A group of hedge witches are being enrolled at Brakebills as third year students much to the dismay of the students who have been studying at Brakebills since year one. There’s obvious tension between the hedge witches and the Brakebills students, but they’re being forced to work and study together. Initially they’re told it’s to bridge the gap between the two magical worlds, but the students soon learn the truth. They will be learning battle magic, an outlawed practice, in order to be prepared for an imminent attack by a powerful magician.
This graphic novel is an extension of The Magicians universe in a pretty major way. There are brand new main characters, a new conflict not present in the books (or TV show to my knowledge), and a new approach to how Brakebills operates. The best way to think about this graphic novel in the context of The Magicians universe is that this is a brand new construction on the same lot of land. We’re not renovating something already established, and we’re not even adding an additional room to the old building. Besides being set in a familiar location with a known dichotomy of who should be able to do magic (classically trained magicians vs hedge witches) basically everything else is new.
I really enjoyed the queer representation in this graphic novel. There is a trans character and a nonbinary character and a handful of other queer characters. While queerness is not foreign to The Magicians Universe, something about the representation always felt a little off to me. This graphic novel does much better. This is all thanks to author Lilah Sturges who is trans.
Overall, things felt rushed. There is so much more that could have been explored that this story hinted at but just never took further. New Class introduced new hedge witchcraft based in traditional and folk religions. It gets a passage mention or two, and then poof! We’re back to Brakebills magic. The villian’s story line gets introduced with a tiny sprinkling of conflict and then wham! There they are. Story is over. Even the art feels rushed. There’s a lot of detail to the impressive magical moments, but everything else, faces, backgrounds, buildings, gets a lot less attention.
