Review: Charismagic #0 & #1
I was browsing the shelves of my local shop last week and happened to notice Charismagic because of its beautifully illustrated cover. I picked it up and a member of the staff nearby said, helpfully, "Real magic exists and it involves Las Vegas." My mind immediately latched onto it as a successor to my favorite doomed-too-young title of recent years - Spellgame - and I bought issues #0 and #1 to dive in with both feet.
To be honest, there are ways in which the writing is really mangled - literally, sometimes the words on the page don't seem to add up to language - but the art in this book is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I've added it to my bag anyway. In a lot of ways it struck me more as the new Elephantmen than the new Spellgame but that's based purely on its lush, dark, dense visuals and its sense of characters who are aloof and brooding and aware of their status as Others in our midst.
Yet again it's super-easy for members of the queer communities to see themselves as the shunned and powerful outsiders on the page and - yet again - that just totally works for me.
From almost the first page, the dialogue and other writing in this book feels odd somehow, and not in a way that can be explained away by the nature of the characters speaking it. This was more true in the introductory #0 than in the first "real" issue, #1, but it showed up a little bit there, too. It feels like sometimes the dialogue hasn't been edited, with sentence fragments colliding on occasion in a way that distracts from the flow of the narrative within a given scene and occasionally made it difficult to understand the specifics of the background information being presented even if the overall shape of the story is perfectly clear. Phrasings like "a time and place when this world belonged to us" make me stumble a bit as a reader - "when" doesn't refer to places and if the whole world belonged to "us" then specific places are irrelevant - and even though those are minor quibbles they made me have to stop and reread more than once to make sure I'd just read something correctly.
That kind of criticism aside, though, the story is pretty much exactly what I need to be engaged by an urban/modern fantasy story: magic is real but in hiding and something big is about to make it really obvious to someone or to everyone. To expound on those two allusions above, much like Spellgame it's got that Harry-Potter-With-Booze sort of cocktails + sorcery vibe but the way the book unfolds its story and setting feels much more like the noir detachment and doomed certainty of Elephantmen. Yes, the world is full of wondrous things and fantastical power but that doesn't mean it's full of good. Rather, it's explicitly full of things that are non-human, endangered, dangerous and tired of hiding.
That makes Vegas a perfect setting, of course, because it's only ever beautiful at night when the neon drags one's eyes away from the sidewalks. When the writing in this title falters or comes out incomprehensibly knotted together the art picks up the slack and shepherds the reader past all that silly thinking. I would see some problematic phrase and think, "What? Let me try that again..." only to find my eye drawn instead to the glorious play of light and shadow and hue on the page. Look no further than the two-page spread of post-narrative-event Las Vegas in issue #1 for why this book will absolutely go onto my pull list. It isn't just a beautiful skyline or cityscape piece. The art is fine enough that my first thought was, "Wow, that's a pretty sweet DeLorean," despite that being a detail instead of a main feature. All over this book we're given lush, dark pages full of subtle coloring and expertly deployed spatters of brightness. The art itself works more effectively than the writing at that same vital setting information I mentioned above: in a world that has (magically speaking) fallen into shadow there are still these motes of vibrant power and there are countless forces that move in the darkness.
It's worth noting that I do think there's a deeper parallel between the various types of us who call ourselves "queer" and the simple dichotomy between humans and non- in this book. Much like the queer communities, the supernaturals in this book are divided into many disparate types that do and don't get along in the way any of us probably recognizes from our own lives: when out at the bar, or at the Gay Quilting Circle, or on the softball field, or down at the PTA, or wherever, the Aberzombies and the nerds and the rednecks and the closet fratboys and the drag queens and the fruit flies don't always mix well but they do consider themselves to be more or less unified against the uninitiated, ignorant masses outside those concentrations of local safety and power. I can recall times I've witnessed the many different and mutually exclusive strata of queer culture stick together - to everyone's surprise - when threatened by a common foe and this book captures that in a way I don't see happen very often in this kind of fantasy story. Pop culture attempts at modern gothic horror usually focus more on the divisions between "types" - White Wolf's World of Darkness games, the Dresden Files novels or films such as Underworld and its sequels spring to mind - and this story, so far, is focused more on the divide between its own version of the strange or impossible and everyone else.
Is it a good comic book? Hard to say. The plot takes a turn I hadn't at all expected and it's going to be interesting to see if they stick with it. The art is fan-fucking-tastic. This type of story is one that's been told a million times before but there's a definite flavor to this iteration of it that's going to draw me back. My reaction to reading #0 was immediately to rummage through my bag for #1, read it, and wish that #2 was already in my possession. That's got to mean something.
Klarion
Posted to Comics, Review on 19 April 2011
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