Just about 15 years ago, Jon Armstrong approached me with an idea. He wanted to do a comic book about a magician. His concept was—this would be a stage magician, transported to a world where magic was actually real, and he’d have to use his sleight-of-hand and stage effects to fake his way through. It was an intentional subversion of the standard trope of the stage magician who has actual magical powers but disguises them with his act. Jon would shake his head, disgusted: “Isn’t being able to do stage magic cool enough?”
It was for me. I was a comic book writer who loved magic, and Jon was a magician who loved comics, and our collaboration (brought to life by artist Ryan Browne) was a five-issue miniseries called Smoke and Mirrors. Jon and I came up with the story, I wrote the script, and Ryan drew it. And Jon, just to show off and convince the audience that, yes, being a stage magician is cool enough, researched and developed some real magical effects that could work on the page for the reader.
Publishing that comic remains one of the proudest achievements of my life. Not just because I got to do good work in collaboration with friends I respect, but because the history of comic books is inextricably entangled with that of magic, and creating a project that fused the two so explicitly for the first time made me feel like I was doing something special. Something that celebrated and honored two kinds of art I love so dearly.