“I get shot, chopped up and liquidized in a blender, drunk by every member of the audience and then re-appear totally intact in a magic box in the middle of the stage.”
“You know that’s been done before, right?”
“What?”
Keep reading for a review of The Magic Order volume 2, issue #3.
Minor spoilers below for this issue, one major spoiler for the previous volume.
One of my favorite things about this series is the variety of monsters they get to fight. I don’t just mean appearances, I mean the feel of the monsters. In this issue we have one that’s a giant, horrific, multi-legged behemoth right out of a Lovecraft novel, and then we have one that…it’s just so gloriously weird, and completely unexpected, and imagining what it’d be like to look out my window and see this thing, it’s amazing. And terrifying. And very, very dangerous.
The other thing I love about this series is you never know where the complications are going to come from. In the previous volume (spoilers) the biggest problem wasn’t the brotherhood of evil magicians, it was a grieving mother and father who was supposed to be on the side of the good guys.
In this issue we’ve got monsters and merciless wizards and pieces of buildings flying around, but the biggest complication turns out to be a pretty-boy magician with bad self-esteem and a heroin habit. (And possibly a literal demon egging him on, it’s hard to tell if that’s just something in his head. I’m betting it isn’t. Which makes it even more interesting that the demon starts to give him some good advice this time?)
We also get a few more pieces to the puzzle this time, namely the object that the Dark Order is looking for, and where it came from. (I like the logic behind its origin, it makes sense, though I feel like the Dark Order is making a lot of assumptions about how all this is going to work out.)
We still don’t know why Cordelia’s actions in the last volume (I’m guessing the resurrection spell) have pushed the Dark Order into doing what they’re doing. If I had to speculate wildly: maybe the resurrection spell is more like time travel, where you rescue people before they’re killed rather than bring them back to life. And what the Dark Order is doing involves messing with the past, maybe she opened the door for that to be possible?
That’s a bit of a reach though, I think we’re still missing one or two tidbits that would tie all that together.
And we also see young Rosie very briefly, and I still don’t trust her. It’s like they’re trying to make sure we don’t forget about her, because she’s going to be important later? And if anybody would have a chip on their shoulder (see previous comments about grieving parents) it’d be her.
The art is, of course, excellent. Beautiful work on the landscapes and expressions, and I’m serious, that second monster I mentioned, the weird one? SO WEIRD. I love it.
