Review: Books of Magic #10

Like most other things associated with the Sandman Universe, I very much love the Books of Magic…to the point that I own quite a few single issues that I’ve been able to get my hands on. If you’re not familiar with them and you’re a fan of titles like Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, even Justice League Dark, I’d really suggest looking into them as they do sometimes pop up from time to time be in it mention or otherwise. Weirdly…or maybe not so weirdly, I find that a lot of magic oriented titles that I have been reading lately have been preaching the same sort of idea quietly. All magic has a price.

Kat Howard and Tom Fowler do a wonderful job of illustrating exactly what price this may be for our protagonist, Timothy Hunter. Timothy is a fledgling magician who is sort of half stumbling his way through his own magic, often times trying to do things with the best intentions and finding that he, perhaps, might be out of his depth. His skills often causing him more heartache than help. Some of that might be due to the fact that his mentor/teacher, Dr. Rose is basically letting Tim essentially make decisions for himself. The thing about this is that we’re starting to see exactly what the ramifications of this decision might be.

After the abduction and subsequent return of a classmate and a terse interaction with police, Timothy divulges a rather large secret to Ellie, who can’t handle the reveal. This leads to a quick but revealing conversation between himself and Rose and an atomic bomb of an event that we round the issue itself out with.Â You’ll need to take a few breaths for this one. I know for myself that once I got to the last few panels I let out a rather large one that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

The art in the title itself, by Brian Churilla, is quite lovely. While I find a lot of Sandman oriented titles often focus a lot more on the lovely scenery around characters, being rooted for to the most part in London, this allows a closer, more intimate view at the faces and facial expressions on our characters. Eyes are a bit larger so you can feel the hope, the terror, the confusion behind them. Subtle expressions of distaste or concern easily come across. Most characters have an almost frail, waif like appearance which I find nice given the fact that we know that magicians are not so helpless. They’re strong, but delicate, like the balance between the price of what they cast and what the outcome of their spells might be.

I truly enjoyed this little 4 out of 5 title. It’s very much starting to feel like another coming of age story that I’ll gladly follow given I know what I know about who exactly Timothy might become. Do you agree?

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(W) Kat Howard (A) Tom Fowler, Brian Churilla (CA) Kai Carpenter