Hermit, Fortune, Empress, and Judgement

It's rare to find a comic artist who takes himself as seriously as Niel Gaiman.

A caveat: I'm not a 'comics person'. I find the collecting of comics tedious, not to mention expensive, and I don't know a lot about the vast multitudes of comic book characters and their fractally ramified storylines. However, I do love comics as an art form - especially when it is really being taken to the extreme, and when it is used in service of storylines with true depth of plot, theme and character. Gaiman has always delivered admirably on both counts, and Books of Magic is no exception.

Books of Magic tells the story of Tim Hunter, a 12-year-old British boy who apparently has the potential to become the greatest mage of his era (the modern). Four mysterious trench-coated figures appear, offering him the choice to step into the world of the shadows. Each guides him on a different part of his tour through the world of the unknown and the irrational.

In the first of the books, a glow-eyed enigma known only as The Stranger shows Hunter the past - but perhaps not the past as we know it. This is a past of angels and demons, of strange figures on the line between reality and fantasy, a past which sums up ages of human history in a few short poems. Through it all Timothy and his companion can look but not touch. Next, the carefree rake Constantine takes Tim on a whirlwind visit to 'America' to visit present 'practitioners of magic' (the more occult of the DC superheroes). Speaking of occult, Dr. Occult - and his 'better half', Rose - is Hunter's guide to the land of Faerie, the myriad other half-real worlds of the imagination, and the world of dreams where Gaiman's own creation Morpheus rules. Finally, the blind and uncompromising Mr. E (get it?) takes Tim on a 'walking tour' of humanity's possible futures.

The art varies over the four books. I found the style of the fourth book somewhat overly choppy and modernistic; if you're telling a story, the important thing is to tell the story, not wander off into visual digressions which serve only to obscure what's going on. The same thing can at times be said of parts of the 'past' sequences, but this is more a function of there being very little in the way of a concrete plot. It is more a series of unrelated 'slices'. Otherwise, the art is beautiful, lush and verdant in some places, dark and brooding in others, filled sometimes with whipcrack action and sometimes freeze-framing on a single hallucinatory image.

Thematically, the story offers dozens of contrasting viewpoints on the nature of magic - and through it the nature of life. Many classic mythical themes, including the 'journey' aspect of the arcana of the tarot and the idea of an 'eternal battle' between good and evil, are introduced. From the classic 'order vs. chaos', to relativistic moral messages and simple reductionist materialism, to more subtle ideas, Tim is subjected to many messages, but ultimately they all say the same thing: once you make the choice to accept magic into your life, you can never unmake that choice. A truth that we would all do well to remember.