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Magical gobbledygook.

Published 2007

Ok, so, complicated: Mystic Arcana is a series of 4 books, each focusing on an early magic-based hero from Marvel. Each book has a self-contained plot as well as scenes from an ongoing plot that runs throughout. This is not the first in the run, so I was definitely confused by the series plot.

Problem is, the issue’s “self-contained” plot was also extremely confusing.

It boils down to “toddler-Wanda casts her first spell and is almost adopted by a witches coven, but they change their minds.”
This story is very “and then this happened” with very little “due to that, this happened.”
So I’m just going to give you a list of strange things:

• Wanda lives in a gypsy encampment that looks like it would be pretty offensive to actual gypsies.
• The witches’ coven is heavily implied to be made up of parents of a lot of important characters, but I don’t recognize any of them.

• One of the witches has an uncle that worships a different god so he has to stop Wanda being adopted by the coven, but when the coven finds out uncle’s god has claimed Wanda they agree to send her to America instead of adopting her and
• This comic, both the ongoing series story and the issue story, is the worst kind of “when the magic system is gobbledygook”

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Off the back of this, I’m guessing the 4-issue series is pretty poorly put together. And this is the only one I see in the reading order, but the others could be buried somewhere in the 16,000. If you haven’t gotten the memo yet, don’t read this, trust me.