Webtoon Spotlight

Spotlight#178: The Black Mage

Have you ever just wanted to deal the hurt on some cream-colored cretins this Black History Month? If so, The Black Mage by Daniel Barnes, D.J. Kirkland, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou is just the Black justice you deserve this February.

Summary

For a century, the prodigious magic school of St. Ivory Academy has been a safe haven for the melanin-challenged for years. That is until they decided for the first (or umpteenth) time to regain some reparations by inducting their first black student: Tom Toilken. While the Black mage makes a rather exciting splash over the beige canvas the school provides, Tom Token soon realizes not everything is as it seems.

Characters

Tom Toilken: Our main character Tom is a relatively calm guy who will take bullshit from no one. Experience with the pale-faced pilgrims he calls students has left him a little wary of new faces. He's a man who never tries to fit in with the status quo, instead opting to push forward for himself and others.

Lindsay Whitetorn: A resident Causicasian crusader, Lindsay is very happy and lucky, studious and stubborn. Despite that, she is one of the "good" ones, commanding an adaptability to break the rules every once in a while for a greater purpose. Through her interactions with Tom, Lindsay can acknowledge her privilege and pair it with her studious habits to become a strong mage in her own right.

Overview

Daniel Barnes may have the most roundabout way I know of their work, ever. I see him on his Twitter page all the time, but I just found out they wrote like this when I saw them on Goodreads. Their biggest contributions to writing, though, seem to lie with multiple comics centered around Aggretsuko and Sonic. I didn't expect to see two franchises overlap here because reading this for the first time made me think something completely different.

Black Mage feels like a book that would fit right into the Boondocks or South Park background. Subtlety went out of the 24-story window when I realized Tom Toilken's crow was called Jim. Of course, having the main Saint Ivory staff dressed in white robes and hoods didn't do anyone any favors. Did I mention that Harriet Tubman, John Henry, and Frederick Douglass also appear here?

Yeah, Black Mage very much doesn't try to tackle the concept of racism, more so Blitzkrieg adopting and pointing out many racist stereotypes Black people go through in a world where magic is less of a way to make cool lore and instead a backdrop to modern tech. Speaking of the magic I love. D.J. Kirkland has a colorful and heavily anime-influenced style that pops straight onto the screen.

Many of the fight scenes and action here feature tons of creative and bombastic spells to add to the action. We also get a lot of cool expressions to sell hilarity or badassery. Still, while the Black Mage is an incredible simplicity and hilarity against full-on racism, I feel like the series blows its load a little too quickly.

I hate white people as the next guy (so long as that person also hates crackers), but I do feel like The Black Mage should've slowed down and done more to flesh down the cast. We don't get to know much about Tom and Lindsay's daily life before the action starts, and you kind of have to accept how the magic system works to understand how Tom can lay hands on people.

Sure, the ending is also somewhat satisfying, sticking some black power to the white man, but I think a concept like this could've gotten multiple books, honestly. Still, Black Mage is fun. I'll give it that.

Epilogue

Overall, Black Mage is fine. While I'm excited to check out Daniel Barnes's pen on Sonic the Hedgehog, I think once you adapt to the central joke of The Black Mage, we kinda get left with just the action to carry it through. It would have fared a little better if this were an ongoing series. However, with the story closed for now, I think it makes sense to talk about another story in the spotlight.