542

When I started this new series I thought it started with #5 because the original series was 1-4. Then after reading about 20 issues I found the "new" 1-4 (this one). Good stuff. Wish I would have read it first, probably would have made things make a little more sense. ( )

In which Timothy Hunter finds out that his parents aren't his parents and almost dies. I love this series, but I like the later issues or trades better. ( )

Not as thrilling and magical as the original but how can it be. Good because i want to figure out what happens next,I really want Timothy Hunter to grow to be a great
magician, so i wouldn't like it if the rest of the books were just his
education in magic. it should really be the full story, with a
beginning or an end.

This second volume in the Books of Magic series (numbered, confusingly, as volume 1) further develops the character of Timothy Hunter and begins to explore his mythic origins. When Tim is drawn away from his world by his birth father Tam Lin, we witness his first true trial--capture by the manticore--and learn of his otherworldly genesis. Unfortunately, the story suffered a bit in some of the same ways that the first did--sometimes I felt as if I had missed large swathes of the story, I suspect because some action took place in some comic book or another that I missed--and Tim, though his characterization is drastically improved here, still felt a little thin.However, there were a handful of stand-out scenes that made this book memorable: Tim's experiences in the manticore's den, his interactions with Death, and the rambling monologue of his surprisingly empathetic one-armed foster father. I'm having trouble evaluating this series so far as I normally do. The bits I like, I like very, very much, but as a whole, the graphic novels seem to leave me scratching my head. They're wispy and dreamlike, not always to good effect, but the parts that were well done were well done enough to keep me reading. We'll see if there's any improvement. ( )