YMMV / The Books of Magic

• Complete Monster: Hunter: The Age of Magic: Arawn Kluder is a necromancer-for-hire who lusts after Death of the Endless, slaughtering thousands of innocent people over the decades in hopes of a chance to meet her face to face. Never managing to catch more than a glimpse despite his efforts, Arawn is hired by Dr. Arthur Lily to retrieve Tim Hunter for him, being bribed with the True Name of Death that will supposedly allow him to command her. Instead, Arawn uses the Name to kill Arthur's agents escorting him and confronts Tim with murderous intent, hoping to use his end to lure out Death. When he finally meets her face to face, Kluder reveals that his "love" for Death is simply a desire to use her as his housemaid and sexual plaything.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Timothy Hunter is a British kid mage with dark hair, large glasses, and even a similar sounding name to a certain boy wizard whose first book was released six years later.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Spinning Jemmy of the Laughing Brigade, after a brief introduction in The Sandman (1989), is shown as a young Lord of Chaos with a hankering for delicious ice cream. Bound by her duty as a Chaos Lord to increase disorder in the universe and knowing that Tim Hunter loves ice cream too, Jemmy contrives a false-flag war between angels and demons over Tim that wrecks a good portion of London, giving Tim no choice but to intervene and stop it. Captured by an exasperated Tim, Jemmy is let go with her beloved ice cream in exchange for calling off the war, and she merrily drifts off on a giant bunch of balloons after honoring her word.
  • Thomas Currie is a gentlemanly wizard who is the sole survivor of a pocket dimension destroyed by the Other, an evil alternate version of Tim, and trains the real Tim in advanced sorceries to combat his Evil Counterpart. When the Other arrives in the main universe earlier than Currie expected, Currie creates another copy of Tim for the Other to kill, hoping to later catch him off guard when the real one returns with enough power to defeat him. When Tim declines out of fear for the safety of his suicidal father Bill, Currie solves the dilemma by pushing Bill out a window himself and telling Tim he killed himself; Tim then agrees to the plan. Killed by the Other shortly after, Currie nevertheless successfully sowed the seeds of his downfall, and whether Currie intended it or not, Bill survives the fall as well.
• Older Than They Think: Read the second paragraph on the main page. Now add the fact that Tim runs around with an owl. Sounds a bit like something else. Issue #1 of this series came out in 1990. Insisting that the series ripped off J. K. Rowling can sometimes be a really effective means of trolling this series' fans. Neil Gaiman has several times denied that Rowling ripped him off, and if anything they both ripped off T. H. White. Nonetheless, in issue #75 of the ongoing series (which came out in 2000), there is a Shout-Out to the Harry Potter series, where Harry — or at least a Captain Ersatz of him — makes a brief, non-speaking cameo, suggesting that Harry is one of Tim's alternate-universe counterparts.

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