Bleeding Fiction

I've been a big fan of the Books of Magic comic for a long, long time, in all of its various incarnations. First the four part miniseries that Neil Gaiman wrote, which gives a full tour of DC's magic landscape and (according to Roger Zelazny's introduction) takes young Tim on a Campbellian Hero's Journey, and then later the regular series that John Ney Reiber wrote, which was probably the most realistic portrayal of a teenager I've ever seen in a work of fiction.

The latest entry into the Books of Magic "universe" is the series Life During Wartime and the first trade paperback came out today. It's a new take on Tim and his story, a different world than anything we've seen before and it's absolutely awesome. This is everything readers have come to expect from the Books of Magic - the grainy whimsy, the intricate plots, the existential questioning, the use of Faerie, Heaven and Hell as places filled with flawed individuals - but with a slightly different edge. It's a look at Tim and his friends as twenty-something druggies rather than innocent young teenagers, it's a wonderful take on religious extremism, it's a look at the psychological impact of war and the strangeness of a world without either it or magic. Plus it's clever. My favorite quote: "There's no such thing as science. He's just pretending not to use magic."

At the same time, this is a different continuity than the last series. It doesn't take place in the same world and it's a very different storyline. That's a bit disappointing to me. It's not that this new book isn't just as good in it's own way (as I said, it's awesome). It's just that I think that the old Tim had more of a story than he got. The love of his life is still fey-touched; he's only just starting to get a handle on what magic is and how to use it; the succubus who loves him is still wandering around somewhere, along with several other interesting characters from his past; and his mother's memories are waiting for him, turned into jam, in jars in the cupboard.

To be honest, I liked the old Tim better, too. He was sensible and stupid, infuriating and clever and sarcastic. And he talked to himself. He was, as I said, real. This new Tim, well, we haven't seen a lot of him yet, but he seems a quieter sort, an internal thinker rather than an external one.

I like the new Books of Magic, I'm very happy to have read it and I'm waiting anxiously for the next trade paperback (which will doubtless be a little while), but that doesn't stop me wanting to read more about the Tim I've been reading about for, literally, a decade.