With all this week's regular X-books caught in mid-storyline, that leaves the curious Mystic Arcana: Magik one-shot.

Mystic Arcana is really a miniseries, but as with several other recent projects, Marvel have chosen to present it as a series of four one-shots, each starring a different character.  Issue #1 gets Magik of the New Mutants.  The remaining issues get the Black Knight, the Scarlet Witch and Sister Grimm.

Tying them together is a framing sequence and back-up story featuring, of all people, Ian McNee.  If you've never heard of him, well, that's hardly surprising - his one and only previous appearance was in an issue of Marvel Fanfare in 1983.  Presumably David Sexton, who's writing the framing sequences, must have seen something he really liked in that story, since they can scarcely claim to be cashing in on the character's popularity.  From what I know of the story - and it isn't recapped here - McNee is a magician prodigy who has already learned the lesson that he doesn't particularly want the responsibilities of being Sorcerer Supreme.

The basic idea is that McNee has been enlisted by the Egyptian goddess Oshtur to restore an ancient magician called Heka-Nut, through the classic method of hunting down some objects.  The main stories, featuring the title characters, would seem to be flashbacks setting up Heka-Nut's background and introducing the magical items involved.

Although New X-Men is presently reintroducing Magik to its cast, this issue has nothing to do with that.  Instead, to fit with the ancient Egyptian theme, it's a tie-in to New Mutants #32, when Magik and Mirage accidentally travelled back in time.  This is very obscure source material.  We're going back over twenty years, to a New Mutants story that isn't talked about much. 

Faced with this remit - write a story tying in with New Mutants #32 featuring villain X and object Y - Louise Simonson plays it straight and produces a story in which Magik does her usual old routine.  She angsts about the evil in her soul, she fights heroically anyway.  This story would have fitted in quite happily as a late-80s fill-in issue, and it does a much better job of capturing Magik's appeal as a character than anything we're presently seeing in New X-Men itself.

This is not to say that you can't live without it, mind you.  Judged independently, it's a pleasantly readable fill-in issue, and not much more.  I find it a likeably retro throwback to the 1980s, but I suspect that younger readers who don't remember that period won't be swept off their feet.

The framing sequence doesn't elevate it much.  Eric Nguyen's art is quite impressive - there's a lovely double-splash of a magical dimension, and I like the conceit that the reflections in Ian's glasses form a different symbol with each panel. 

But the pacing is horrid.  The crucial exposition that sets up the entire series is ploughed through in three garbled panels when it clearly needs much, much more.  The back-up reads a little better, but it's not clear what's actually going on, and it feels completely contrived. 

Still, if you want to get an idea of why Magik actually worked as a character in the first place, you'll be much better off picking up this issue than you would be with the current New X-Men arc.

Rating: B

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