5 out of 5

Sometimes you really can tell, just from a few pages.  I sampled a few pages of Amelia Cole, for example – from volume 5 – and was imbued with the knowledge that I would love the series, and shouldn’t hesitate to catch up.  Questionable though my wielding of expenses may occasionally be, over time I accrued the four preceding books, knowing I’d want the ability to flow from one volume to the next without delay.

Here we are at book one; that gifted awareness was accurate: I loved it, and I can’t wait to start on book two.

Writers D.J. Kirkbride and Adam Knave tackle a ‘secret magic world’ format, but factor in our Harry Potter-ized acceptance of such tropes by zooming past all the setup and kicking in, quite literally, mid battle: as wizard Amelia squares off against a ‘persuasion demon,’ her headphones preventing her from being persuaded, but also quite well speaking to Cole’s laid back approach.  We get it: spells, wands, good guys, bad guys, but it helps that our art team can help us truly visually ‘get it’ as well, with relative rookie Nick Brokenshire making an amazing impression – complicated action choreography, told clearly and excitingly; varied personality tics and traits, fully animated on the page – and supported exceedingly well by expressive lettering from Rachel Deering, and a bright and light color palette from color assistant Ruiz Moreno.  Knave and Kirkbride then throw a curveball, though, somewhat reversing the norms for genre tales of this type: instead of bringing magic to the normal world or vice versa, Cole finds herself trapped in a heretofore unknown realm where both magic-users and “normals” interact, but are treated as something of a higher and lower class…

As Cole establishes herself in this ‘unknown world’ as a magic-imbued building superintendant, she befriends – against this society’s usual standards – non-magic users, and finds herself at odds with ‘The Protector,’ a one-man police force, who seems to be a more extreme example of the class divide between wizards and others.

But fear not: this isn’t beat-you-over-the-head social commentary; it’s just flavor to incredibly organic world-building.  Brokenshire, Knave, and Kirkbrade give Cole and her surroundings an immense amount of personality, which makes even day-to-day fixer-upper moments around the apartment building worthwhile, with some extra humor dashed in thanks to a silent helper golem Amelia construsts out of rubble and bits and bobs.

And then double fear not: there somehow manages to be plenty of room for wizard battles through Unknown World, as well as building the brewing discontent of ‘the magistrate’ with The Protector, and other intriguing plotlines, such as why this world was kept secret from Cole in the first place…

While I could knock this trade for not including issue covers or chapter breaks, I was maybe too busy flipping from page to page – then back, to appreciate the art – to really care.