Review by Woodrow Phoenix
A house that used to belong to a Grand Order of Magicians stands empty and abandoned. Suddenly an elephant magician appears, climbing out of the teapot on the table. He slams the door on his way out, knocking a picture frame to the floor. A blackbird magician is freed by the breaking frame and exits the house via the open window. A young girl magician then appears from behind a screen in the corner and makes her way outside. The floor splits to reveal a large, angry mechanical Chinese lion-faced dragon, who is trying to catch the three of them. He is joined by a young woman with a bow and arrow: the Huntress. She and Clinker, the dragon, have been pursuing the three magicians for a while. They vow to stay on their trail until they catch and destroy them. But why are they chasing them? Who are the heroes and who are the villains in this story?
After the typical comic layout of The Holidays composed of panels and grids, Blexbolex has returned to his more usual design approach for this story. Each page is one image, usually with a block of text underneath. The Magicians is very much in his tradition of the book as an object. This one features an unusual kind of binding where images are only printed on one side of a long sheet which is then folded like a leporello (the bookmaking term for a concertina) so the images face each other as usual. The folded pages are bound into a standard book layout, so you won’t notice anything unusual until you begin paging through a copy and find each spread has extra thickness to it. It’s an old method occasionally used in vintage book production for dealing with images that had a lot of ink on the paper: by doubling the sheet there is no problem of images showing through to the other side of the page. Blexbolex’s silkscreen-style of overprinting three spot colours in layers on these folded and gathered pages gives The Magicians that extra luxuriously antique artbook flavour. It also makes this book twice as thick as if it were printed conventionally.
The reasons for the chase, the identities of the magicians and their pursuers are the mysteries driving the beautifully designed and executed narrative, so you will want to discover those things for yourself. Suffice to say if you and/or your children like the fairytale structures of previous books by Blexbolex this one has all the same ingredients that make those pleasurable reading. The Magicians is a ‘Best Book of 2023’ for The Wall Street Journal and Moonbow, A ‘Best Middle Grade Book of 2023’ for Kirkus, and a Booklist ‘Editors’ Choice: Graphic Novels, 2023’.
