Blackbird

The story is centered on Nina Rodrigues, a twenty-something drifter girl with a traumatic past. She spends her waking hours tending bar at a seedy watering hole, drinking herself, popping pills and researching online on the mysterious “cabals” of paragons, magicians who live beyond the shadows. She knows they are real, but that just causes her family to label her “Crazy baby”. But a dead mother, drunkard father and ill grandmother leaves her bunking with her more responsible sister.

When her sister is kidnapped by a giant lion-lizard-monster thing, she knows the magical world is real, and now has to navigate the cabals jockeying with each other for territory who are ready to use her as a pawn. All too suddenly she finds that she is more entrenched in the world than she bargained for…

The artwork in this series is absolutely gorgeous. The whole series has a noir feeling, with the whole world existing in luxurious shades of teal and purple. The characters are drawn out magnificently; the proportions, positioning and alignment is near photo-realistic.

The story is a little muddled and all over the place. When Nina was twelve, she had a premonition where she foresees an earthquake, but then she is the only one who is killed in the earthquake. Her mother strikes a bargain to make her a paragon, but then puts a spell on her to make her forget she is a paragon. If that is confusing, the next part even more so; her mother herself fakes her death and becomes a paragon, which leaves Nina unmoored until she is sixteen, when she turns a corner and graduates high school. But then when the story starts she is again unmoored and drifting… All this before the main story, where her mother wants to supress her, but her mother’s political opponents support her in a grand fight against her own family…

At this point the story became too muddled to follow.

The idea that paragons use crystals and a bracelet called “cirque” to make magic is not much more unhinged than using a wand, so I’ll accept that, but there being entire skyscrapers in Los Angeles out of sight of civilians is harder to swallow.

I just appreciate the absolutely sublime artwork and leave it at that.