As Beautiful As It Is Strange: Reviewing ‘Mage And The Endless Unknown’

Welcome to the table,

I have a collection of zines and art books that tell sequential stories in non-traditional ways. I used to love comics so much. Recently I have felt my love for them rekindled, leading me to review more and more books for this site. Even while I was on a break from the medium, though, I frequently flipped through art books and the more non-traditional offerings to flex muscles in my mind while I was working on a project or trying to shake negative thoughts.

If I had come across SJ Miller‘s Mage and the Endless Unknown in the wild, I would have bought it right away.  It’s one of those books that really captures the imagination, in a way that has made me stop writing this three times just to flip through the review PDF of the printed version that will be coming out June 20, 2023, from Iron Circus Comics

Mage and the Endless Unknown tells the story of a wandering mage in a series of single-page drawings. The art is charming and whimsical in a way that feels very child friendly and cartoonish, until it slips into the horrific and worrying.

There are no sexual themes or anything that cross into those realms, but there are some twisted body horror moments that are unsettling when you stumble across them. The world presented is quiet and old and strange in ways that evoke the dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft or those strange spaces explored in the dime store weird fiction books that were left in hospital waiting rooms.

If I had access to this book as a child, I would have hidden it to ensure it stayed safely in my possession and read it nightly, just to try and convince my dreams to conjure the strange landscapes to explore. As an adult, I can’t wait to purchase a physical copy of this so I can sit it on my bedside table and flip through it at 3 am when I can’t sleep just to see where my mind takes me.

The story starts off fairly innocently, but SJ Miller quickly shifts gears that take a story that, from the surface, looks like a young wizard on a happy-go-lucky adventure, before it shifts into some kind of Junji Ito-esque hellscape full of worrying monsters and bloodshed. This book keeps you just a little bit nervous about what you are going to find on the next page.

Mage and the Endless Unkown is the kind of book I wish I could go back in time and give to the younger version of me, just so I could have this strange story of magic and horror for longer in my life.

If you are looking for something beautiful and odd please, I implore you to give this book a try.

Until next time, I like this book so much I would turn this into a TTRPG if given the chance.