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Mark Millar and Olivier Coipel's The Magic Order is Also Trying to Be Watchmen

Published Wed, 13 Jun 2018 08:30:22 -0500

Years ago, when Mark Millar was working on a Secret Society of Super-Villains pitch for DC Comics that never happened, he described it as the Watchmen of super-villains.

Years later, when it became Wanted for Top Cow, he managed to get a tame reporter on the Scottish Sunday Times to describe it as the 'Watchmen of super-villains' instead so it was someone else blowing his trumpet. It worked.

But it really wasn't. Even on a thematic and structural level, it was a very different kind of story, both in the comic and in the subsequent movie.

The closest it came to that, was the idea of someone trying to assassinate all of the Wanted super-villains/assassins, just as Watchmen had someone trying to kill all the superheroes. Which itself was reminiscent of Moore's Captain Britain plot with someone trying to kill all the psychics in Britain. Of course, there were layers and twists and turns beneath all of this.

And The Magic Order by Mark Millar and Olivier Coipel is basically… that again. Maybe even more so. Like Wanted, like Watchmen, it begins with an assassination in a ridiculous, unusual and unsettling fashion.

But then what you also get is a funeral where everyone important to the story comes out to show their respect. And yet don't get assassinated. You know that whoever is behind whatever is going on has to be at that funeral. And it won't be the obvious suspect.

Oh and also it has naked men hovering above the ground, with their… wands on display. Three for three.

Because The Magic Order has someone trying to kill all the magicians and being murdered in very magickal ways. And battles that were thought won (or lost) in the past, and coming back to the fore.

Basically, it's a murder mystery wrapped up in the clothes of another genre. It's a very pretty read too. But you what is it they say about how a magician shouldn't repeat a trick in front of the same audience?

The first issue is out today. If you can't find a copy, don't worry, every Reed POP show for the rest of the year should have plenty of copies…

By the way, I can't get the special magic trick AR to work at all, it diverts to a Facebook page that doesn't have content ready. Not for me, anyway. Anyone else having better luck?

MAGIC ORDER #1 (OF 6)
(W) Mark Millar (A/CA) Olivier Coipel
We live in a world where we've never seen a monster, and The Magic Order is the reason we sleep safely in our beds. Magic meets the mob in THE MAGIC ORDER, as five families of magicians-sworn to protect our world for generations-must battle an enemy who's picking them off one by one. By day, they live among us as our neighbors, friends, and co-workers, but by night, they are the sorcerers, magicians, and wizards that protect us from the forces of darkness…unless the darkness gets them first. MARK MILLAR's first NETFLIX comic book, drawn by the incredible OLIVIER COIPEL (Amazing Spider-Man, Thor).In Shops: Jun 13, 2018
SRP: $3.99

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