Kieron-Gillen

Kieron Gillen has a lot of things going on in The Wicked + The Divine Volumes 1 and 2, but below the plot there are some profound thoughts about godhood, the YOLO ethos, music idols, and resentment. The plot, as the you no doubt already know, is that every 90 years 12 gods are resurrected for two years. For the most part it appears unclear why this cycle was set into motion and how it jives with the stories we have about gods. At one point near the end of the second volume we’re told that the gods have to fight The Darkness and it appears that The Darkness is responsible for human dark ages. We’re told that men would have been on Mars by the Roman times if The Darkness had been held at bay. Of course, it’s possible we’re being subjected to an unreliable narrator.

Serial storytelling is popular on television, but as far as print goes, it’s a dying art. There used to be a time when people regularly followed installments of actual books, printed a chapter at a time in magazines, but now magazines themselves are struggling to keep the public’s interest in the face of the internet. You can find serial stories on the internet—web comics and fanfiction for example—but the business of it isn’t the same. The comic book industry is one of the few businesses that still maintains that original serial model and because of that it usually takes six or twelve issues of a comic to tell a single story arc. The last few months I’ve spent a lot of time deciding what titles to trim from my pull list in favor of waiting for the graphic novel releases. As I’ve evaluated titles, I’ve thought a lot about the downsides of serial storytelling. The obvious downside for the consumer is the price. I bought the first six issues of Avengers by Jonathan Hickman for a cover price of $3.99 which meant I spent approximately $24.00. The graphic novel collection of those issues is currently being sold for $15.00 on Amazon.com. For someone with a tight budget, that kind of difference is noteworthy.

Continuing from a few weeks ago, here are a slew of comics Image Comics will be releasing in 2014. Nameless Nameless All Image released was the above image and that it will be written by Grant Morrison with art by Chris Burnham. However, I loved their work on Batman Incorporated, so I look forward to this. Nailbiter Nailbiter This series is neither my cup of tea nor do I recognize the creators, so I’m going to go with Image’s press release: ...

AvX: Consequences #1 I decided to combine both Uncanny Avengers #1 and AvX: Consequences #1 because they both are dealing with the aftermath of Avengers vs X-Men. These aftermath type books aren’t anything new for Marvel. At the very least they did the same thing with Fear Itself. After the main book they had Fear Itself:Consequences or some similar mini-series where they dealt with the aftermath. And Uncanny Avengers, itself, kinda swings directly out of the events of Avengers vs X-Men. It has a team of Avengers teaming up with a team of X-Men in order to show the world that they can all work together. ...