{"id":11107,"date":"2025-05-29T22:29:30","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T21:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11107"},"modified":"2025-05-29T22:29:30","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T21:29:30","slug":"magik-5-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11107","title":{"rendered":"Magik #5 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>MAGIK vol 3 #5<\/strong>
\n“Fate Unbound”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ashley Allen<\/strong>
\nArtist: Germ\u00e1n Peralta<\/strong>
\nColourist: Arthur Hesli<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Ariana Maher<\/strong>
\nEditor: Darren Shan<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAGIK<\/strong><\/p>\n

She’s upset and passive-aggressive about Mirage going behind her back last issue and asking Cal to keep an eye on her. She privately accepts that Mirage is right to be concerned about the threat from Darkchild, but she’s still hurt by their distrust and by not being told about this “back-up plan”.<\/p>\n

The three weeks that Liminal gave her in issue #3 to endure the Darkchild without her mental blocks have elapsed – this must have happened between issues #4-5.<\/p>\n

When Liminal escapes into Earth, the wards that Magik placed as holding measures in issues #1, #2 and #4 are broken, causing her pain. (These are the locations at the bottom of page 6.) She claims the pain is normal when a magical spell breaks, particularly a complex one. This allows Darkchild to briefly take control, until Magik uses literal self-harm to focus on the pain and suppress her.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In her own mindscape, Magik then confronts Darkchild and reconciles with her. The basic idea here is that Darkchild is not a possessing demon, but an (admittedly corrupted) aspect of Illyana herself, who developed as a protective response to her childhood trauma in Limbo. Darkchild considers herself to be trying to protect Magik, albeit rather aggressively. The upshot of all this is that Illyana needs to come to terms with her past and embrace her Darkchild side instead of rejecting and suppressing it. Things like “Inferno” are presumably being attributed to the Darkchild persona taking over altogether, instead of integrating.<\/p>\n

This all fits quite nicely with the previous issues. With hindsight, Darkchild’s speech in Magik’s dream in issue #1 is a clumsy pitch for the two of them to work together (“We can become something more”). Also, what the Darkchild actually does <\/em>in the previous issues is to continue fighting Liminal on Magik’s behalf. Cal gets scenes in both issues #1-2 where he points this out, in the face of everyone insisting that the Darkchild is a massive threat, but nobody listens to him, including Illyana.<\/p>\n

Having reconciled with Darkchild, she returns to Earth in partial demonic form, thus enacting the “Darkchild Unleashed” prophecy image that Cal’s grandmother had in issue #1.<\/p>\n

She refuses to let Cal sacrifice himself to stop Liminal, claiming that Cal is a “child” who lacks “the capacity to make this decision” – all of which ties back to her wanting to shield him from the sort of childhood that she had after getting dragged into the world of magic. When Cal sacrifices himself to stop Liminal anyway, she seems genuinely upset about this.<\/p>\n

Mirage argues that Magik has been neglecting Cal’s need for a mentor, and carts Cal off to the Society of the Eternal Dawn. She gives Mirage a lecture about responsibility (in implied contrast to her own leadership). She has a point – Illyana sort of took him on as a trainee in issue #1 but has effectively done everything she can to marginalise him in the name of keeping him safe, and offer to solve the problems for him. As she said in issue #2, “I have a mission – stop the demons attacking mutants. You are tagging along.”<\/p>\n

Her spells include the “Arm of Phorcys”. Phorcys is a primordial sea god in Greek mythology.<\/p>\n

Her one line in Russian – \u0433\u043b\u0443\u043f\u044b\u0439 – means “silly”.<\/p>\n

SUPPORTING CAST<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cal Isaacs.<\/strong> He tries to fight Liminal to avenge his bloodline, but his magical skills don’t extend beyond casting spells by reading them from a book. His\u00a0auxilium manus<\/em> spell (helping hand) works, but has no meaningful effect on the likes of Liminal.<\/p>\n

He offers his blood (and by implication his life) in order to restore the seals, on the logic that the magic involves his bloodline. When Magik tries to stop him, he forces his way in and traps Liminal inside himself. He remains unconscious for the rest of the issue, so we don’t see what that means in practice. Magik reads Cal as wanting to sacrifice himself, while Mirage reads him as trying to protect her. Mirage takes him off to the Society of the Eternal Dawn to recover.<\/p>\n

Mirage. <\/strong>She claims that Darkchild terrifies her, but admires how Magik has persevered with her; she says that she only doubted Magik last issue because Magik was doubting herself. It’s unclear how far Mirage is really on board with the idea of Magik reconciling with Darkchild; she seems pretty negative about the demon persona in this and the previous issue, but did also have a speech last issue about how Illyana was a good person because of her past, rather than in spite of it. In other words, Mirage seems to have basically the right idea about Magik needing to embrace her past, but not to appreciate that Darkchild itself falls into that category.<\/p>\n

Cyclops. <\/strong>He tries to be supportive to Illyana when he finds her crying at the Factory, in a call back to the pancake scene from issue #1.<\/p>\n

VILLAINS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liminal. <\/strong>As usual, he wants his generals to sacrifice mutants in order to access their life energy and break his final seal, allowing him to return to earth. Unfortunately, they don’t manage to draw enough blood from the single Irish mutant they capture, before being interrupted.<\/p>\n

Liminal’s solution to this is to remotely kill the two generals. Once again, he claims not to remember much of his past, but he knows that they were responsible for turning him into who he is and seems happy enough to get his revenge.<\/p>\n

He describes this issue’s location as “the very place I was born”. A caption identifies it as the Causeway Coast, which is a real area on the coast of Northern Ireland.<\/a> The “causeway” in question is the Giant’s Causeway. The ruined castle shown in this story is possibly meant to be Dunluce Castle<\/a>. Once again, mutants are so abundant in this area that there are three of them hanging around feeding sheep on the local farm. Maybe it’s some sort of outreach project, because the chances of there being that many mutants randomly working on a rural Irish farm is kind of bizarre.<\/p>\n

He describes his prison dimension as “a hollow copy of this world”, which it clearly was when we saw it in issue #3. In that issue, he seemed confused at Magik’s reaction to him, but contact with the real world seems to alter his perspective.<\/p>\n

When Magik shows up in part-demon form after reconciling with Darkchild, Liminal initially thinks that he’s achieved his goal. He’s not entirely wrong:\u00a0in issue #3, he said that she was “resisting your true self” and “I want you to be your true self on Earth”. Where he seems to have gone wrong is to read Darkchild (alone) as Magik’s true self, which is the same mistake Illyana was making.<\/p>\n

His generals. <\/strong>We saw two mages who were responsible for creating Liminal in his origin flashback in issue #3. One appeared in the present day as one of his generals in the previous issue; both appear in that role here. They still don’t get names – they’re referred to simply as the flame demon and the gravity demon.<\/p>\n

The fact that their blood works for Liminal’s sacrifice might suggest that they’re mutants. But we were told that mutants merely worked better <\/em>for the spell, because they generated more power. So it’s also possible that Liminal was just close enough to being free that any old blood would tip the balance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MAGIK vol 3 #5 “Fate Unbound” Writer: Ashley Allen Artist: Germ\u00e1n Peralta Colourist: Arthur Hesli Letterer: Ariana Maher Editor: Darren Shan MAGIK She’s upset and passive-aggressive about Mirage going behind her back last issue and asking Cal to keep an eye on her. She privately accepts that Mirage is right to be concerned about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11109,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11107\/revisions\/11109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}