Magdalena #1
Kicking off a new series for a character that has been around for a while and has a complex back-story can’t be an easy job. I mean, as a writer you have to accomplish two distinctly different tasks at the same time. On the one hand, you have to make the book accessible to new readers. How do you make a book accessible to readers who know next to nothing about your character? Simple, you fill them in; you bring them up to speed; in other words you provide them with the information they need in order to understand what is going on. A writer can do this in a variety of ways, including flashback scenes, dialogue or exposition. Obviously, this can eat up a lot of pages in an issue and can really slow down the story. At the same time that you are bringing new readers up to speed you are faced with the task of capturing the interest of old and new readers alike. Now, to do this you have to keep the story moving which is very difficult since you devoted all those pages to catching up new readers.
As difficult as these two distinctly different jobs are Ron Marz pulls them off pretty well. In one issue he gives new readers a brief history of the line of the Magdalena including their origin and their relationship with the church. He also gives the new readers some back-story on the current Magdalena’s split with the church. While doing all this Marz also begins laying out the current storyline. SPOILER WARNING Marz does give himself an edge by making this new storyline about nothing less then the coming of the Anti-Christ and the end of the world. If that is not enough to pique your interest then you are a tough sell. END SPOILER WARNING
As the series progresses he’ll need to gradually shift from filling in back-story to focusing more on the current storyline but that is for future issues. I, also, hope he’ll give the reader more details about the current Magdalena’s split from the church. From what we learn in the first issue those events would seem to be the most important elements in the characters history. In the end, this first issue is a solid start; now all Ron Marz has to do is keep it going. That’s easy, right?
Keith Forney