“…I’m just not feeling myself at the moment and I’ve done something really bad again…”
Keep reading for a review of The Magic Order 3, issue #4.
Minor spoilers below.
Two storylines are put on the back burner this issue: Sammy Liu’s questionable use of his powers, and Leonard and Salome’s hunt for “The Puzzle” that killed her father. Instead the focus is just on Uncle Edgar, Sacha, and little Rosie.
Last issue I was very concerned about Sacha taking Rosie away to someplace very private so he could give her some “special instruction.” Ew. I’m happy to say I was wrong about what he was planning. Sure, his actual plans are pretty horrific, but it turns out he’s not a pedophile. That’s…something?
I’m curious to see if I was wrong about Rosie too. I’ve been thinking since volume two that she’s plotting something: she’s a young, powerful sorceress who’s parents were executed or locked up by the Magic Order, and she’s way too cheerful. My money was on her cute-little-girl routine being an act. But there’s the slightest chance she never meant to do anything wrong. Till now of course. After the events of this issue if she wasn’t already evil she’s definitely going to go evil. And that’s the question: was she bad the whole time, or will this make her bad?
Side note: I love Sacha’s method for traveling to different multiverses. Spoilers, if you’d rather find out yourself, but in short: every time someone writes a fiction book it creates a new universe, one that keeps going even when the book ends. If you know what you’re doing you can go inside the world in that book, and then you just have to find a bookshelf. Because there’ll be books inside that universe that don’t exist in our world, and they’ll have universes inside them. So you can drop from one universe to another, over and over, and end up in a place no one else can get to unless they know the exact path you took. Which, unfortunately, is not good for Rosie.
Meanwhile, Uncle Edgar’s chilling out in the castle inside the painting inside the Chicago Museum of Art. He’s having tea with the first Lord Moonstone, who’s been living (and mostly sleeping) in the castle for five hundred years. Everything is pleasant and chatty, right up to the point it’s not.
Uncle Edgar, remember, is actually a powerful wizard under a spell to make him docile and harmless. We don’t know why he’s suddenly started to remember who he is (is the spell wearing off? Is someone taking the spell off on purpose?) but things are about to get Very Bad Very Quickly. I won’t say what happens, but it’s certainly, uh, upsetting.
As for the art, Gigi Cavenago gets several chances to shine in this issue: an entire vintage comic book story, a huge cityscape infested with vampires, a tentacled elder god the size of a mountain, even a pulp fantasy novel cover. Cavenago is a quite a chameleon when it comes to changing art styles, and can create some pretty horrific images too (seriously, the shot of Moonstone in the bed, ack!)
As a whole this issue felt a little more coherent than the past six or seven issues. I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on why everything has seemed….off? But it’s definitely looking like that was intentional, because it seems like all the questions I’ve had are slowly coming together into one big answer.
