Matt Wagners Mage TPB or HC?

[Cadefoster]

I'm a huge Matt Wagner fan but for some reason I never got around to reading Mage. With the new series starting I thought now might be a good time to get caught up. I'm a little confused with how the first Hero Discovered story has been collected. I found both a Hardcover and tpb version of "Hero Discovered Vol 1" on amazon but the Hc as almost double the page count of the tpb. Am I to assume the tpb is only half of the story while the Hc is complete? Thanks to anyone who can help.


https://www.amazon.ca/Mage-Book-One-...ds=matt+wagner


https://www.amazon.ca/Mage-HC-Vol-He...ds=matt+wagner

[Orion]

The hardcover is the complete series plus extras. It came out in 2004 and was the first time Mage was collected in a single volume. The hardcover was regular-sized and had a dustjacket. Later editions of the hardcover dropped the dustjacket to be more like other Image hardcovers. I could've sworn a softcover version of the hardcover was released at some point (ie collecting the whole series in one book). There are many different softcover editions that split up the series into several volumes. That is the discrepancy you see in the listing.

What I'm wondering is as far as the new series, are people like me who have the original Image dustjacket hardcovers of Discovered and Hero Defined going to be screwed by a dustjacket-less release of the third hardcover?

[Cadefoster]

Thanks for the info, much appreciated. I went ahead and ordered the hardcover which I'm sure will soon be followed by The Hero Defined hardcover

[ZenAmako]

For The Hero Discovered, I would personally go with the three oversized Donning/Starblaze softcovers. These were also released as limited edition signed hardcovers with slipcases (V-1 is green; V-2 is red; and V-3 is white). The reason is that these editions have the best coloring. When the series was originally published in comic book format in the mid '80s, it featured distinctive painted color by Matt Wagner. The Donning/Starblaze editions retain the original coloring, and the first issue was actually recolored for this edition in the style of the later chapters. The Donning/Starblaze books are also printed on thick, glossy paper, and the softcovers are still fairly affordable. The downside with these is that the series is broken up into three volumes and volumes 1 and 2 do not end at natural breaks in the story (each Mage series is divided into four four-issue arcs, with the last chapter being double sized). Also, some of the pages don't work quite as well in the oversized format.

When The Hero Discovered was reprinted by Image, the series was recolored with digital color by Jeromy Cox. The original lettering was also replaced. Perhaps nostalgia plays a part, but I prefer the original blue line/airbrush color from the '80s for this series. I also prefer the hand lettered originals. I seem to recall seeing some typos in the new lettering that weren't present in the originals as well. I'm not saying the Image version is bad, but given the choice, I would go with the original comics or one of the collected editions with the original colors and lettering (the series was also reprinted by the original publisher in multiple regular size volumes under the title "Magebook"--these books actually retained all of the house ads and lettercols of the original issues).

The Hero Defined was released as a nice hardcover from Image, but the first edition had an unfortunate printing error which resulted in a few pages in the book being out of order. This was later corrected, so I would try to get a later printing. I forget which pages exactly were out of order. There's also a TPB version with the same contents as the hardcover.

As a longtime fan, I'm really looking forward to The Hero Denied!