Magik & Colossus #5: Mutant Therapy

Magik & Colossus #5 opens up immediately after the last page of the fourth issue. The Rasputin siblings are immediately tossed into a life-or-death battle against Koschei in the Russian countryside.

The age-old trope of a villain explaining how their powers work. Koschei has been a boastful character, but it doesn’t make much sense for him to monologue his own powers in the middle of his battle with Magik.

That dialogue itself, which extends to all of the characters in this issue, is the main problem with the story itself. Each of the characters is overly self-aware to the point that they are essentially performing therapy on themselves in the action sequences, which slows down the pacing considerably and can cause readers to get lost easily. Well, it’s nice to see a peaceful and supportive resolution between the two siblings, but it comes at the cost of the issue’s immersion and the storyline’s emotional payoff, which has been built up to slowly but happens practically instantly.

It’s clear that Ashley Allen spent a lot of time getting the characters right, and the writing does, but it feels more like the author’s words than the character’s. Beyond that, all the time spent on the dialogue does lead to some inconsistencies on the page, such as a magical rapier that appears out of nowhere in a scene where Illyana’s magic is being cancelled out completely by Koschei’s ritual. This second weapon is wielded alongside Magik’s iconic Soulsword and is never addressed until it is presumably destroyed when it’s targeted by one of Koschei’s spells, at which point Magik re-summons her Soulsword, which had disappeared abruptly in a different panel so she could open a stepping disc. It hasn’t been a problem in the past, but okay.

That brings me to the art. For the most part, Germán Peralta’s artwork, combined with Arthur Hesli’s colors, carries that same dark fantastical ambiance that the previous four issues have thrived on. It’s mostly excellent, but a handful of pages take noticeable shortcuts, like a flat single-color background or flat backgrounds that lack the same definition as some scenes in the issue. It’s not necessarily bad artwork, it just ends up coming across as tonally inconsistent despite being high-quality line art with lots of detail in some of the panels.

This issue is full of magical blasts, spells, and effects. Arthur Hesli delivers on each of these very well by drawing bright colors onto Peralta’s darker backgrounds, which rely heavily on shading for the issue’s nighttime atmosphere. Further, the lighting that these effects create is consistent across the pages and is used as light sources in scenes that would otherwise lack them. It’s clear that Peralta trusted Hesli’s coloring for this exact purpose.