I gave a warning last year, didn’t I? We start the new year off fresh with an old favorite of mine, Sorcery 101 by Kel McDonald. As a customary reminder, I mentioned last week that they’re trying to run a kickstarter to publish their first omnibus for the comic. It’s in its last week, so if you’re interested, please please please check it out here. They’re still painfully short of their goal.
It doesn’t always happen, but with the season I managed to devour the entire backlog of pages (roughly 1300) in roughly two days. The joy of this particular series was, in returning to these pages – I had read a few chapters in around the start of the series in early college – was that it wasn’t a chore to slog through the backlog, so to speak. The pacing of the story is well enough done that reading through parts of it was a breeze. I could go into a completely separate article about webcomic artists going back and fixing up their initial chapters (speaking from an artist standpoint myself), I will leave it at saying that her art has most assuredly matured well. A lot of it is still similar to the beginning, but the lines and shading have a feel of crispness to them that wasn’t there in the original black-and-white updates that I remember years ago. And if I’m remembering incorrectly….that happens, too.
The story revolves around Danny, History Teacher at a Boys’ School and his day to day life. Magic hovers between commonplace and something that mundane folk need to be kept in the dark about unless something dire happens. As one travels further along the comic, it doesn’t take long to realize that Danny’s not exactly normal: Blood Bound to one evil-as-hell vampire, attempting to learn sorcery from the closest thing to a “vegan” vampire (Pig’s blood, anyone?), his best friend a werewolf and his wife a magi – which, in this case, seem to be separated from Sorcery in ways I’m still not clear about. Oh yeah, and Danny’s a Prince who’s given up any and all claim to his family’s throne. Complicated life is oversimplifying it.
Yet the story is relatively easy to follow, with each character developing their own distinct personality over the course of the comic. Kel takes great pains to explain the history of the world when it’s necessary to the comic: no superfluous information is really stuffed in your head from the getgo. What starts as something almost slice-of-life turns down the rabbit hole and back again as a three-headed behemoth. But hey, you’ll enjoy yourself in the meantime.
Again, you can read Kel’s other works on her site (as well as Sorcery 101 in its current entirety) and check out her Kickstarter for the first omnibus here. The series ends sometime this year, so now’s as good a time as any to check it out!
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