Magic The Gathering: Path of the Planeswalker II

Writing about this book reveals yet another aspect of the geekiness that runs rampant through my life. Magic the Gathering, the grand daddy of all collectible card games, has been something I’ve really enjoyed as a casual fan. I’ve been collecting again only for about a year, and the last time I was really following was about 10 years ago. It’s something that is fun to do with friends and family, and so far I’ve been too scared to ever try any kind of competitive play. It was easy for me to get sucked right back into the world of Magic after a long hiatus because the people at Wizards of the Coast have done such a great job of building an entire saga around it.

This book is one of the ways they’ve built up what is so great about Magic. Path of the Planeswalker II, like its predecessor, reprints comics that were originally published online at the Magic website. They exist to help flesh out the storyline that can really only be hinted at through the cards themselves. So these comics are running along the spiffy interactive websites and the novels in the world building department.

What we have here in this book is quite the grab bag. There should be some kind of disclosure in that if you don’t care about Magic at all, this book is highly unlikely to convert you into being a fan. This is definitely a “preaching to the choir” kind of comic. The stories are handed off between a bunch of different artists and writers (sometimes quite jarringly) and some artists are a little on the amateurish side. It’s nice that they wanted to have a painted look throughout the comic, presumably to retain that same flavor as the Magic cards themselves. As far as buzz names go, here’s what I’ve got: Arthur Suydam, Kev Walker, Brian Haberlin, Mark Texeira, but they are only a fraction of the people who worked on these comics.

Just one more pitstop before some talk about the story. The Path of the Planeswalker books, simply as physical books on the shelf, are among some of the best made trade paperbacks I have in my collection. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t seem to be cutting any expense in making these. They’re printed in the U.S. on some really nice and thick glossy paper and have nice and sturdy binding. It reminds me of an IDW book, but is superior to those...we’ll return to that connection in a bit. This compilation runs to 160 pages and costs $17.95. I don’t see Marvel or DC offering this kind of value at the $18 price point these days.

And now we arrive at the stories themselves. Some things worked a lot better than other things. My favorite parts were the origins for a couple of the planeswalkers. Once I read the stories of Garukk Wildspeaker and Liliana Vess I was expecting the rest of the comics to be devoted to telling similar stories for all of the planeswalkers. I thought they were very good because they really made it clear how Garukk was always going to be a green magic user and how Liliana was always going to be a black magic user. I think that Liliana was my favorite character in these comics, not because I found her particularly likable, but I just enjoyed her sarcasm and her darkness.

But sadly, this kind of meaningful character building isn’t a focus in too many of the other yarns. There’s a very high quotient of “heroes uniting against a huge threat and oh my god everyone could die very soon” here. Which is okay, and I’m sure that a lot of Magic fans are really looking for that. I just would like to see more of what makes the characters really tick. A lot of the fun of these comics is seeing the characters, creatures, and places that always remain so static as trading cards as they come to life and actually do stuff and become real. But sometimes there’s not quite enough development and everything remains a little hazy. Just scanning the Amazon reviews shows that the fans know when there is a stinker in the Magic canon. I think that Wizards should try to focus on the characters even more and see what happens. They might be able to make more people happy that way.

Path of the Planeswalker II covers a lot of ground storywise. The Eldrazi are seen, the plots of Nicol Bolas are advanced, Jace is out doing his thing, the Phyrexian invasion on Mirrodin is in full swing...they could have made the page count twice as high and it would still be hard to fully satisfy. Understanding that Wizards is doing what they can with these comics, it’s good that we at least have 160 pages of story in a really nice format.

One thing that is pretty exciting is an ad on the last page. It was also included in a free sampler that was distributed back in May for Free Comic Book Day. It’s a pretty great announcement: new Magic comics will be published by IDW this coming fall. It sounds like they’re going to be doing exclusive card inserts too, so that should be a lot of fun. If they have a monthly Magic series, I’m sure that Wizards will have a more steady way to roll out the story they want to tell. Things will be less sporadic. One gripe about this ad is that the link they include still doesn’t exist and it’s been two months since we’ve first seen it. Oh well, when the IDW Magic comics site is up it will be a happy day. So the future for Magic the Gathering’s comics output is looking like it will be in good hands.