At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back,[2] and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters".

[3] Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories[4] such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King,[5] Gaiman created an everyman character of a twelve-year-old boy, called Timothy Hunter, who would need to be given an extensive tour of the DC magical universe before being able to decide if he should embrace or reject his destiny as the world's greatest magician.

Berger eventually approached John Ney Rieber after having seen some of his work, convinced that he would be able to meet the challenge of developing Tim into a fully rounded character.

At one point, Rieber himself tried to withdraw from the project, but Berger was still convinced that he could do it, and when the Vertigo The Children's Crusade event was being planned, she asked him to write one of the chapters to reintroduce Tim to the DC universe.

The annual saw Neil Gaiman's first credit as "creative consultant" for The Books of Magic, a position which DC Comics paid him to carry out despite the fact that even when he did make comments on the script, he was told that it was too late for anything to be changed.

[7] By the time the series launched, the name had returned to The Books of Magic and a regular rotating team of artists Gross, Gary Amaro and Peter Snejbjerg was put in place to provide artwork for alternating storylines.

[8] As well as writing, Gross continued to provide artwork for the book, juggling this with a separate career teaching a class in Comic Illustration at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

The boy recovers and returns to Earth with Titania's curses in his ears, having to come to terms with the revelation that the people he thought of as his parents - a mother who died in a car crash caused by his one-armed, grieving father - might be no relation to him at all.

Several of his characters, including Tim, seek to avoid their problems in the real world by escaping into fantasy, but Rieber later explained that "wishing never solves anything in the Books.

The Reverend falls foul to Tim thanks to the intervention of one of his childhood imaginary friends made real, Awn the Blink, who has an amazing knack for fixing broken things.

[17] Gwendolyn decides to stay and look after Tim while his father makes a miraculous recovery at the hands of the strange Mister Vasuki, eventually returning home after sharing a taxi with a young mother and her son Cyril.

The wasteland opens out into an entire magical world created unconsciously by Tim's childhood fantasies, but as Molly is exploring it with Crimple she ends up being kidnapped and taken to Hell.

Instead, she offers to give him a tattoo that will stop him from ever hurting Molly: Tim agrees, and gains a moth/scorpion hybrid across his chest that stings him whenever he gets angry or performs magic.

Almost immediately, Holly's son Cyril becomes a target of a demon's malign interest, and rescuing him helps Tim to decide that his presence is putting those he loves at risk.

She attempts to attract a fairy in the hope that they will grant her wish, but when she succeeds in drawing the Amadan to her, she accidentally challenges him to a contest to see who is the greatest fool.

The trick backfires, though, as Molly's anger transforms her into "the burning girl", who cuts a swathe of destruction across Faerie with a horse named Prince.

The flitling Yarrow saves Fairie: her belief and loyalty cause it to be recreated in reality as exactly what it seemed to be - happy, natural and carefree - and with no tithe now owed to Hell.

As Molly learns of Tim's night with Leah - sad that he didn't think enough of her to tell her the truth - she breaks up with him, using a charm given to her by Zatanna to return home to her family.

Returning home with the fallen angel Araquel — who had previously been tricked in to breaking his chains by Barbatos — Tim finds that the armies of Heaven and Hell are fighting each other to a standstill in the mortal world.

[24] Tim's family find themselves caught in the crossfire of the battle when his father's wedding to Holly is interrupted by the groom transforming into a ravenous beast with a taste for angel-flesh.

It transpires that Mister Vasuki, the surgeon who miraculously restored Mr Hunter to health after the fire, is in truth a demon hoping to force Tim to work for him.

When a fire starts to destroy the forest, Tim's anger puts him back in touch with his magic as he tries desperately to save his one tree, but then finds himself returned outside the box, not a second older than the moment he was first trapped inside it.

His story was partly designed, then, to show Tim accepting his male side and learning how to be a boy - one of Gross' reasons for not using the character of Molly during his run.

He did comment that if he had stayed on the book, Gross' next story would have shown Tim similarly exploring his feminine side and would therefore have reintroduced some of the established female characters such as Molly or Gwen.

Tim's soul is immediately forfeit to Barbatos, and he becomes his slave[41] but sets in place the chain of events that eventually leads to the demon being defeated and trapped in the Dreaming.

The second, actually titled The Books of Magic Annual #1 due to the change in name from "Arcana", told the story of Tim's encounter with a minor god's daughter who was one of Tamlin's cast-off conquests.

An exclusive Books of Magic story, titled "The Lot" and written by Ney Rieber, appeared in Vertigo Rave #1, published in the fall of 1994.

Tim attempts to return the box to its original owner, but Constantine wants nothing to do with it, until it falls into the hands of a demon called Kobal ("Master of the Infernal Theatre").

[50] After several years of drafting and redrafting, the script moved so far from the original concept that Gaiman and Paul Levitz advised the filmmakers that any audience seeing it expecting a film based on the comic would be disappointed, and decided to develop the movie themselves.

A section of Paul Cornell's Doctor Who spin-off novel Happy Endings features Death in a brief cameo, quoting her dialogue from the original The Books of Magic mini-series.