Matt Wagner's Mage: The (Annotated) Hero Discovered

Welcome

Please note that this site is a reference to Mage and a design experiment at the same time. It creates its "look" via code that some browsers don't properly support but is perfectly legitimate. If the site looks wacky (for instance if you don't see a whole person (Kevin) in the background), it's because you are using a non-modern-standards-compliant browser. The best browsers for this site are the most current browsers. Safari (for Mac OS X) or Firefox (for all platforms) work very well with the design. Internet Explorer has some trouble because of (shamefully) poor support for accepted web standards.

In 1984 Matt Wagner created a comic book called Mage: The Hero Discovered. In it, he created a gift for all of us who read it. What a wonderful journey. To read Mage was to share in growth: Kevin Matchstick's growth as a hero, and Matt Wagner's growth as an artist, a writer, a storyteller.

Part of its allure is that it is semi-biographical, so in every issue we get a piece of truth; a part of Matt. What I also found was that Matt has a real knowledge of myth and legend, and as I researched the characters, I found over and over again ancient mythical sources forming the basic skeleton of the characters. From Goe-Magot to Edsel to the Red-Caps to Kevin himself, almost all that is in Mage: The Hero Discovered began as a legend you can find in your library.

Matt is now two-thirds done with his Mage trilogy, and much has been added to the Mage mythos since The Hero Discovered. This particular site is only a reference for the first part of the trilogy and I have no current plans to research the second series, The Hero Defined. I have, however, created a list of related links below.

WARNING! The content of this site is one major "spoiler" for The Hero Discovered. The entire story is revealed in the site, so continue only if you've read The Hero Discovered and want more information or if you missed it and want to know what happened but STOP RIGHT NOW if you are looking forward to your first, fresh reading of the Hero Discovered.

Thanks, Matt, for a great book.

Magic? It's Green! .....Right?