“…we were raised to protect the human race. Not make a fast buck while we can.”
Keep reading for a review of The Magic Order 4, issue #6.
Warning, I’m spoiling just about everything in this review.
After a two-month hiatus, The Magic Order is back with the final issue of the 4th arc, and there’s not much I can say that I haven’t already said in the last handful of reviews: Dike Ruan and Giovanna Niro knocked it out of the park with the art, and the story is weirdly unsatisfying.
For the last three volumes I’ve expected the kinds of twists we got in the first volume. We get some twists for sure (who expected Madame Albany would be cool with dying again, had even planned for it?) but they all feel very surface level, nothing that blew my mind. It’s hard for me to put it into words, especially when I know what an amazing writer Mark Millar is. It’s not that everything was predictable, it just felt…ordinary?
This whole time Madame Albany’s plan was revenge on the people who killed her. She set everything up so that Uncle Edgar would need to kill her too, because she liked being dead, as long as she got to screw people over on the way. That’s really the most interesting part of the issue, of the last several issues really. And even that felt like it was just an elaborate setup so that Ruan and Niro could do a full page image of Albany holding a skull while she dissolves into nothing. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it (it’s a very cool image) but I was expecting more from the crazy bitch we met in the first volume.
Meanwhile the “B Team That’s Probably Going To Get Themselves Killed” managed to finish off the traitor Magic Order members (well, the ones who weren’t already killed by Uncle Edgar’s spell) and they’re off to take out Madame Albany. Instead they find Uncle Edgar in full control of his powers, summoning his people from Kolthur. But wait, Cordelia’s in charge of those people now yay! Except oops, Uncle Edgar (if you remember a few issues ago) is the author who created the Wizard King, and then switched bodies with him, trapping the Wizard King in his dying-from-suicide body, and he wrote the Wizard King to be invincible.
But wait! Cordelia has a spell that goes into the Infinite Wardrobe where everybody’s clothes live when you close the closet door (..okay?) and they give you a direct path to almost anyone on the planet (…sure?) and she instantly picks the one that leads to Uncle Edgar’s original body. (Even for a series about magic spells this explanation felt pretty handwavey and rushed.)
Uncle Edgar’s body didn’t die because his estranged wife found him and saved him, so the Wizard King lived on in the body and became successful as heck and used his intelligence to make the world a better place, because the original author wrote him to be that way. That made sense to me, but shoehorning in a magical koala to distract the Wizard King’s wife felt a little out of place.
Anyway, the Wizard King may not have his magical powers, but Cordelia reminds him that he’s in the body of the original author, so he has the ability to write a story where Uncle Edgar sees the error of his ways and gives up, swapping bodies with the Wizard King again and promising to live his life better this time around. And that’s exactly what happened.
Then there’s a bit of time travel cleverness that I almost understood (I need to reread the first issue in the arc to remember what it was Sammy and Cordelia were doing in the magic bar with the note) and the remaining members of the Magic Order share a toast, dedicating themselves once again to protecting the world. (I guess until the next time one of them gets sulky about it and decides to break the rules because I’m still not seeing a consequence for that.)
It’s not that I have any real complaints about the story, everything made logical sense within the confines of the world. It’s just I was hoping for something else, something messed up and cool like the first volume.
I’d thought this might be the end of the series, but the final panel says “Next: The Death of Cordelia Moonstone” so it looks like there’s more to come. I’m not completely sure I’ll read it though; after four volumes I think I’m good with moving on, everybody’s in a halfway decent place now and that’s how I’d like to remember them.