“…you really need to get over yourself.”
Keep reading for a review of The Magic Order 4, issue #5.
Warning, some pretty significant spoilers below.
This issue was a heck of a chance for Dike Ruan and Giovanna Niro to show off their skills. The fight in the arena, with increasingly horrific monsters springing up while Cordelia and Perditus screamed at each other, was stunning. The moments back in the “real” world were just as impressive; I particularly liked the trio of Egyptian gods waiting in ambush, and Madame Albany is as beautiful as she is batshit crazy.
When it comes to the plot, I still have this feeling like I’m missing something. I keep expecting this story to be sneaky, with a lot of clever twists and turns. But I think in the end it’s just a bunch of wizards smacking each other around with magic until someone wins.
Cordelia and her brother Perditus, after some pointed remarks about family and sacrifices, have a magic battle where they each change into bigger and badder monsters until Cordelia harnesses the power of the sun and kills her brother as gruesomely (but not as gruesome as you might think considering it involves intestines) as possible so she can command everybody in the arena to follow her back to Earth.
While Perditus’ death was satisfyingly horrible, I would’ve liked the final battle to have been more, I don’t know, clever? In the end it was just “I’m more powerful than you so I win.”
Meanwhile back on Earth, the children of the wizards who were murdered by the mutineers are plotting revenge, and despite the fact that they refer to themselves as the B-Team That’s Probably Going to Get Slaughtered, they seem to be doing pretty well. It doesn’t hurt that Sammy and his team are dumb enough to be tricked by a fake phone call. Do NONE of these people ever take precautions, ever?
Finally Madame Albany offers to let Uncle Edgar out of his prison and give him back his memories.
Wait, what gives? Why would she suddenly decide to let Edgar out when a couple issues ago she was perfectly happy to murder his friends and let him rot inside the magic painting? Maybe the B-Team is scarier than we thought and she wants backup? While I’m thinking about it, what was up with the scene a couple issues ago when she got all dressed up to be a nice unassuming cashier or something? Did that have a point?
The final page says “To Be Concluded.” Is this the end of another arc, or the entire series? Albany says she’s undone everything Cordelia did with the forbidden spell in the first arc. Were arcs 2-4 a big circle to bring Cordelia back to the same place (most of her family dead, about to be taken out by Madame Albany) to allow her to make a different decision? Or is that too complicated? Maybe in the end they just wanted to have three more arcs of wizards smacking each other around.