Madame Xanadu #16

Madame Xanadu meets the world of Mad Men.

Thats the best way to sum up this issue, as a late 1950s house wife named Betty, complete with an emotionally absent daughter and husband (named Jon) begins to experience unuasual and strange occurances in her everyday white-picket-fence life such as vomiting insects and levitation.  With nowhere else to go and with all natural means unable to help, Betty has no-one else to turn to except the Madame.

What makes this book great is the real world take on mysticism throughout the ages that Wagner infuses it with.  It reads more like an early vertigo title, like Swamp Thing or Sandman, relying not on violence and language but situiation to push the mature rating.  This book is brilliant, and thats in no small part due to returning artist Amy Reeder Hadley who returns this issue.  Her soft yet determined pencils make this book both feminin and fierce, and she captures the time period with the same ease as the AMC show, "Mad Men".