Written by Jon Price
Illustrated by Rebekah IsaacsMagic is coming back to our world. The Seal keeping it from all of humanity is crumbling and its keepers frantically race to stop it. With magic slowly creeping across the globe, chaos is looming on the horizon. As time runs out, desperate and deadly measures are taken to ensure power remains with the powerful. And, just as things seemed to be settling down for Ben and Darius, they must face-off with a dangerous (and hungry), magical creature.
The plot thickens as Price and Isaacs’ magic epic reaches it’s halfway point. This issue brings both good and bad (read: firebreathing) tidings for our heroes, so click on down and see what all the fuss is about.
It’s not the easiest time to be a comic book about magic. Both of the big two companies have floundering magic departments currently and if your protagonist doesn’t have a scar on their forehead or your monsters don’t glow then you probably won’t get much attention from anything resembling the mainstream. However, its within this very defined underdog situation that Magus finds its footing. Playing with not only magic, but deep espionage and traditional super heroic story tropes to create a relatively unique, genre bending experience about what magic existing in our world might actually look like.
This issue featured a fair amount of stage setting in the early half of the issue, with several rapidfire scenes that feature such impressive story beats as: increased definition of our antagonists, insight into the underground network of magic protectors to which our heroes belong, and the apparent death of the President of the United States. All of this leading up to the main conflict of the issue: a big ol’ Irish dragon with a terrible thousand year hangover. We learned last issue that the focus we were convinced to follow for the opening beats of this tale was not quite the center of the action we thought she were, and this issue we begin to see just why Darius is so special.
The way in which this special nature is revealed to us falls in line with every classic hero’s journey ever conceived in literature, but that does not make it trite. Not every comic can, will or even should reinvent the wheel, and Magus seems preoccupied only with telling the best story with the building blocks it brought to the party as possible, and with the action heating up and the stakes growing ever higher, this story is proving to be quite an interesting ride.
On the art end, Isaacs manages to convey the simultaneous dread and wonder of a bunch of neophyte magic users on the run pretty accurately. While her work can’t quite be described as anything other than “traditional”, that is by no means a bad thing. Her crisp lines, pseudo-realistic character proportions and use of perspective make the primary fight scene feel like a bunch of tiny humans battling something that dwarfs them physically. It takes a really dynamic style to convey both momentum and magnitude, and Isaacs pulls it off.
It’s really easy for comics to get lost in some misguided idea that every new comic must be groundbreaking and controversial and the result is a lot of pretentious crap that no one will remember. However, its books like this one (and The Sixth Gun and Skullkickers, just to name a few), that dedicate themselves to having fun with the medium and just telling a good story that end up being the ones to actually stand out. In a lot of ways, the simplicity and directness of both the story and the art create a more genuine package overall, and I can’t wait to see how this one wraps up.
Final Verdict: 8.5 – Buy
