“We’re Comics Elitists.” Talking The Wicked + the Divine with Kieron Gillen

We live in a culture where fame is treasured beyond riches, but the series, which just released its second trade paperback, resists the easy metaphor about the short lifespan of celebrity to tell a story about that great question we all must one day face: what are we going to do with the brief time we’ve been given? Are we going to squander it? Or are we going to live our dreams? We recently sat down with writer Kieron Gillen to discuss what inspired the series, how he grapples with success, and the moment he realized he had to live out his own dreams.
The Wicked + the Divine was recently optioned for TV. What are your thoughts on translating the story to the screen?
We are comics elitists. We as creators are really interested in the medium. If you’ve read our Young Avengers or Phonogram, we kind of tear everything apart and do stuff on the page that doesn’t really translate to the screen, because we’re interested in doing it as comics. However, out of all the ideas we’ve had, this one feels more commercial than most, and I can see it working. I can see it being adapted in a variety of ways. We view it as a challenge to anyone who wants to adapt it. Because you can’t do this literally. You can’t do it one for one. Too faithful comic adaptations tend not to work for us, because they are two different mediums.

If it goes forward it gets more people reading the book.
Certainly. The book has done very well, sort of worryingly well, but following the numbers, there was definitely a peak after the announcement. And that’s always the thing: the book is enough to worry about. That’s what I mean by being comics elitists; we’re not very interested in building multimedia empires. Me and [artist Jamie McKelvie] are obsessing about the books. We’re more like, “Here is an artistic statement.” I was in the shower the other day and thinking, ok, if you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer and you’ve got three months to live, what do you do? I do the maths, and it’s this: if I die, and these are the 40 or so issues I leave behind. Which is a bit depressing, but it’s a book about death.

Of course, you want to be working on something that inspires you.
Absolutely so. I’ve always been inspired and transformed by pop culture. Literally, art has changed my life. And the fact that when art can really make you what you are, for better or worse, you’d like to try to do something that will speak to someone else.

Where did the story come from? What was the genesis moment for you?
I don’t like to talk about this because I feel like I’m prostituting it, but my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I had the idea a week later. It was my initial response to the grief at my dad’s oncoming death. So that’s what the book’s about: what the hell do we do when [death is coming]? Why does anyone do art anyway? Life is fundamentally very short, and the two years to live is a way of stressing it. But it’s what we all face, whether we have two years, or 10 years, or 70 years.
Why did you decide to focus on young people?
In terms of deciding to become an artist—and that’s kind of what the book is about—it’s a way of intensifying the metaphor. I think about the changes I went through at 20, 21. That’s the transformation from someone who wants to be a writer to someone who is a writer.

So if you were a reincarnated god with two years to live, what form would your art expression take to get your worshipers in? Would you keep doing what you’re doing or do you have secret ambitions of being a tightrope walker or something?
I always wished I could sing. I forget who the quote is from, but it says, “music is the art form that all others aspire to.” The idea that other art forms can move a person’s brain, but music is this hybrid art form, a series of noises in order, that creates emotional effects entirely out of proportion to what is happening.
In the book, what the gods do isn’t music, it’s very specifically just a pure thing that happens, and then the audience responds.
Do you have an idea of what you think their music sounds like?
It’s pure transcendence. And that’s what I mean about the challenge of how you adapt it. Do you choose the music? I actually think it would be more interesting to have a lot of music in the show, and then when the gods perform, stop all music, and just have a vacuum. Make it a visual showpiece, with little echoes, tiny bits of sound.
Adaptations are interesting to talk about, but I tend to be the person who prefers the original, whether it’s books or comics. I don’t think there’s ever been an adaptation everyone liked.
I always like an adaptation that’s aggressively against the book. Like the Starship Troopers adaptation: it’s not that it misunderstands Starship Troopers, it hates Starship Troopers. If you try to follow the book too closely, the small changes start making a lot of difference.
Do you have a conception of where you are going with this story, and how long it is going to take to get there?
We think about 40 issues. In some ways it’s a book about me turning 40, so the idea of doing 40 issues is the sort of meta-bullshit I’m into. And I can’t start if I don’t know the end of the book. When I wrote the first one, I could have written at least half of the final issue. The ending is the point of the book, but the middle is how we decide to wind it all together. The first thing I know about a character is how I’m going to kill them, and I use killing to mean, when they leave the narrative.
The Wicked + the Divine, Vol. 2: Fandemonium is available now.