Review by Ian Keogh
Broken House of Cards moves Madame Xanadu forward to 1957 and a cry for help from Betty Reynolds. She should be living the TV-promoted, white family’s suburban dream, but strange things have begun happening to her.
Matt Wagner’s progression of Madame Xanadu through the centuries has transformed a powerful, but restrained and uncertain person into someone more than capable of holding her own in any given situation. Once tracked down, the mystical threat seen in Exodus Noir was easily dealt with. Now, however, after a millennium, she’s once again faced with her malign and aggressive sister.
Either Wagner or Vertigo’s editorial department have planned artistic changes well, ensuring when there’s a change of artist there’s also a change of circumstances. Primary artist Amy Reeder has now contracted her name, but confidently and decoratively delivers all pages set in the 1950s, while Jöelle Jones supplies interlude chapters set in the past explaining the relationship between Madame Xanadu and Morgaine Le Fey. The talent is very obviously present, particularly in full pages designed to resemble book illustrations, but Jones isn’t yet the artist she’d become.
The chapters set in the distant past at the dawn of mankind show Nimue and Morgana’s fairy heritage and their contrasting relationship with humans, Morgana’s cruelty offending Nimue. We also see oldest sister Vivienne for the first time in what becomes a story about whether might makes right. It’s followed by Wagner pulling events up to the dawn of Camelot, preceding the starting point of opening volume Disenchanted.
In every volume Wagner has made good use of guest stars, and does so again with a telepathic trenchcoated detective called John Jones. As his Martian Manhunter identity never transferred to the Vertigo universe Jones remains in human form, so readers unfamiliar with him may be puzzled at the appearance of someone so powerful. He’s needed, though, as Wagner draws seemingly disparate threads of gangsters, would-be Satanists and Morgana together, and pleasingly the finale is contingent on someone who’d seemingly been forgotten in the chaos.
Concluding the main story doesn’t end the book, though, and it’s followed by a short tale of dreams that descend into nightmares. The brevity shouldn’t discount the intelligence, and it’s among the highlights of the run. Sadly, that run concludes with Extra-Sensory.
