The Books of Magic is the title of a four-issue English-language comic book miniseries written by Neil Gaiman, published by DC Comics, and later an ongoing series under the imprint Vertigo. The first issue came out in 1990. Since its original publication, the miniseries has also been published in a single-volume collection under the Vertigo imprint with an introduction by author Roger Zelazny. It tells the story of a young boy who has the potential to become the world's greatest magician.
Miniseries The Books of Magic began life when DC Comics decided to highlight some of their mystical characters across the range. They initially approached writer J. M. DeMatteis to script a prose book with illustrations from Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Dave McKean and others, but when it reached the stage of confirming the artists' involvement, the suggested artists all declined to be involved. At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back, and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters". Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Gaiman created an everyman character of a twelve-year-old boy, called Timothy Hunter, who would need to be given an extensive tour of the DC magical universe before being able to decide if he should embrace or reject his destiny as the world's greatest magician.
Gaiman used the four issues to formally split the structure of the story and allow for a different artist to draw each issue: In Book I: The Invisible Labyrinth (artwork by John Bolton), Tim is introduced to the history of the DC Universe by the Phantom Stranger. In Book II: The Shadow World (artwork by Scott Hampton), he is taken around the present world by John Constantine. In Book III: The Land of Summer's Twilight (artwork by Charles Vess) he visits Faerie, Gemworld, Skartaris, King Arthur's Camelot, Hell, and the other mystical realms with Doctor Occult. In Book IV: The Road to Nowhere (artwork by Paul Johnson) he travels to a possible future of the universe with Mister E.
This structure allowed Gaiman great scope to include various magical characters from across DC's ranges, as well as reintroducing characters that weren't currently in print. In his introduction to the collected edition, author Roger Zelazny also noted that the structure bore some similarity to the key story points of the mythic structure identified by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, although he did allow that this might come from Gaiman's intimate knowledge of the same source material rather than a deliberate attempt to follow Campbell's guidelines. When the book was initially released over 1990/91, it proved very popular and led Vertigo executive editor Karen Berger to make it a regular ongoing series under editor Stuart Moore.
Ongoing series Tim Hunter made the ultimate choice to pursue magic in the Mister E miniseries by K. W. Jeter when he was forced to use magic to prevent Mister E from killing him. He was aided in this decision by The Phantom Stranger, Doctor Fate, and Zatanna.
Berger struggled to find a writer suitable for the project, however, with writers like Dick Foreman struggling to handle the character of Tim. Berger eventually approached John Ney Rieber after having seen some of his work, convinced that he would be able to meet the challenge of developing Tim into a fully rounded character. Rieber was asked to come up with a story outline for the proposed series, but these were rejected by Berger and DC. Still convinced that Rieber was the writer for the job, Berger asked him to persevere: he tried "several times to come up with something different, but it still didn't thrill anyone". At one point, Rieber himself tried to withdraw from the project, but Berger was still convinced that he could do it, and when the Vertigo The Children's Crusade event was being planned, she asked him to write one of the chapters to reintroduce Tim to the DC Universe.
The Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual was the sixth part of The Children's Crusade series, with artwork by Peter Gross. It introduced several characters created by Rieber that would be developed in the later ongoing series, such as Tim's biological father Tamlin, as well as starting off some of the ongoing book's storylines. The annual saw Neil Gaiman's first credit as "creative consultant" for The Books of Magic, a position which DC Comics paid him to carry out despite the fact that even when he did make comments on the script, he was told that it was too late for anything to be changed.
By the time the series launched, the name had returned to The Books of Magic and a regular rotating team of artists Gross, Gary Amaro and Peter Snejbjerg was put in place to provide artwork for alternating storylines. In early 1997, Rieber announced to Peter Gross that he was going to leave the comic. Gross attributed this to Rieber's growing dislike of the comic's central character, which Rieber seemingly confirmed in his "Afterward" for his final issue, saying: "I've found it difficult to like Tim now and then. Of course he gets on my nerves. He's a lot like someone I spent years learning not to be". Rieber's last issue was issue #50, coincidentally the point at which original co-creator Neil Gaiman decided that the time was right to stop "taking DC's $200 an issue and not doing anything" and resigned as creative consultant on the book.
With Rieber leaving, the series editor Stuart Moore championed Gross to take over scripting duties because "he got a great sense of story and character". Gross initially wrote a short memo detailing where he thought the series should go, hoping that it might influence the editors' choice of writer. Gross was then asked if he could expand his ideas into an actual story, and he plotted a six issue story that he thought might be used as a "filler" until a new writer could be found. DC encouraged him to think bigger until, by the time he started writing his first issue, he had plotted out a 23-issue-long story for the book. This soon expanded into plots for Gross' entire 25-issue run, despite Gross initially being nervous that his writing efforts would be unfavorably compared to those of Gaiman and Rieber by the series' fans.
As well as writing, Gross continued to provide artwork for the book, juggling this with a separate career teaching a class in Comic Illustration at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Despite this, he still attempted to write full scripts for each issue, saying: "I like working that way so I can kind of forget about it before I sit down to draw. So when I draw it, I can think of it as something I didn’t write almost". This sometimes caused difficulties for Gross, and guest artists were used frequently to help lighten the load - and on one occasion, Peter Hogan was brought in to write a filler issue that gave Gross more time to catch up.
From the beginning of Gross' run, there were tentative plans for the comic to rest after it reached its 75th issue. Such a break would be used to allow the character of Tim Hunter to grow up a little before resuming his story - Gross had ideas for this later run to explore the character's relationship with the women in his life, through his relationship with his late mother. When the 75th issue was reached, however, Gross decided to move away from the book, and instead Dylan Horrocks continued Tim's story in a five-issue mini-series called The Names of Magic after a short break symbolizing Tim's readiness to face his destiny. The mini-series was followed by a new ongoing monthly series, titled Hunter: The Age of Magic.
Storylines
Neil Gaiman The original mini-series concentrated on Timothy Hunter's introduction to the world of magic by the Trenchcoat Brigade (the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult, Mister E, and John Constantine), who are aware that the boy has the potential to be the world's greatest magician but that his allegiance to good or evil is undecided. Equally, he could turn from the world of magic completely and be lost to either side. The Trenchcoat Brigade see it as their duty to resolve the uncertainty around Tim's fate one way or another.
They take him from the birth of the universe all the way through to its eventual death, ostensibly teaching him about the possibilities - and the price - of wielding magic before he decides whether to embrace his destiny. Along the way, Tim meets some of the DCU's more prominent magicians and fantasy characters, such as Merlin, Zatara, Doctor Fate, The Spectre, Madame Xanadu, Doctor Thirteen, Zatanna, Dream, John Constantine, Cain and Abel, Destiny, and Death, whilst his allies try to protect him from the machinations of the Cult of the Cold Flame. Following his misadventures, Tim decides that the price is too high, only to find that everything he has learnt from his supposed mentors has made it impossible for him to turn away from magic.
John Ney Rieber Finding Tim's parents As John Ney Rieber began the ongoing series, he used the stories to focus on telling Tim's story: he summed up his run later by saying "The Books of Magic aren't about Cool. They're about Tim". His first storyline, Bindings, for example ostensibly showed Tim discovering that since the realm of Faerie had cut itself off from Tim's world (the Mundane world) it was withering and dying, something that Titania hid from her people by using powerful glamours, but that Tim managed to permanently cure by "opening" the realm again to the Earth. This story, however, was merely the backdrop to a more personal story for Tim, as he discovered that the Falconer Tamlin (who kidnapped Tim during the events of the Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual) was actually his true father, and that the Faerie Queen Titania might be his mother: this revelation first appeared in a gaming guide to the DC Universe, possibly misinterpreting a scene in the original miniseries where Titania refers to Tim as "my son".
Bindings also brings Tim into conflict with a Manticore, who attempts to convince Tim of the non-existence of magic before hunting and killing him. Tim revives and releases a unicorn that has been similarly hunted, and destroys the Manticore, but not before he is poisoned by it. The boy nearly dies, until his father Tamlin performs a magic ritual which allows him to die in Tim's place. The boy recovers and returns to Earth with Titania's curses in his ears, having to come to terms with the revelation that the people he thought of as his parents - a mother who died in a car crash caused by his one-armed, grieving father - might be no relation to him at all.
Partly the Faerie storyline in Bindings was written to appease DC's desire for a "big" story to launch the new series with: Rieber's original starting point was to be the Summonings storyline instead, introducing Tim's first girlfriend Molly O'Reilly and demonstrating the writer's desire that the stories should be about "a realm that has never been mapped by the Royal Geographic Society and never will be. People who've lost touch with the place call it 'Adolescence'".