{"id":11412,"date":"2025-09-19T23:21:21","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T22:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11412"},"modified":"2025-09-19T23:21:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T22:21:21","slug":"magik-10-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11412","title":{"rendered":"Magik #10 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>MAGIK vol 3 #10<\/strong>
\n“Above All”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ashley Allen<\/strong>
\nArtist: Germ\u00e1n Peralta<\/strong>
\nColourist: Arthur Hesli<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Ariana Maher<\/strong>
\nEditor: Darren Shan<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> Magik and Mirage pose dramatically.<\/p>\n

This is the final issue of the current run.\u00a0Magik<\/em> doesn’t have an equivalent title during “Age of Revelation”, but some sort of sequel with the same creative team has been announced to start in January.<\/p>\n

PAGES 1-2.\u00a0<\/strong>Magik, Mirage and Liminal hold the Society of the Eternal Dawn at bay.<\/em><\/p>\n

The previous issue ended with the trio confronting the Embodiment and retrieving Cal’s heart (which Embodiment magically removed in issue #7), ultimately with a view to exorcising Liminal from Cal’s body. Magik also removed the limits on Liminal’s powers so that he could help them, presumably relying on the fact that he hadn’t fully adjusted to Cal’s body to keep him under some sort of control.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Liminal claims here to be able to call in a “demonic army” to help, and brushes off Magik’s claims that the Tower’s magic blocks teleportation… but never actually does it. Maybe he’s not as powerful as he thinks, or maybe Cal is holding him back. Then again, when Magik tries doing magic in tandem with Liminal, he seems to have more control over the resulting spell than she does.<\/p>\n

The two remaining Exemplars, Yanisa Suwan and Kian Mir, were looking sceptical of the Embodiment last issue, but are still fighting for the Society here. But they’re trying to stop Liminal from escaping and he’s threatening to kill their colleagues, so that’s fair enough.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-4. <\/strong>The Exemplars reject the Embodiment<\/em><\/p>\n

Embodiment still claims to be acting for the greater good, and insists that “My track record is clean.” This is very likely true, since her origin story last issue set her up as an “ends justify the means” type character who had created the Society to defend the world in place of the magical sect that she had destroyed as a child for exploiting her precognitive powers.<\/p>\n

Ultimately the Exemplars seem to be firmly convinced that Embodiment has indeed betrayed Mirage and Magik, and turn against her. This issue has some of the signs of an accelerated wrap up of a story that was hoped to extend another arc, but the dialogue does at least acknowledge that the Exemplars’ change of heart only makes sense if they’ve had their doubts for a while, and this is simply the last straw for them.<\/p>\n

PAGES 5-7.<\/strong> Magik and Embodiment fight through the Tower.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Did you forget that I can see three seconds into the future?”<\/strong> Embodiment can clearly see much further than that, since she was used to scan the future as a child. That was with outside machinery, though, and she’s also got access to the Library of the Fates for prophecies, so it’s possible that her baseline level of foresight is quite limited.<\/p>\n

Despite that, she seemed completely blindsided by the Exemplars turning on her. Most likely, the explanation for that is that it simply wasn’t on her radar as a possibility and she wasn’t paranoid enough to be looking. More generally, she doesn’t seem to have predicted the general course of events in this issue, but perhaps that’s obscured to some degree by Magik and Liminal’s own magical abilities.<\/p>\n

Somewhere during this scene, Magik produces her second sword – the Wraithsword that she picked up in Limbo in issue #6.<\/p>\n

Magik picks up on the parallels between her own back story and Embodiment’s in the previous issue, but Embodiment seems committed to the role that she’s taken on, and insists that she’s at peace with herself. There are some obvious hints that she’s protesting too much.<\/p>\n

PAGES 8-13.<\/strong>\u00a0Magik defeats Embodiment in the Library of the Fates.<\/em><\/p>\n

We saw this doorway in issue #7, also described as leading to the Library of the Fates, “a nexus for prophetic information”. This is the first time we’ve seen inside, and Embodiment presents it as her own realm, analogous to Magik’s link with Limbo and Liminal’s connection with his own realm. The realm appears as a load of books and bookcases floating in space, which is presumably one of those cases of people interpreting the realm in a way that makes sense to them.<\/p>\n

This finale rather hinges on Embodiment’s powers working in ways that hadn’t actually been set up; apparently there has to be some “physical stimulus” to trigger her premonitions, which makes her vulnerable to ambush. She can also be overwhelmed by surrounding her with spellbooks which give her too many stimuli to process at once – basically, the idea seems to be that you can’t prevent her from seeing the immediate future but you can make it so chaotic that a few seconds notice still isn’t enough time to usefully react.<\/p>\n

Anyway, since Embodiment isn’t an outright villain, Magik leaves her in the Library to have a time out – although she destroys the door on the next page, so presumably she’s confident that Embodiment won’t just starve to death there.<\/p>\n

PAGES 14-20.\u00a0<\/strong>Magik and Mirage free Cal from<\/em> Liminal.<\/p>\n

Magik correctly figures out that Cal has been speaking through Liminal, the most obvious example being him suddenly drawing attention to the Tower’s captive star in the previous issue. But this probably also explains Liminal’s inconsistent behaviour in issue #8, such as offering intermittently useful advice, and drawing symbols before denying that he had done it.<\/p>\n

A bit of pseudoscience explains that thanks to the Society’s captive star, Cal can indeed be used properly to imprison Liminal, with Cal as the dominant personality. It’s not clear whether the Embodiment knew this was an option all along – it’s possible that she genuinely didn’t, since it plays into the idea of Cal as a character with a foot in both magic and science. It’s also possible that she did, but wasn’t willing to use the star in this way; certainly, what happens here seems to lead to the collapse of the tower.<\/p>\n

Despite us being told about massive numbers of Society members at the start of the issue, the art only shows a handful of soldiers standing around with the remaining Exemplars at the end. Nobody seems to think there’s just been a mass slaughter, though, so apparently everyone else got out and hanging around off panel.<\/p>\n

Cal essentially writes himself out by declaring that he wants to go back to school.<\/p>\n

Magik seems to have learned from all this that she’s ready to move on and “rediscover who I am outside of everything that’s happened”. That’s no doubt a set-up for whatever book we’re doing in January, but it does make reasonable sense coming out of this series: she came to terms with her Darkchilde persona in the first arc, and now that she’s sorted out the mess with Liminal and Cal, she can turn her attention back to the consequences of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MAGIK vol 3 #10 “Above All” Writer: Ashley Allen Artist: Germ\u00e1n Peralta Colourist: Arthur Hesli Letterer: Ariana Maher Editor: Darren Shan COVER: Magik and Mirage pose dramatically. This is the final issue of the current run.\u00a0Magik doesn’t have an equivalent title during “Age of Revelation”, but some sort of sequel with the same creative team […]<\/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-11412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11412","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=11412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11414,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11412\/revisions\/11414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}