“Pleased to meet you / Hope you guess my name / But what’s puzzling you / Is the nature of my game”

- Sympathy For The Devil, The Rolling Stones

It’s not every comic book that paints the devil as a sympathetic character. Then again we’re not talking about some goat-faced Beelzebub here. In The Wicked and The Divine, the so-called Prince of Darkness isn’t that dark — or even a prince. He’s mischievous teen Luci, who just happens to be a chanteuse.

That’s right, the premise of The Wicked and The Divine is that many of the world’s pop stars are actually gods. Sadly most of them are as one-dimensional as their Top 40 counterparts. Mindbogglingly, even though writer Kieron Gillen generated 34 densely plotted pages, he only fleshed out two characters: the aforementioned Luci and Cassandra, a tenacious TV journalist who interviews superbland songstress/goddess Amaterasu. Not surprisingly it’s Luci who gets the best lines of the book. After all, Satan didn’t get where (s)he is by not being a witty conversationalist.

Unfortunately, The Wicked + The Divine is a little flat when Luci gets pushed into the background. And that could be a problem if the other characters don’t get real interesting, real soon. That said, Gillen did craft a prologue that I wanted to read more of. He also included an, um, interesting riff on fandom, showing how young concertgoer Laura is held in Amaterasu’s sway (hint: it involves a mass orgasm). But the chief flaw in Gillen’s storytelling is that while it’s inferred the gods are incredibly charismatic, I’m never given a chance to experience their gravity.

Similarly, the art by Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson fails to pull me in. Their work is technically flawless, but it feels cold and distant. For a story about gods — especially diva deities — I want something a little more spectacular. The Wicked + The Divine reads like architectural elevations, with lots of straight lines, dead spaces and muted hues. This could simply be my bias against digitally drawn work, but Fiona Staples uses the same Magna Studio software and I’m entranced by what she does with Saga. It’s an unfair comparison, for sure, but everything McKelvie and Wilson does is a little too perfect for me. I guess I prefer my gods to have some flaws. And yes, I realize I’m in the minority here.

So will I head back to the spinner rack for issue #2? With The Wicked and The Divine, I had to think on this a bit. Despite the book’s flaws, Luci is a compelling character and the issue ends with her in a perilous position — one dicey enough I’ll follow along to see how it all plays out. Though I’m not sure a few pages of Luci each issue will be enough to hold my interest long term, especially if I’m subjected to vacuous drivel from four lackluster gods. Honestly, is it too much to ask for the shallow world of pop music to have little more substance?

I’m sure that’s a question David Fricke asks himself every day.