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Enchanted #1
posted December 28, 2005
 

Creators: Robert Chang
Publishing Information: Sirius, $2.95
Ordering Numbers:

Another in a long line of real-world imaginings of pulp-genre material, in this case bohemian twenty-somethings as dabblers in magical powers like summoning demons. The comic, the first in a three-issue mini-series, is the work of a Bay Area artist type named Robert Chang, and as expected the best parts of the story are the observations of this specific young people's community and the sexual flirtations that make up a large part of their lives.

There's a bit of artistic talent here, too, particularly in the inking. The page design is virtually non-existent, and the panel-to-panel progressions ape the Eisner/Caniff film school without really making sense of it -- I wanted to grab the non-existent "cameraperson" and cuff them in the head so they would stop making me dizzy. Characters are appropriately cute, but I had a hard time telling them apart.

I'd probably like this better if the genre-elements were lost; they don't seem to be used in an imaginative way. A lot of stories like this use the fantastic parts of the story to enlighten the reader on the nature of the real-world groups the story focuses on. While there may be some depths to explore in equating a witch's coven to a closed clique of young people, I don't see how the adventuresome aspects add anything to what is already a really surface observation.

This review was written in the late 1990s as part of a then-ongoing freelance gig; I apologize if it reads oddly or seems incomplete.