Manticore

Creation

The Manticore was created by writer John Ney Rieber and penciler Gary Amaro in The Books of Magic issue 2, in 1994.

Major Story Arcs

The Manticore controls his own small faerie realm, a mansion with a yard of bones, surrounded by an immeasurably tall wall. He collects creatures, takes their soul, and stuffs them. He sees himself as removing all the illusions of faerie, presents himself as an academic man, and likes to quote in Latin phrases.

When Tim Hunter appears in his realm, the Manticore appears to him as a Victorian-style gentleman, concealing what he truly is. Tim can tell he's trying to trick him, and initially refuses to play his game, but the Manticore tempts him by saying he'll tell him who his father really is if Tim can win his game. If Tim loses, he will be come his "student," lose his illusions, and eventually be eaten. Tim agrees to the game.

The Manticore explains that he is trying to simplify the world by erasing it, bit by bit, such all the unicorns. Tim, appalled, changes the bet, and decides he wants to know the Manticore's name instead of his father's, so he can defeat him. The Manticore is amused, and says he will hand over both names if he loses.

Tim plays hide and seek with the Manticore, in a dangerous game with high stakes. He is spurred on as he sees others who lost against the Manticore, and are now taxidermied specimens in his collection, or rotting corpses in pits.

Tim finds a picture of a manticore in the library, the only page out of an antique bestiary that wasn't ripped out. The Manticore finds him, angrily insists the Manticore is the only creature from the book that is real, and explains more about how he is removing extraneous objects, like the unicorn, from reality. He explains that he wants to show that things like the unicorn aren't real, aren't magic, and are just hoaxes--by "disproving" them, he takes their souls and removes them from reality.

After disgusting Tim by describing how he "disproved" the unicorn and taxidermized the specimen, causing Tim to lash out, The Manticore leaves, saying the game hadn't yet begun, and that he'd be back. Tim talks to the stuffed unicorn specimen, consoling himself.

The Manticore returns in its beast form, declaring he no longer desires to have Tim as a pupil, and bites Tim, but the unicorn comes alive, inspired by Tim's feelings for it, and stabs the manticore book page, killing the creature. The unicorn leaves.

Tim walks off, dripping blood from his hand. The drips of blood turn into flowers on the ground, and soon all of Faerie, which had been wasting away, is blooming again. It was the Manticore that was draining it.

It is also mentioned once Tim is found that no one has ever defeated him, before, hence why the manticore appears in very few myths, as no hero has bested him.

The Manticore nearly has the last laugh, however--his bite is venomous with no known antidote, and the Faerie Queen Totiana herself cannot cure it with her magic, and Tim succumbs to it until he sees Death herself. However, Tim is saved by his father, who uses magic to die in Tim's place.

Much later, Tim runs across Leah's old box, where she was trapped for centuries before Tim finally let her out.

Tim is sucked in, and is held prisoner there for many years within the box's internal chronology. Among the various experiences he has there, Tim dreams of four enemies from the past, including the Manticore, saying they could have saved his soul by giving him a "cleaner" death. This implies that his clash with the Manticore was one of the truly formative experiences of Tim's life.

Long after, at the end of the Faerie realms, a powerful woman and the creature Gyvv look back at what happened in this iteration of the realms. One of the things they remember is The Withering caused by the Manticore, one of the key moments in Faerie's history.