Adversaries and Sort-of Friends
| Character | First appearance | Last appearance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sir Timothy Hunter | The Books of Magic #5: "The Hidden School" | The Books of Magic #20: "Playgrounds Epilogue: The Knight, The Dragon & The Maiden" | Sir Timothy Hunter is a future version of Tim, who sold a memory to Barbatos the demon and became his slave. Sir Timothy was convinced that he lived in luxury and was master of his own destiny, when in reality he lived in a cardboard box and carried out the demon's bidding. Barbatos keeps Sir Timothy in line by providing him with his favourite distraction - a neverending series of young, docile Molly O'Reillies that he spends his life abusing and humiliating. However, when Barbatos brings Sir Timothy back in time to try and ensure that Tim grows up to be him, Sir Timothy comes into contact with a powerful magical object that restores his mind. Genuinely ashamed and self-pitying at what he has become, Sir Timothy falls in with a group of dragons who transform him into one of them. When the dragon meets with the real Molly, he has enough time to confess his full list of sins to her and beg that she doesn't let her Tim become him before he is slain by Tim's uncontrolled anger. It is later revealed that Sir Timothy was in fact the soulless remnant of Tim's original body, and that the true Tim's soul lived on by hiding in the body of Barbatos. |
| The Reverend Slagingham | The Books of Magic #9: "The Artificial Heart: Book 1 - Handmedowns of the Ragged School" | The Books of Magic #75: "The Closing: Inner Child" | Slagingham was a reverend in the Victorian era, where he got to know Daniel before the boy disappeared. He prolonged his life through steampunk cybernetics and recruited an army of the cities underclass to help him in his ultimate dream: he thinks that happiness is a finite resource, and so he builds a machine that will steal it from others so that he can have his fair share. He runs a number of scans to raise funds for his grand endeavour - transforming street children into plastic toys to sell cheap, capturing souls in magical devices to build a workforce of mindless slaves - but when he meets Awn the Blink, he is convinced by the unmechanic of the pointlessness of his scheme, which breaks his mechanical heart. He survives as a disembodied head, going quite mad and hearing the voices of angels and demons - which it turns out he actually can hear when the two forces come to Earth to do battle. He redeems himself by helping Tim to end the battle - with Awn the Blink transforming him into an angel and demon catcher, where both sides are trapped until they agree to stop. |
| Gwendolyn | The Books of Magic #10: "The Artificial Heart: Book 2 - Bleak Houses Hard Times" | The Books of Magic #43: "King of This" | Gwen is a young Victorian girl who uses magic to prevent herself aging, falling in with the Reverend Slagingham to help him steal souls for his workforce. Her prize possession is the Faerie King Auberon, whose soul she tricked away when he was feeling particularly melancholic. She has a change of heart, however, when the sewers that the workforce flood and they all drown: the only one she can save is Auberon, because - not being human - he doesn't need to breathe. She gets Tim's assistance in returning Auberon's soul, and in gratitude looks after him until his father comes home from hospital. She stays on for a while to look after William and Tim, but when William begins a serious relationship with Holly she decides it is time to move out. |
| Zatanna Zatara | The Books of Magic Book Two: The Shadow World | The Books of Magic #41: "Nothing Up My Sleeve" | Zatanna is the magician daughter of the great Zatara, whom Tim sees whilst visiting in the past with the Phantom Stranger. She looked after Tim at the request of John Constantine while the Trenchcoat Brigade fought the Cult of the Cold Flame. Later, when he realised that he needed a mentor to teach him about magic, Tim decided to find Zatanna and ask her to take the job. He and Molly stayed with her for a while, and she tried to teach him that there were more important things than magic: his girlfriend, for example. However, Tim couldn't learn and eventually it was all Zatanna could do to help Molly return home. |
| Circe | The Books of Magic #13: "Small Glass Worlds Part 2: Transparent Lies" | The Books of Magic #75: "The Closing: Inner Child" | Circe is a mysterious, powerful tattooist who sees it as her duty to protect women from worthless men. When she first meets Molly and hears about Tim, she thinks she has found another and captures him to study at her leisure. The amount of raw power he has scares her, and she looks into his soul to find out the truth about him: inside, she finds that most men are really animals, and turns them into whatever animal they might be. Tim, however, has no animal in him: he is just a frighteningly normal human boy. Still wishing to protect Molly, but unable to do anything without Tim's permission, she offers to give him a tattoo that will ensure he never hurts Molly. Tim agrees, and Circe gives him a tattoo that ultimately ensures that Tim is unable to connect to the world and pushes Molly away from him. She later feels regret about her actions. When she finds the Reverend Slagingham's head and learns of the war between the angels and the demons, she finds Tim and ultimately helps him to defeat both sides. |
| The Other | The Books of Magic #51: "A Thousand Worlds of Tim" | The Books of Magic #74: "The Closing: Being Mr. Wrong" | The Other is an alternative version of Tim created by the original's instinctive childhood use of magic: he lived on a world where both Tim's parents survived, but focused more on their careers than their son. The Other never came into contact with magic until he met the demon Barbatos, who revealed both the existence of magic and this Tim's nature as one of a number of alternate Tims. The Other dedicated himself to learning magic, and found a way to travel to another alternate world where he met another version of Tim: When this Tim died, the Other found that he absorbed all of his magic and feelings as the world he lived in was destroyed. Trying to return home, the Other discovered that he own world had also vanished as soon as he left it. He then starts hopping from world to world, killing each version of Tim he finds and stealing their power - gradually losing his humanity as he does. Ultimately, he reaches the real world with the intention of killing the true Timothy Hunter and usurping his power and his life - but when he thinks that he has, he finds the real world almost impossible to acclimatise to after years of wandering and killing. He is ultimately subsumed by the true Tim when Barbatos takes away the memory of the Other's creation, making it impossible for him to exist any more. |
Read more about this topic: List Of The Books Of Magic Characters
Famous quotes containing the words adversaries and/or friends:
“Do as adversaries do in law,
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)