“…this little girl is far from normal, and there’s a darkness in there I really don’t like…”
Keep reading for a review of The Magic Order 3, issue #3.
Spoilers below.
Somehow I missed reviewing issue 2, so here’s a quick recap: we met Salome, the wife of the former head of the Order, Leonard. Her magic talents run to prophecy; she knew before they were born that her children would have unhappy lives (death, abandonment, and mental illness) so she left Leonard years ago so she wouldn’t have to watch it happen. But she’s also waiting for the moment the “Puzzle” reappears: a vaguely defined magic threat that killed her father. Leonard, who never blamed her for leaving, has tracked her down to tell her Gabriel died (see volume one) and help her with finding and killing the “Puzzle,” since it’s due to reappear any day now.
Meanwhile Cordelia and the Order have a little chat with Sammy Liu, and we find out that members of the Order use their magic to help people, and they must never ever use it for personal gain. That was a new bit of info for me, but it explains why the Dark Order were so bitter and broke; they were prevented from making their own lives better with their magic. I think.
Finally, we get a little more info about Uncle Edgar: we knew he lived inside a painting to keep the world safe from him (if he loses control things Go Very Bad Very Quickly) but now he’s starting to remember who he was: the Wizard King that Leonard and Salome defeated, in part by giving their oldest son away.
Got all that? On to issue 3.
We see Leonard and Salome leave on sea horses (not the underwater kind, the really cool magical stallions that run on top of the water, Leonard arranged that because Salome always liked them and he’s a big ol softie) and then we switch over to Regan hooking up with a married guy, Sacha lecturing Regan on the benefits of celibacy, and little Rosie getting a lesson in putting down a pack of undead drug dealers.
We get a moment of Sacha and Regan discussing how powerful Rosie is, and for the first time someone mentions that she’s got a dark side, which I’ve been saying for a while now. Her father was killed and her mother imprisoned for all the things they did to bring Rosie back from the dead, and she’s always been so relentlessly cheerful. I’m sure she’s plotting something.
But if I’m a little suspicious of Rosie I’m a lot suspicious of Sacha. He leans pretty hard into the idea that Regan’s a deviant for having so much sex, that celibacy is the only way to improve oneself, and then he tells Rosie he’s going to take her under his wing to a special secret place and make her his personal apprentice and NOPE. I do not trust any of that. I’m afraid this story is about to go to a much, much darker place.
The pacing of these issues is always a little odd to me, for instance: one minute Rosie and her friend are underwater fighting several of the undead, then we jump to her and her friend outside of the school, planning on ditching class so they can fight the last gang member. There’s no transition. I don’t need a bunch of panels that detail how they got from the water back to Chicago, but the abruptness is jarring, because I don’t know if it’s slightly lazy storytelling or if we’re suppose to be suspicious.
I think the problem is that I’m focusing on each individual issue a little too hard. There’s several stories going on, and while it looks like we’re jumping around a lot, I’m hoping that by the time we finish volume three all the things that have been bugging me in the last two volumes will fit together in a big coherent picture. Right now it feels all over the place, but that could all be part of the plan.
As for Gigi Cavenago’s art, there’s several impressive panels this issue, my favorite being the full-page shot of the three undead drug dealers, it’s really well composed and very nicely creepy.
