In 1999, the Trenchcoat Brigade would reunite for a titular limited series of their own. The series was a success, and editor Karen Berger would launch an ongoing Books of Magic series under DC’s mature readers Vertigo imprint to further chronicle Timothy’s adventures. DeMatteis, various production setbacks led to Neil Gaiman becoming a writer instead, with a rotating quartet of artists supplying full-painted illustrations. Initially meant to be a three-issue series written by J.M. The stew bubbles on.It will never satisfy some, of course, but at least he is on the record.The Books of Magic was a four-issue prestige-format limited series, released from late 1990 to early 1991, meant to explore various magical characters and settings in the DC Universe through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy named Timothy Hunter, guided by Zatanna and the Trenchcoat Brigade - an newly created, informal team of DC’s magic-based characters consisting of John Constantine, the Phantom Stranger, Mister E, and Doctor Occult and Rose Psychic. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. It's not the ideas, it's what you do with them that matters.

I loved Neil Gaiman's robust response: I doubted she'd read it and that it wouldn't matter if she had: I wasn't the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school.

Gorgeously illustrated, with Gaiman's typical style, but I also noticed the lack of women characters this time round - not that they are absent, but the five central figures are all male.īack in 2008 there was an exciting kerfuffle about the fact that Harry Potter, like Timothy Hunter, is also a boy wizard with a pet owl. Rereading it now, I realise that it's meant to be not only a Bildungsroman/Hero's Journey type story, but also a tour through the various magical and fantasy characters of the DC comics universe I am now much more conscious of my own ignorance of that subject than I was twenty years ago. Nwhyte I think this was the first Neil Gaiman comic I bought, or possibly was given, strongly commended by Roger Zelazny's glowing introduction, written just a year or so before his death.

The books of magic by neil gaiman