This is not a sequel to Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell. It is, though, the only other project I know of by the team behind that webcomic, and it's set in a world very similar to Darwin Carmichael's. It may even be the same world, though not necessarily so.
Darwin Carmichael ran from 2009 through 2013 and then was collected into a book. Sophie Goldstein drew about 90% of it and co-wrote it all, as far as I can tell, and Jenn Jordan drew a few bits and did the other half of the writing.
An Embarrassment of Witches was a 2020 original graphic novel. This time out, it looks like Goldstein (the professional comics-maker and teacher) did all of the art, but the book is still vague about their roles, so I continue to assume they write it together, in whatever way. (Probably not Marvel Method. My guess would be some variety of co-plotting, with Goldstein maybe doing page breakdowns and then coming back together for dialogue.)
Darwin was set in a modern NYC where everything in myth was true - there were minotaurs on the subway and stoner angels were important to the plot. In Witches, we only see humans, but it's a world with industrialized, systematized magic - our milieu is the academic world around magic, focused on two young women and their post-graduate lives.
As required in a story about two people, they're quite different: Rory is impulsive, unsure, flitting from one idea to the next. Angela is driven, focused, serious. And the story is thus mostly about Rory, since she's more interesting and active.
They've both just graduated. Angela is about to start an internship with Rory's Type A mother, Dr. Audrey Rosenberg. Rory is heading off to work at a dragon sanctuary in Australia with her boyfriend Holden...who, just before getting on the plane, tells her that he wants to open up their relationship to other people. (We get the sense that this sort of thing happens to Rory all the time - she misreads signals, dives into everything headfirst, and gets hurt all the time by everything before bouncing off into something totally different after a big emotional scene.)
So Rory impulsively doesn't go to Australia, begs Angela to let her stay in the walk-in closet of their apartment - they've sublet her room to a guy named Guy for the summer - sells off most of her stuff, and then falls for Guy and decides to follow him into his new Interdisciplinary Magick program. (Every time Rory does something, you can assume the word "impulsively" is there. The narrative doesn't say she always does this about a boy, but the two cases we see here both fit that pattern.)
Meanwhile, Angela, in a somewhat more low-key manner, is one of six interns working for Dr. Rosenberg (Rory's mother, again), who is demanding and exacting and apparently has not one iota of human feeling for her employees or family.
They both crash, of course. Angela because she's been doing the boiling-frog thing, with pressure building up bit by bit probably since she was five, and she just cracks. Rory because that's what she always does: throws herself into something but only half-asses it, misunderstands other people and doesn't say what she wants or needs, and then collapses into an emotional wreck when it inevitably breaks apart.
They yell at each other, they break their friendship...but only briefly, because it's that kind of story. They also have familiars - I think everyone in this world does, but the familiars are pretty independent and seem to wander off for weeks at a time - who kibitz on their relationship, squabble with each other, and help to mend everything in the end.
It's a story I've seen many times before - you probably have, too. One part quarter-life crisis, one part best friends assuming too much of their relationship. Goldstein and Jordan tell it well, and their quirky, specific world adds a lot of depth and intertest to what could otherwise be a pretty general and bland story. Rory would be deeply annoying in most stories; she's the kind of person who goes out of her way to step on every damn rake on the ground, over and over again.
In the end, they both move on to things that we think are good for them - at least, we hope so, and it is the end, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. It's a solid ending, open and forward-looking. I don't know if we'll get another story by Goldstein and Jordan set in a world of industrialized magic, but...if we got two, surely there's no reason there couldn't be three?
English (US) · 