The Wicked + The Divine #1

History

Kieron Gillen has publicly traced the series' origin to the period immediately after his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer — a personal confrontation with mortality that he channelled into a story he described as fundamentally about life and death dressed in pop-star clothing. He and artist Jamie McKelvie had collaborated previously on the Phonogram trilogy and Marvel's Young Avengers, and WicDiv was conceived from the start as the definitive statement of their creative partnership — a project McKelvie later said was built to be 'the epitome of everything we did in the medium.' The series was announced at Image Expo on 9 January 2014, with designer Hannah Donovan contributing to the book's high-fashion visual identity — including the now-recognisable use of the '+' symbol in the title, which Gillen noted simultaneously nods to Christian iconography and resembles a crosshair. Issue #1 shipped on 18 June 2014 and sold out at the distributor level on or near its release date, prompting a second printing dated 16 July 2014.

Trivia · 7 facts

• First appearance of all core characters: protagonist Laura, Lucifer (Eleanor Rigby), Amaterasu, Sakhmet, Baal, Minerva, Susanoo, and the ageless overseer Ananke — all introduced or named in this issue.
• Written by Kieron Gillen; art by Jamie McKelvie; colors by Matthew Wilson; letters by Clayton Cowles — the complete creative team that carried the series for the majority of its 45-issue run.
• The issue opens with a 1923 flashback — the prior Recurrence — before jumping to 1 January 2014 and introducing Laura at an Amaterasu concert, a dual-timeline structure that plants mysteries revisited across the entire series.
• The first issue sold out at distributor level upon release; a second printing was solicited with Diamond Code MAY148118 and released 16 July 2014.
• Multiple variant covers exist for the first issue, including a Cover C by Bryan Lee O'Malley (Scott Pilgrim), a DCBS retailer exclusive, an Eh! variant, a Newbury Comics edition, and white-background character variants featuring Laura and Lucifer.
• Issue #1 content was reprinted in Image Firsts: The Wicked + The Divine #1 (December 2014) and collected in The Wicked + The Divine Vol. 1: The Faust Act TPB (issues #1–5); it also received a French-language edition from Glénat in 2016.
• Television rights were optioned by Universal TV in 2015 (with Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick's Milkfed Criminal Masterminds attached to produce), though by June 2024 Gillen confirmed rights had reverted to the creators and were again being shopped around.

Full credits

Variants (9)