About: The Books of Magic   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : dbkwik:resource/vjsUKKphavhWX2PeAhJyjQ==, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

The Books of Magic began life when DC Comics decided to highlight some of their mystical characters across the range. They initially approached writer J. M. DeMatteis to script a prose book with illustrations from Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Dave McKean and others, but when it reached the stage of confirming the artists' involvement, the suggested artists all declined to be involved. At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back, and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters". Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Gaiman created an

AttributesValues
rdf:type
rdfs:label
  • The Books of Magic
rdfs:comment
  • The Books of Magic began life when DC Comics decided to highlight some of their mystical characters across the range. They initially approached writer J. M. DeMatteis to script a prose book with illustrations from Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Dave McKean and others, but when it reached the stage of confirming the artists' involvement, the suggested artists all declined to be involved. At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back, and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters". Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Gaiman created an
sameAs
sort
  • Books of Magic
dcterms:subject
dbkwik:crossgen-co...iPageUsesTemplate
dbkwik:heykidscomi...iPageUsesTemplate
Creators
  • John Bolton
  • Neil Gaiman
Letterers
Date
  • 1990(xsd:integer)
  • 1994(xsd:integer)
ongoing
  • Y
Issues
  • 4(xsd:integer)
  • 75(xsd:integer)
Type
  • title
Caption
  • Cover of the first issue of the ongoing series.
TPB
  • The Books of Magic
  • Transformations
  • Reckonings
  • Death After Death
  • Bindings
  • Summonings
  • Girl in the Box
  • The Burning Girl
main char team
Title
  • The Books of Magic
Format
subcat
  • DC Comics
ID
  • 1403(xsd:integer)
  • 1416(xsd:integer)
Artists
Writers
Publisher
  • DC Comics
ISBN
  • 1(xsd:integer)
Limited
  • Y
abstract
  • The Books of Magic began life when DC Comics decided to highlight some of their mystical characters across the range. They initially approached writer J. M. DeMatteis to script a prose book with illustrations from Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Dave McKean and others, but when it reached the stage of confirming the artists' involvement, the suggested artists all declined to be involved. At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back, and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters". Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Gaiman created an everyman character of a twelve-year-old boy called Timothy Hunter, who would need to be given an extensive tour of the DC magical universe before being able to decide if he should embrace or reject his destiny as the world's greatest magician. Gaiman used the four issues to formally split the structure of the story, and allow for a different artist to draw each issue: * In Book I: The Invisible Labyrinth (artwork by John Bolton), Tim is introduced to the history of the DC Universe by the Phantom Stranger; * In Book II: The Shadow World (artwork by Scott Hampton), he is taken around the present world by John Constantine; * In Book III: The Land of Summer's Twilight (artwork by Charles Vess) he visits Faerie, Gemworld, Skartaris, King Arthur's Camelot, Hell, and the other mystical realms with Doctor Occult; * In Book IV: The Road to Nowhere (artwork by Paul Johnson) he travels to a possible future of the universe with Mister E. This structure allowed Gaiman great scope to include various magical characters from across DC's ranges, as well as reintroducing characters that weren't currently in print. In his introduction to the collected edition, author Roger Zelazny also noted that the structure bore some similarity to the key story points of the mythic structure identified by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces - although he did allow that this might come from Gaiman's intimate knowledge of the same source material rather than a deliberate attempt to follow Campbell's guidelines. When the book was initially released over 1990/1991, it proved very popular and led Vertigo Executive Editor Karen Berger to make it a regular ongoing series under editor Stuart Moore.
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software