one doesn’t… but in music you give up control of time to the form (i.e. Music will continue no matter what the audience does) while comics timing is entirely based around the audiences’ desire. That it is almost literally impossible to do a 1:1 translation was what made it fun. Why try something that’s possible? That shows an incredible lack of ambition.
As such, we were forced to try and think of how you can translate ideas and feelings between two opposite forms. That’s a fun challenge. You will always fail to get it 1:1, even at your best, but the attempt generally leads to something novel and compelling.
Coliseum: This is also your second title where magic and music irreversibly linked is a going theme. In fact, the two are almost interchangeable. I can guess at a few reasons, but why do you feel you come back to this theme so often?
Kieron: What’s the quote? It’s late, so I’ll paraphrase. Music is the artform that all other art forms aspire to. It creates emotional responses for no reason whatsoever. A series of sounds creating fundamental psychological change. That’s as close to magic as anything is in our world.
The Wicked + the Divine is a little different to that. We take a lot of conventions of music, but what the gods do isn’t really music. It’s a whole new fictional art form that rests above them all. The line above about aspiration and art was in my mind. Basically, in the world of The Wicked + the Divines, even music is but a shadow compared to what the gods do. It is the highest, most potent art form.
Coliseum: Your partnership with artist Jamie McKelvie feels almost exclusive at times and it feels like you two are almost simpatico in the stories you want to tell . Have you learned to tailor your scripts to Jaime’s art style or vice versa?
Kieron: In short, yes. It’s an incredible fluke we haven’t been torn apart. We were always close, and now we’re in the odd position where we know each other so well, we can do things that neither of us can do with another creator. There’s the understanding and trust built from every single panel for more of a decade of work.
Obviously, we also want to kill each other, but mutual murder urge always adds a little spice.
Coliseum: The premise of Wicked + Divine has to do with gods reincarnating every 90 years, living for two, and then dying. Are we to expect to follow these characters for two years and then wait another 90 for another set of stories or what’s the deal?
Kieron: I quite like the idea of having a ninety year gap in publication. People complained about Planetary’s delays, but I love the idea of COMMITTING TO THE NEXT LEVEL OF DELAYS. Coming in 2104! The Wicked + the Divine! Issue 25!
It’s an ongoing, but the book has a definitive end. It’s somewhere between 30 and 60 issues long, depending on how we take it. The majority of the story is about the contemporary incarnation – though it should be noted that the gods don’t all arrive en masse. We start the story with nine of the twelve gods in the world, with three to appear. So while each god only is there for two years, the total span of time is a little longer.
There’s also room to go back and talk about previous incarnations. We show a little of the 1920s gods in the first issue. We get a splash of the 1830s ones in issue 2. There’s certainly stories I want to tell in previous incarnations – it’s just that the main thrust of the story is in the present day.