It’s a bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Super Sexton!
South Beach Artist Puts the Magic Back in the Marvel Universe

By Penn Bullock

Artist David Sexton, whose new book, Mystic Arcana will be released December 26

David Sexton is a polymath, a man of many talents, and at the root of them is a knack for storytelling. He attributes this Homeric bent, in part, to his Irish descent. But unlike a native Irishman, who might tell stories over a pint at the pub, Sexton has made use of professional media: comic books, theatre, Tarot, and drawings.

Sexton’s story starts in Columbus, Ohio, where he was born. His childhood was a scatterplot of family relocations: from Ohio to Texas, then to Tennessee, Chicago, and Springfield, Illinois; then to Houston, and finally to Waco. His father was the cause of this peripatetic lifestyle. As a “turnaround man,” his job was to revamp failing businesses across the country, making him a sort of modern American frontiersman. As Sexton put it, “After a year, if he did his job right, he was out of his job.”

Today, Sexton lives in Miami. At age 38, he’s a former gym owner, a twice-produced playwright, and a successful artist. This year, he has done for Marvel Comics much as his father did for dilapidated businesses. In collaborating with the company, he published a new comic, Mystic Arcana, a complex, four-part miniseries grounded in Tarot and ancient magic. The aim of the series, Sexton says, is to overhaul a struggling borough of the Marvel Universe: “Marvel Magic.”

The progression of a page, from black and white draft…

“I went to Marvel with the idea that they needed work in their magic world,” he told me. “They have a very sophisticated sci-fi aspect to their universe. But the Marvel Magic and supernatural stuff has never really taken hold.”

The reason for this, according to Sexton, is that the rules on the use of magic in Marvel comics have become slipshod and arbitrary over decades. The realization dawned on him while reading the climax of a comic book from the 90s:  

“[The comic] was based in the magic realm, and one of the spellcasters duels Dr. Strange in the end. She makes her fingers like a gun, points it out and says, ‘Bang!’ And that’s the spell she casts. So I went into Marvel I said, ‘Magic is not a gun! It’s perhaps the opposite of a gun. If it looks like technology or some mutant power, why even do it? We have to make it look and feel different.’”

to finished, colored art

In Mystic Arcana, Sexton did just that: he outlawed Deus-Ex-Machina sleights of hand and installed a rigorous set of rules and rituals to guide his characters. The stories in Mystic Arcana are as intricate as the rituals of magic. There are four books. The ideas for them grew out of the human water tables, where our archetypes dwell. In particular, Sexton borrowed sweeping motifs from the tradition of Tarot. Each book stars a hero who embodies an elemental power: earth, wind, fire, or water. Authors and illustrators produced the four books under supervision from Sexton. The books are sewn together by an overarching back-story, “The Ritual of the Sphinx,” authored by Sexton himself. It follows protagonist Ian McNee, an obscure young man that Sexton exhumed from the archives of Marvel Magic after months of digging. McNee is on a quest to become a full-fledged magician. The Goddess Usher has tasked him with finding four artifacts, the Cornerstones of Creation: a sword, a rose, a crown, and a mirror.

The Map of Planes page from Sexton’s Marvel Tarot

Mystic Arcana has been well received, and a sequel’s in the pipeline. Marvel might even publish a Tarot deck to its brand. If that project comes about, Sexton will be in charge. Since his aunt gave him a deck at age 18, he’s become something of a Tarot maestro. In 1999, he used a computer to produce an entire Tarot deck, and soon he had sold it to U.S. Games, the largest Tarot publisher. Shortly thereafter, he designed and sold another deck themed after The Wizard of Oz.

Supplementing Mystic Arcana is Sexton’s 48-page Marvel Tarot, which he wrote and illustrated himself. As far as comics go, it’s work of science; in it, Sexton, with the exhaustive precision of Noah Webster, fuses Marvel with classic mythology. 

“One of the things that is at the beginning of the Marvel Tarot is two pages of what’s called ‘correspondences,’” he said. “It’s an ancient concept that kind of comes from the idea: ‘As above, so below’ – that to bring about spiritual change, you want to create harmonious environments on the physical plane. So if you wanted to summon a fire elemental, you’d burn a torch. So what I tried to do is weave in classic ideas of the correspondence and the Four Elements with Marvel characters.”

The Magician card from Sexton’s Marvel Tarot

Thus, with an exhaustive ambition, Sexton has reformed the universe of Marvel Magic: introduced rules, connected dots, combined comic book magic with ancient myth, and, most important, told stories. Sexton is pleased: