The Wicked + The Divine and One Big Spreadsheet
A quantitative analysis of the Gods appearing in the series
For the past few months I’ve been doing a fair bit of analysis of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s graphic novel series The Wicked + The Divine. This probably isn’t too surprising considering that almost 50% of my posts have been in regards to this series and/or religion in comics.
But I think that one of the most interesting parts of this whole process has been making a spreadsheet to categorize this information.
By far it is not done considering the fact that the series most not likely wrapping up until either this summer or early fall, but I have already amassed a fair bit of information. I thought that the best way to categorize my information was by color-coding, column/row identifiers, labeling, and a few =sum formulas.
Column “A” is basically the explanatory section for the rest of the table in which I use the rows to list the Gods, and the unknown, which part of the world/culture they are from, which ones are the actual members of the Pantheon, and their total counts (sorry for the spoilers).
After that columns “B” through “M” are broken into which volume or issue a character is being analyzed. The reason why it’s both volumes and issues is due to how #40 till the end have 1) not all issues are published yet and 2) will not be released in another volume until after the end of the series. Additionally, I have only included the placeholder columns for #43 and #44 considering they are the first of the last few issues to actually have released publishing dates, April 10th and May 15th at the moment, while the last expected issue has not yet had any news/expected dates.
Lastly column “N” is where the totals of totals is recorded. From rows 2 to 21 this column is totalling all that was recorded per each individual character. The same is then done in rows 23 to 27 in combining together the totals for all of the particular groupings of the Gods and the unknown. In order for the information to be accurately displayed, columns “L” and “M” have to be omitted considering that they are placeholders for the future data once the last issues have been published.
So why do all of this? What does it mean and why should we care?
To start off, most religion/spirituality that is showcased in comics and graphic novels is quite different than what occurs in the real world. Most depictions are based in either a fantasy, sci-fi, or supernatural setting that are possibly created entirely from scratch by the creator and/or offshoot versions of historic religions and mythologies.
The Wicked + The Divine is one of the only series I have seen to date in the realm of comics and graphic novels that actually bases its portrayals of the Gods in the same way they were viewed in our world. Furthermore, there are even characters embedded within the overall arc that refute the physical existence of said Gods by referring to accurate historic literature and mythology. This is also an impressive feat considering that the Pantheon is comprised of Gods from various cultures and religious practices on a global scale.
This brings me to my second point on the overall representation of the Pantheon’s Gods turns out to really break down. I was fortunately able to categorize all the Gods, minus the unknown, under three categories: European, African, and Asian. Unsurprisingly, it makes sense that with a particular group having more Gods they will dominate the number of appearances made in the series. This turned out to be extremely accurate that with a total of 13 Gods categorized being European they outweighed the other three groups with having a total of 3,415 appearances when combined.
To me, this data makes an insane amount of sense, even if it seemed like a crazy thing to do. Comparing African and Asian Gods to European ones, most people are going to know a little bit of information when put up against divine beings that they might have off chance heard in their lifetime. Additionally, this might be more or less pandering to English speaking and/or European audience than anything else as well, but that is not my place to say.
Nevertheless, I think that it is important that research is done on a series like The Wicked + The Divine considering that there really is no other title like it that has been created before. If you were to look up scholarly information on this series, the only material that to be found is most likely only going to offhand reference it in relation to some unrelated piece of academia. While I still have more work to do on this, I will say that I’m glad that series exists to show a different side to how religion can be showcased outside of its normal conduits.
