Books of Magic #24

Hello! You might know my other blog, Lunatic Obscurity, where I review obscure old videogames in an attempt to save them from damnation (in the Fortean sense of the word). Because I have many thoughts about comics, TV shows, movies and other miscellany, I've started another blog (this one). This blog will probably be pretty different in tone and content to the other one, since it I do plan on it mainly being an outlet for thoughts, rather than the opinionated reviews of LO, but who knows how much of this will end up being true?

For the inaugural post on this blog, I've picked a single issue of a comic, and it's a single issue that represents various firsts for me: the first comic I'd ever read that was marked "for mature readers", the first time I'd ever seen fairies depicted as anything other than harmless creatures in childrens' stories, and probably the first comic I'd ever read that didn't contain any action. Read without the context of the issues preceding it, this issue is about a girl going up a hill, reading a letter and meeting a fairy. Though it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would appeal to a 10-year-old boy,it totally enthralled me! I'd never seen anything like it before!

It wasn't set in a city acting as a superhero habitat, or a futuristic dystopia, but in the Irish countryside. A countryside, which, as depicted in this comic at least, bore more than a passing resemblence to the Yorkshire countryside that surrounded the village where I lived. The main character was just a mostly-normal teenage girl, in regular clothes. Even with the fairy and the talking stones and such, every part of it, story and art, felt totally grounded in reality. I'd never seen or read anything like it before!

I've since read the entire Books of Magic series several times, so I know all about Molly O'Reilly, Amadan, Tim Hunter and all the other things that led up to and from this issue, and though the series as a whole is one of my all-time favourites, even against the rest of the localised golden age that DC's Vertigo imprint was going through at the time, with series like The Sandman and House of Secrets alongside Books of Magic, this issue in particular will always have its own special meaning to me, for introducing me to kinds of fiction and aesthetic that were totally new to me.