“…I’ve been eating away at her for two entire years and now there’s nothing left at all.
…do you want to see what I really look like?”
Keep reading for a review of The Magic Order 4, issue #2.
Warning, some spoilers below.
I said it last month and I’ll say it again: being a member of the Magic Order sucks.
You have all this power but if you use it for your own benefit you’ll get stripped of your magic and exiled. So what’s good side? There doesn’t seem to be one. You’re in a never ending battle to protect non-magicians from magical threats. There’s an infinite number of things that can kill you, usually in creatively horrible ways. And there is (from what I can see) nothing that can stop a bunch of you from going “screw it” and killing your way to the top of the Order. Why even bother having an Order, if it’s so easy for a handful of pissed off magicians to decide they don’t want to play nice anymore?
This issue we saw a few of the remaining good guys get taken out. It’s a bit of a letdown to have someone make a dramatic quip about how long they’ve been doing this and how powerful they are and spoilers: they get killed really easily because they were outnumbered. The Order has literally taken on armies before, why is it so easy for a dozen bad guys to all point their wands at the same time and go poof? Is it because they weren’t expecting to be betrayed? That seems awfully naive for this group.
(Also if anybody was hoping Rosie could somehow be rescued from Madame Albany, I think that ship has well and truly sailed.)
What I’m waiting for is a twist. This all could just be Millar walking us down a garden path in order to surprise us. “The bad guys are SO strong and there’s SO many of them what will we doooooo oh wait I know, we’ll massacre them because the Magic Order isn’t some kind of pinky-swear honor system, there’s consequences for breaking the rules.”
I don’t know if that’s what we’re going to get, but I’m hopeful. Maybe most of the deaths we’ve seen were all some kind of magical hallucination that was cast on the bad guys and everybody’s still perfectly fine. I’d rather that, than have them all get brought back to life: we saw that at the end of Volume 1, and it didn’t turn out so well for Rosie. Hell, it might not have turned out so well for everybody else who got resurrected, that could be something else we find out.
As for the art this issue, Dike Ruan is doing a great job. I like the strong line work and dynamic motion, and Giovanna Niro’s colors are super complex, going from muted purples and blacks to jewel-toned greens, with a lot of blood red when things get particularly harrowing. The panel of Albany looking down at Regan was really nicely composed, and the design of the…things…that you see near the end are perfectly creepy, I can’t wait to see more of them.
