Circe

Creation

Circe was created by writer John Ney Rieber and artist Peter Snejbjerg in The Books of Magic issue 13 in 1995.

Major Story Arcs

Circe, the ancient goddess of Greece and Rome, now lives in modern London and works in a tattoo shop.

She sees Tim Hunter and Molly walking down the street and looks at their young love with some envy.

Much later, she stands outside the shop, smoking in the rain wearing her typical revealing leather clothes, and a man assumes she is a prostitute. She lets him come in her shop, and we see a flash of blue light.

Meanwhile, Tim is playing around with magic and turns himself into a cat, but his mind starts to become like a cat as well.

Circe hears Molly talking about Tim with her friend Marya. Molly is unhappy because she found out an alternate version of Tim has made multiple copies of her and kidnapped her. Marya also had a bad experience with a boy, Daniel, who turned out evil.

Circe comes up and commiserates with the girls about the problems of men. She is also interested to see Marya's unicorn. Marya warms up to her but Molly does not. Circe mentions when she saw them earlier. She offers herself up as a guide to the girls on men issues, and releases a bird from a cage she was carrying--presumably the man in the shop earlier. She has been turning men into animals for at least hundreds of years.

Tim, as a cat, starts to listen to the women talk about him, and how Molly is scared he may turn out like Sir Timothy. Daniel also shows up and says he'll kill himself if Marya doesn't take him back.

Circe recognizes Tim and freezes him as a cat, including his mind. Then she uses her magic to rub away the evil of Daniel's soul, and also turn him into a mindless, loving puppy. Marya is happy, but Molly sees that if he ever turns back to a boy, Marya won't love him like she loves him as a puppy. She tells Circe to leave.

She does, and takes Tim-cat with her, back to her tattoo parlor. She gives him his mind back, but when she realizes that he shaped himself into a cat, something that takes very advanced magic, she is scared of his power and whether he may comes from the Dark Tower, and wants to do magical surgery on him.

However, when she pulls out his soul, he looks safe. In fact, she is ashamed to learn that he has a pure heart. Most people have some kind of animal spirit they connect to, but Tim is the most human person she's met.

She turns him back to his normal body and lets him wake up. When Tim talks to her about how Molly is afraid of what he might be, Tim asks her if she can use magic to stop him from hurting her. She tattoos his chest with an enormous butterfly/scorpion image. It will sting him if he doesn't respect its power and intent.

At first, the tattoos sting him when he uses magic for the wrong reasons. He learns various things about them. They can leave his body, and fight each other. Kenny the Gnome says they're Maps, without really explaining what that means. The scorpion ends up getting destroyed. Much later, Khara tells him that the moth has made him flighty and unable to settle down with people, which led to him losing his connection to Molly, who then leaves him. However, she speculates that perhaps even though Molly has short-term pain over this, it will be better for her in the long run to be away from him. They remove the tattoo with Tim's Stone of Opening.

Long after she put the tattoos on Tim, Circe feels like her technique of teaching men lessons by turning them into animals isn't working, and she turns some back into human form. Something about the world feels odd to her.

She finds the detached head of the cyborg Reverend Slaggingham, who she seems to have watched pigeons with in the past. They discuss a recent and ongoing war between angels and demons, and she decides to look into it. She takes Slaggingham's head with her.

She starts to realize that what he says isn't nonsense, but actual prophecy. They see an explosion, and go to check it out. There, two women with balloons and enormous power, at least one of whom is called the Queen of Wounds, are in the middle of a complicated situation involving Tim, Araquel, Tim's dad Bill, and Tim's step-brother Cyril.

She is amazed when one of the woman brings Cyril back from the dead, or as she says, "from Hades."

She meets up with Tim to help him out with a plan of his. They talk about Molly, and Circe is sad to hear that her tattoo (which she calls a Warding) caused him and Molly to break up. Tim says the reason her magic doesn't help anyone is that she's not human so she doesn't understand them.

As Tim, his creation, Awn the Blink, and Reverend Slaggingham create a machine to entrap all the angels, devils, and balloon-ladies, Circe gets Tim an ice cream.

When the machine catches all the supernatural creatures, the two balloon-ladies merge into Spinning Jemmy. She explains that she had them all fight for her fun. Tim throws the ice cream at her, and even Circe doesn't understand this level of remoteness from human concerns.

Much later, after Tim defeats Barbatos, Circe is seen driving in a red convertible with Slaggingham's head attached to the back, both of them happy.

Powers and Abilities

Circe can turn people into animals, turn herself into an animal, and borrow animals' bodies. She can use magical instruments to study people's souls.

She can tattoo magical wardings on a person, to control their actions.

She has superhuman strength, enabling her to (at a minimum) easily hold Tim in the air with one arm.