Mage: The Hero Denied Vol. 2 and/or 6 by Matt Wagner

So this is the end, huh? After thirty-some years and around twelve hundred pages of comics, Matt Wagner's comics fantasy autobiography is done.

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, the earlier pieces are the two volumes of Mage: The Hero Discovered from the mid-80s, the two volumes of Mage: The Hero Defined from the late '90s, and the prior collection of this 2017 series.)

Almost anything I could say here would be spoilers of one sort or another, so I will try to be vague without being totally pointless. Mage: The Hero Denied, Vol. 6 has a confusing volume number -- it's the second half of Hero Denied, and only number six of the overall series -- and should encompass the lowest point of hero Kevin Matchstick and then his triumphant conclusion.

It does that, reasonably well, and gives space for the rest of Kevin's fictional family to shine: wife Magda, son Hugo and daughter Miranda. They're not allowed to be heroic in the same way Kevin is, perhaps because they are not comics-makers in the real world, and so can't actually fight nasties in the metaphor the way he can. But they're active, and useful, and not just people who Kevin needs to save -- which is nice. He's the one who has to do the important stuff, since he's the one who looks like Wagner.

The metaphor is still very vague: I don't think each series is meant to be about a specific comics project or time in Wagner's life; just a transmutation of "sitting at a table writing words and drawing lines" into "wacking evil with a baseball bat just like the characters he draws." And the Big Evil of all three series is the same: the middle book was slightly different, in a generational way, but Denied goes back to the original Big Bad. And the Big Bad doesn't relate to the real-world end of the metaphor at all: there's no force or entity conspiring to stop comics creators, unless it's something universal like Death or Entropy or Watching Cat Videos Instead.

Also, at the end of this story Kevin Matchstick is explicitly done with heroing. I want to leave it vague exactly as to why, but that's another way the metaphor diverges strongly from Wagner's own life -- his own kids are old enough to collaborate with him on comics (his son Brennan colors this book), and he's clearly still working.

In the end, Mage is much more superhero comic than it is transmuted autobiography. It's the story of a guy who looks like Matt Wagner but does comic-book stuff instead of creating comic-book stuff. And Wagner is not the kind of creator, it appears, that cares about digging into the wellsprings of creation to tell stories about that act: his shtick, like most of modern commercial comics, is making pretty pictures of people hitting each other until the world is saved.

So, after three stories and more than a thousand pages, Mage ends up as just decent superhero comics with a vague mythological shell and a this-is-me conceit that doesn't go much deeper than the surface. It might still be too weird for a lot of superhero-comics fans, because they are stunted and blinkered individuals, but sucks to their assmar.