The Tripartite Hero: Matt Wagner’s Mage
At the Emerald City Comicon in early March, Image Comics announced that starting in August they’d be publishing writer/artist Matt Wagner’s Mage: The Hero Denied, a 15-issue series with a half-length 0 issue and a double-sized conclusion. Hero Denied will be the final part of a trilogy Wagner began over thirty years ago, and I want to prepare for that last installment by looking back here at the first parts of the saga. The Mage books are two of the finest works of a great comics talent, urban fantasies mixing excellent action storytelling, a mastery of plot beats, and a sense of the mythic into gripping stories — and stories with a semi-autobiographical slant, no less.
Mage: The Hero Discovered was published by Comico from May 1984 to December 1986 (I read it in the three-volume 1987 Starblaze trade paperback collections). Wagner wrote, drew, and coloured the series, with letters by Bob Pinaha, and Sam Kieth inking from issue 6 through 15. The story follows Kevin Matchstick, inhabitant of the modern-day world, as he encounters a mysterious figure named Mirth who turns out to be a mage; Mirth introduces Matchstick to a grander and more terrifying world, one of wizardry and horrors, and leads him to the hidden truth of his nature and his link to a hero out of legend. Mage: The Hero Defined came out from Image from July 1997 through October 1999, again written and drawn by Wagner, this time with colours by Jeromy Cox and letters by Sean Konot. The series follows an older Matchstick through a stranger world of greater magics and other heroes; Matchstick meets another mage, faces consequences of his earlier actions, and discovers deeper truths about the archetypes behind him.
Always intended as a trilogy from the beginning of the story back in the 80s, the second and third chapters have necessarily been slow to follow because the story is in part an autobiography. Kevin Matchstick is the alter-ego of Matt Wagner: he’s drawn to resemble his creator, aspects of his story are fictionalisations (fantastifications?) of Wagner’s life, and other characters are analogues of people Wagner knows — and since Wagner’s a professional in comics, a number of the characters in the second series are thinly-disguised versions of other comics artists. The Hero Defined is therefore also an odd document of 1990s comics culture. If you don’t know the background, you don’t need to know it. If you do, you see another level to the story: artists become mythic heroes and villains. That works with the central concern of the tale — the transmutation of everyday life into archetypal struggle.
Weird Heroes was a series of eight books put out by Byron Preiss Visual Publications from 1975 through 1977, a copiously-illustrated mix of novels and short stories that aimed at creating a new kind of pulp fiction with new kinds of pulp heroes. The series had a specific set of ideals for its heroes, linked with an appreciative but not uncritical love of pulp fiction from the 1920s through 40s. Well-known creators from comics and science fiction contributed to the books, and one character would spawn a six-volume series of his own. And yet Preiss’ long-term plans for Weird Heroes were cut short with the eighth volume, and today it’s hard to find much discussion of the books online (though 
Though he’s written short stories and three self-published novels, Jess Nevins is likely best known as an excavator of fantastic fictions past: an archaeologist digging through the strata of the prose of bygone years, unearthing now pieces of story and now blackened ashes of some once-thriving genre long since consumed and built over by its lineal successor. Across annotated guides (three to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one to Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham’s Fables) and self-published encyclopedias (of Pulps and of Golden Age Superheroes with Pulp Heroes soon to come, as well as 2005’s Monkeybrain-published Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana) Nevins has reassembled old pieces of fantastika, indicating direct influences on modern writing and establishing directories of almost-forgotten story. He’s one of the people broadening the history of genre, in his books, and in articles such as 
