The Books of Magic

The Books of Magic
Cover of the first issue of the ongoing series.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics (Vertigo for volume 2 and the collected editions)
Format	(vol. 1) Mini-series (vol. 2) Ongoing
Publication date	(vol. 1) 1990–1991 (vol. 2) 1994–2000
Number of issues	(vol. 1) 4 (vol. 2) 75
Main character(s)	Timothy Hunter
Creative team
Writer(s)	Neil Gaiman John Ney Rieber Peter Gross
Artist(s)	John Bolton Scott Hampton Charles Vess Paul Johnson Peter Gross Jason Temujin Minor
Letterer(s)	Todd Klein
Creator(s)	Neil Gaiman John Bolton
Collected editions
The Books of Magic
Bindings
Summonings
Reckonings
Transformations
Girl in the Box
The Burning Girl
Death After Death

The Books of Magic is the title of a four-issue English-language comic book mini-series written by Neil Gaiman, published by DC Comics, and later an ongoing series under the imprint Vertigo. Since its original publication, the mini-series has also been published in a single-volume collection under the Vertigo imprint with an introduction by author Roger Zelazny. It tells the story of a young boy who has the potential to become the world's greatest magician.

The Books of Magic began life when DC Comics decided to highlight some of their mystical characters across the range. They initially approached writer J. M. DeMatteis to script a prose book with illustrations from Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Dave McKean and others, but when it reached the stage of confirming the artists' involvement, the suggested artists all declined to be involved. At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back, and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters". Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Gaiman created an everyman character of a twelve-year-old boy called Timothy Hunter, who would need to be given an extensive tour of the DC magical universe before being able to decide if he should embrace or reject his destiny as the world's greatest magician.

Gaiman used the four issues to formally split the structure of the story, and allow for a different artist to draw each issue:

This structure allowed Gaiman great scope to include various magical characters from across DC's ranges, as well as reintroducing characters that weren't currently in print. In his introduction to the collected edition, author Roger Zelazny also noted that the structure bore some similarity to the key story points of the mythic structure identified by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces - although he did allow that this might come from Gaiman's intimate knowledge of the same source material rather than a deliberate attempt to follow Campbell's guidelines. When the book was initially released over 1990/1991, it proved very popular and led Vertigo Executive Editor Karen Berger to make it a regular ongoing series under editor Stuart Moore.