Mike W. Barr and Terry Dodson proving you don’t need to be Japanese to come up with gender bender stories, but as an US comic it features a lot more violence and lot less of checking out your new boobs.
Lukasz is one of four disciplines of the Archimage, fighting the minions of Boneyard through a centuries long war. Each time he’s killed or otherwise dies, he jumps into another random body, completely wrecking the lives of whicever poor soul he possesses as well as that of their family and friends. Having done so for a hundred times or more he long since has stopped worrying about it, justifying as the cost of the war he must wage to stop the evil Boneyard. The details of the war or why Boneyard is so evil are a bit unclear, though he’s certainly not above kidnapping and murder. It’s halfway through the issue that Lukasz is killed for the second time in the story, as Archimage and his men are betrayed and most die while Archimage himself is kidnapped. Once again Lukasz jumps bodies but for the first time it’s a female boy he ends up in…
Now this being a 1993 vintage comic don’t expect too much in the way of a trans friendly narrative here, though Lukasz’s struggles with his new body continue to make up a part of the series. Not just how he feels about his body, but also how other see him now. What with it being a nineties series, rape or at least the threat of it plays a large part in this. There’s also the question of the family Lukasz left behind this time: as a man he has walked out countless times on lovers, family, children; as a single mother now it’s more difficult…
When Malibu — flush with the money it got for publishing the first Image titles before they became a proper publisher — launched the Ultraverse in 1993 it was incredibly exciting. Unlike Image, this new superhero universe was writer driven (including Mike W. Barr, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, James D. Hudnall, Gerard Jones, James Robinson and Len Strazewski) but was also created as a coherent world from the start, rather than as with Image where each of the founders went with whatever interested them at the time. Even so, not every series was a winner for me and Mantra was one of those with which I didn’t click. Neither the overall plot nor the idea of a man trapped in a female body appealed to me to be honest. I only bought the first couple of issues of Mantra when they first came out, though also got a few more from the back issue bins. Not a bad series, just not one I liked all that much.
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