SCRIPT: MIKE MADDOX
ARTIST: PRADEEP INGALE

PRICE: $4.99

The Masked Magician is the star of the Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed TV specials, made by Nash Entertainment, the people behind such series as Who Wants To Be A Superhero? and Court TV’s “Most Shocking. Originally portrayed by Val Valentino, the identity of the current man behind the mask is unknown.

Until now. Virgin Comics, together with Nash Entertainment, bring us the story of the Masked Magician. His name is Tom Worley, and he helps to design tricks for a big, flashy, slightly outdated magician. To put it another way, he’s Jonathan Creek without the quirky personality. The magician he works for, Mark Swain, is secretly a very bad man indeed. He’s attempting to assemble a collection of four magical statues that will enable him to rule the world.

Sounds OK, doesn’t it? Could be a reasonably entertaining made-for-TV movie, like an American Jonathan Creek meets FX, meets those Librarian movies with Noah Wyle.

Well, it isn’t.

This is absolutely the worst comic that I have ever read.

We start ten thousand years ago with a statue that falls out of the sky into Britain. It gives the finder the ability to control the world. His wife eventually tricks him and steals it away, channelling the power into four statues and sending them all over the world. These statues are guarded by a group that becomes known as The Society, hiding in plain sight and using their tricks to distract us away from the real magic. Swain wants to get these statues together, and The Society has to stop him – and Tom Worley ends up being the man to do it for them.

The basic storyline is reasonably good. Like I say above, it could work reasonably well as a TV movie. The execution is where it falls down.

The dialogue is often clumsy, to the point where lines such as “The whole world saved through the healing power of light entertainment.” make an appearance, and you genuinely can’t tell if it’s the character being silly, or if the writer thinks it’s deep and profound. Odd comparisons are made – a Minotaur enters the scene, and is told to “Take off the ‘Freddy Vs Jason’ head”. Characters move from location to location at an alarming and needless rate, almost as if the artist was attempting to get as many different backdrops in as possible.

The artwork is among the worst that I have seen in a professional publication. Poor anatomy, wonky perspective and some of the most amateurish CG work ever. There is a single panel which features two cars passing one another that appear to have been drawn by a 12 year old learning to use the 3D drawing program they’ve just picked up… back in 1998. The background of the panel is a poorly photoshopped-in shot of London, which is amazing considering that the cars are on a single-lane motorway where the signs are in the central reservation, and they are written in both English and Welsh (and we’re somehow only 20 miles from Cardiff on the M4).

I cannot make this point to you strongly enough – please do not buy this book. Those of you that read my Howard the Duck review may recall that the poor quality of the issue made me lose interest in picking up Essential Howard the Duck. This title has made me lose what little interest I had in reading anything else from Virgin Comics at all – it’s so bad that it has turned me away from an entire publisher.

I read this as a free .pdf format review copy, and I still want my money back. Avoid.

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