It'a a complicated thing to try to collect the Books of magic graphic novels. There's a newish iteration which pops up with similar names to the original series every time you search the assorted book sites.
To make it easy i went for this omnibus which contains the first two years of John Ney Reiber's version of the story.
This of course also contains the storyline I read not too long ago, but being a graphic novel, the reread doesn't take too long.
One thing that becomes very clear when reading this number of the stories back-to-back is how often Tim doesn't need to do anything because a protector he doesn't know he has will pop up and save the day on his behalf. He becomes a very passive character in his own story.
The protectors vary from a unicorn he accidentally revived, to the wife and child of a chained-up angel, to a demonically controlled future version of himself to his childhood imaginary friends come to life.
It's never less than entertaining and there is a great imagination on display, but I found myself wanting Tim to be a more active feature of the plot. It's very rare he does anything for himself.
That said, he does help other people semi-regularly, in particular his Dad and a succubus who moves in next door.
There's also a prologue i hadn't read before from a crossover event called the Children's crusade that happened in the 90s at vertigo comics. Unfortunately, it only contains one section of that story and tells the reader that his voyage back from the land he was transported to can only be read by buying another graphic novel (which I have done, but under duress).
It's fairly weird reading this now, when the "future" version of Tim Hunter lives in the year 2012... It really hammers home how old I am since I used to have the original comics when they came out.
I will be seeking out volume 2 rather than trying to figure out which of the individual storyline graphic novels I need to buy.
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