3 out of 5

Lordy, underwhelming: thy name is Black Magick.

People, I want you to know: I’ve read a heckuva lotta Greg Rucka, book and comic, and a heckuva lot of it as it came out.  Nay, stop, that’s not an “I was here first” claim; rather, I just want to say that I’ve seen his growth and writing shifts as they’ve occurred.  I’ve seen trends I’ve liked, and seen trends I’ve been sort of iffy on.

The Greg, as of late, has found himself in what I’d consider an interesting spot of doing, like, what he wants to do.  So that means we get the deep dive politics of Lazarus, the down and dirty low-level crimes of Stumptown, and then random whims or check-fills like a Star Wars novel or Veil.  Oh, and Black Magick.

People love Black Magick.  It checks their boxes of strong, female lead (Greg’s specialty…) and justifying Wiccan love, i.e. I put that stuff in the closet when I didn’t want to take it seriously but now I see that it was actually pretty cool all along.  Now, I’d be totally down with a supernatural / noir mash-up, but that’s not what’s happening here.  In fact: hardly anything is happening here.  Our cop, Rowan, might use her witchy powers to solve crimes, but that is sooooo in the background to a slooooow moving foreground of witch hunters, or rival witch clans, or deny your destiny something something.  Bad sign: I’m not that interested.  I’d blame the pacing on the lifelike (I was going to say breathlessly lifelike, but that seems confusing) artwork of Nicola Scott, but she and Greg did a bang-up job on Wonder Woman, with action a’plenty, so I don’t think that’s it.  And I started with the preamble about Greg’s “modes” to clarify that I also don’t think Greg is just writing like this at the moment – i.e. in a hazy, dreamlike fashion that subjugates what there is of plot movement to some molasses-momentum layer of the story – I think this is a purposeful affectation.  It’s something that admittedly matches the black and white color palette, which casts the comic into a time period of the 40s or 50s – era of the black and white drama – juxtaposed with its actual present day setting.  I can get that, contextually, as a way of meta-realizing the comic’s themes of pasts that continue to haunt us, but the whole magilla is maybe too enmeshed in this wrapping for me to really get into it.

And I don’t find Rowan all that interesting.  I’d rather Greg continued with the weirdness of Veil, but I guess that’s not happening, or give us more Stumptown.  And the crooked lines on the H’s in Jodi Wynne’s lettering really freakin’ bug me.

So we learn… a bit… more… about Rowan’s past, and some bad guys come to the fore to set things alight and be threatening.  And a cat.

It’s an amazing presentation, Mr. Trautmann, and what there is for us to read and see is undoubtedly precise; I don’t doubt at all in Greg’s plans and Scott’s art manages that uncanny valley line of realism without losing its humanity (which is often my problem with that style).  I’m just not positive I’m down with this exact expression of Ruckaness, alas.