Black Gate

Be honest.  If you had magical powers when you were a teenager, what would you have done?  How long would you have walked the path of righteousness before cursing the school bullies?  Before casting a spell to make yourself popular?  Before just flat-out killing bad people?  Would you have made friends with elves … or goblins?

Ted Naifeh’s series of fantasy comics for young people (the back label says it’s appropriate for children ages 7 and up), introduces us to Courtney Crumrin on the day her vapid parents move in with her grand-uncle, Aloysius.  After a few restless nights, she discovers that her grand-uncle is more than simply a curmudgeonly hermit.  He’s also a wizard, more feared than respected by his fellow magicians, occasionally called upon to handle those supernatural problems that others don’t want to handle.  Going through his collection of grimoires, she begins her own self-guided education in the magical arts.  In the first volume, she traps a child-eating goblin, enchants herself to become the most popular girl in school, travels to the faerie kingdom to swap out a changeling for a human infant, and gets replaced by a doppelganger who turns out to be nicer than her.

Courtney is an intelligent young woman who’s just naturally drawn to the darker parts of this world, a cynical yet moral protagonist.  These early stories tend to rely a bit much on the “and then her uncle saved her and put everything right” solution; but they effectively convey a child going through those early learning stages, both of magic and of the harsh truths about life.  I’m glad that, after years out of print, the original volumes are being reprinted, even as a new series of adventures begins.

It’s nothing new: taking old mythic tropes and adapting them to modern-age stories. The social commentary thinly-veiled as mysticism, the peek-a-boo mythology references, the obligatory explanation for why most people in our modern times don’t notice magic, the unassuming youth who will one day become a great hero … we’ve all read them.  he secret is in the execution.  How well is this ancient story re-told? How compelling are the characters? Are the truths revealed deep or trite?

Matt Wagner was only twenty-two when the first issue of Mage was published and it’s surprising that someone so young could write something both this introspective and this self-aware. His hero, Kevin Matchstick, is already a cynical, disillusioned man at the story’s beginning. He acts like a man who already has the weight of the world on his shoulders, yet has no true responsibilities. It’s telling that the mysterious wizard who approaches him with news of his great potential is named Mirth. The journey that follows over the next fifteen issues concerns Kevin’s quest to understand and fight forces of supernatural evil; but it’s just as much Mirth’s quest to make Kevin stop being a jerk. The adage that the only thing evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing rings through this series.

Kevin, Mirth, the supporting cast and even the incidental characters are written with a surprising depth. No one is merely a follower (on the side of good or evil), each having his or her own reasons for the decisions made. The storyline is equally divided between action scenes and “downtime” where the heroes relax and talk about how they see the world and their place in it. The baseball-bat-wielding Edsel and supernatural civil servant Sean Knight work just as hard to guide Kevin towards self-discovery as they do covering his back during fights with quintuplet casino bosses, hordes of redcaps and the occasional succubus. They also have to face down a dragon. And a staple gun.

This series has been in and out of print for years and a collected edition shouldn’t be difficult to find. But if you have the means, definitely find a comic shop that carries the original back issues. There you’ll get the letter page debates on the nature of magic and morality, Matt Wagner’s comments on the state of the comic industry and the amazing Grendel stories (originally published in the back of each issue as a series of four-page mini-stories). Volume One is subtitled The Hero Discovered. Fifteen years later, there were another fifteen issues subtitled, The Hero Defined. And, someday, we may see the final volume, “The Hero Denied”. Until that day, magic is green.