Good stuff. I started reading the titles last year, but dropped off after Sherlock Frankenstein & the Legion of Evil. Should get back into them.

I did a reread of The Wicked + The Divine, the Image series by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie running from 2014-2019. I had not reread the whole series after it finished, but it's been a while and with everything still in lockdown here, I've been rereading a lot of things lately. It is a series that benefits from rereading everything some time after your first read.

As it's a reread expect some big time SPOILERS here:

Knowing which direction the series is going take at the end, definitely made me look differently at the first issues. What felt like inconsistencies at the time, all make sense towards the ending and it's interesting to see that Cassandra points out all these inconsistencies (but none of the other characters or readers believe her. No doubt that Gillen chose the name Cassandra very deliberately for this character).

The premise is that every 90 years 12 young people awaken as gods, blessed with the power to inspire/excite humanity, but cursed to die within 2 years. And pretty soon you start to see the cracks within that premise: there should be 12 gods; why is the Morrigan 3 goddesses in one body? while the three Norns in three different bodies count as 1 god? Why does Woden not have any powers to inspire like the others? Why is Baphomet one of the twelve when there never was worship of a god named Baphomet ? Why does Tara not know which goddess Tara she actually is, cause Baal does know which of the many Baals he is?

It's also interesting to see the relationship between Ananke and technology during this whole cycle. The 6000+ year old non-goddess praises technology at various points during the early series, but you see her cursing the same technology near the end, because the instant communication between the various characters makes it far more difficult for her to keep control over the various characters.

Overall I like the series now more, then I liked it on first reading (issue #1 did not immediately draw me in, while I loved Phonogram by the same creative team (though I started with volume 2 there and when I later read volume 1, I also did not love that one as much as the rest of the series). It deals with some of the same ideas as Gillen's Journey into Mystery about the relationship between gods and stories, where gods *are* stories. Stories that have power, but are also traps (which in turn goes back to Gaiman's Sandman and to other works before that).
This work also throws in a comparison between the worship of gods and the worship of celebrities (in this case specifically popstars/rockstars, even though the gods in the Wicked + the Divine specifically don't make music when they use their powers to excite and inspire the people around them), made even more explicit by basing each god's look on one or more popular music artists (in case of Lucifer even explicitly called out by one of the other characters, accusing her of just ripping her look from her parent's David Bowie collection). In the end it does not do much with that premise though: the characters have little in common with the artists they resemble and the way various characters are tempted by fame and power does not have specific links to the popular music industry (I think only Woden, as "producer" of the Valkyries comes close to that).

Weird tricks your memory plays on you: In my head, the revelation of the '13th' god took place about halfway through the series, but it's in the 2nd of 9 volume (though volumes 3 and 8 are side-stories), so more like the end of Act 1.

The series does some interesting stuff with the music references (but I haven't figured out yet how they fit into the overall concept of the series, nor how for the 19th Century all gods being writers/poets fits in the concept):

The most interesting thing it does with the music reference is the division between Pantheon/Mainstream and Underworld/Underground music, with the Pantheon being on a stage, performing at their audience and the Underworld performing from within their audience and Persephone, fittingly, moving between Pantheon and Underworld all the time. With the extreme cases on both sides being Woden (who does not even perform and has no direct interaction with his audience), which fits his role as 'producer', and Dionysos (who is not on a stage, but always part of the crowd, even if he's the catalyst for the whole performance), which is his role as 'DJ/Dance artist'.

This is Hickman.  Big intriguing ideas that ultimately lead nowhere and peter out as he gets interested in his next big thing. 

I've caught up on the Marvel King in Black saga, although I haven't read any of the tie-in books yet. Even though I'm not a huge Venom fan, the main story has been pretty good thus far. I only know of Donny Cates from the Absolute Carnage event that came out I think two years ago which I liked. I know King In Black has it's roots in the Venom run that Cates was writing, so I might finally go back and read more about Eddie Brock's journey from there. Ryan Stegman's art has also been really, really good.

How is the new comic by Johns? I really like the Universe but I do find it a little hard to read the same way Hellboy could be hard to read.