Friday Quotations: Blinkin' Amazing

From Books of Magic, #12.  Almost forgot this one.  I just reread the entire Books of Magic series; it was one of the first series I've read in graphic novel form, so it was a very nostalgic rereading.  I'm glad they're bringing Tim Hunter, and maybe some of his supporting cast, into the DC proper with the Justice League Dark series.
The catch when I was originally reading them was that the library I was borrowing them from had the first volumes of the original series, and the first volumes of the reboot, but missed rather large swathes in between.  So I was rather confused.  Having now read the whole series, I'll admit it all hangs together--even the reboot can be worked into actual continuity, if you squint a bit.  The real problem is that the series' tone and purpose shifts wildly with new writers.  Neil Gaiman created the series, and it was a fairly simple premise: an ordinary British boy is put on a whirlwind tour of the magic side of reality, led by the high profile "good" magic characters of the DC universe.  He has the potential to be more powerful, magic-wise, than any of them, and they ask if he wanted this power.    I won't go so far to say that Timothy Hunter was a MacGuffin for Gaiman to do a DC magical tour, but he is, I think, supposed to be deliberately vague personality-wise, aside from general "wise-ass Brit kid" in order to present him as an Everyman type figure.  (Like Harry Potter, but about a decade earlier.)

You can't really hang an ongoing on that premise, though, so the first writer of the main series, John Ney Reiber, developed a supporting cast.  Tim had a pretty miserable life at that point; sure, he had magical powers, but people were always trying to kill him for them, and his father was a one-armed drunk, still feeling guilty about the car crash that took his arm and his wife's life.  Tim's gloom is counterbalanced by Molly, his next door neighbor, a spunky little Irish girl.  Much of Reiber's run can be classified as a teenage love story, and Molly is portrayed as such a vital character that I was okay with that.  My big problem with the following writers is that they went a little overboard in the overwrought, emo-side of Tim, and they never got Molly quite right; she went from being her own unique character to being Tim's Supporting Cast, role: Girlfriend.

Okay, I felt I needed to rant about that.  Still, the scene above?  Good scene.

Later Days.