TRoOB: Destiny, NY

[jducoeur]

Time for a new installment of The Review of Obscure Books! This is my (at this point pretty occasional, but long-running) review column of comic books that I think deserve more attention than they are getting.

During our recent vacation (about which, more in a later post), my evening reading was Destiny, NY. I had backed Volume 3 on Kickstarter, mostly on the grounds of "that looks like it might be interesting". I'm glad I did -- it's a winner.

The story takes place in a world that is very nearly our own. It is a world with magic -- but only a little bit of it. Magic isn't secretive a la Harry Potter: not only is it public, there's even a federal agency dedicated to regulating it. But it's pretty rare, and the average person in the street isn't necessarily sure that it's even real. Perhaps the most conspicuous part is the Seers, folks with mild precognitive abilities. Their visions are sometimes good, sometimes not so much; sometimes reasonably clear, often far from it.

Sometimes a Seer identifies a kid with a capital-D Destiny -- the truly important thing that they will do, that will define the meaning of their life. And that is where Destiny University comes in: a school prepares them to fulfill that Destiny.

And that's where we get to Logan McBride. Logan was a "magical girl", a child with a Destiny. Which she fulfilled at age 13. Now, it's 15 years later, and she still doesn't quite know what she is supposed to do with the rest of her life, wrestling with the depressing knowledge that she peaked as a child -- she had one important day, and then it was all over.

Now, she's just found new love in her girlfriend Lilith. And her ex-girlfriend (and still friend) Gia has gotten details on her own Destiny, to kill "the most ancient evil" -- who is, unfortunately, Lilith.

Suffice it to say, it's complicated, and there is more going on than shows on the surface.

The first volume stands reasonably on its own as a novel, but the story really comes into its own in the later volumes, as the unexplored plot threads from the first story trace outward. It becomes more of an ensemble story, and shows its strength as it explores more of the characters, ranging from "gangsta barista" Trinity to would-be-Potter Joe. (Who covers a 15-year-old's insecurity with all the braggadocio in the world.) With the exception of a Chaos God who might be just plain EEEEVIL, pretty much everyone has depth and motive. Relationships grow and change -- enemies become allies, sometimes even friends, and the closest relationships can break on a bad moment.

It's all terribly real, and that's important. The story is about 15% magic, 10% suspense, and 75% relationship drama, but it never devolves into soap opera. Rather like Sunstone (one of my favorite books of recent years), I find myself liking and caring about these characters a lot, and that matters to me more than almost anything else in a graphic novel.

There have been three books so far, which I've picked up electronically. When the Kickstarter for the fourth comes out, I plan to pick up the entire series in paper -- the first e-book I've cared about enough to make that jump. Each volume is a well-defined story, advancing the overall arcs (by now, there are a lot of arcs going on), and each ends with a whole pile of short stories, each fleshing out one of the characters.

Plain and simply, it's great -- a book that understands how to use genre in service to human storytelling, not instead of it. Highly recommended...