If you want to find a loved one or if a ghost haunts your house, it is useless to call ghost hunters seen in the cinema, but it is necessary to contact the Doctor Mirage as shown in this touching story in one volume at Bliss editions.
Only one being is missing…
Doctor Mirage begins with a full-page studded with a television director's monologue. This narrative technique is a clever way to present the character. Shan Fong aka Doctor Mirage is depressed, because this magician able to communicate with the deceased has lost her power and the dead are now silent, in particular, the one who is most important to her, Hwen, her deceased husband. Through a flashback, we understand the origin of this amputation. These ghosts were her cameras which, like in a reality TV show, followed her constantly. Doctor Mirage feels abandoned when a young woman unexpectedly arrives at her home. Grace Lugo explains that if she no longer sees the dead it is because she is one and, like her, they live in hell. She wants to prove her point to him but for that, she has to take drugs. You can see it by its yellow eyes. The cartoonist Nick Robles renders this experience very well by a layout and colorization reminiscent of psychedelia. It thus instills doubt… Is this young redhead a real magician or a simple drug addict?
A magician in love
Focusing on these two heroines, Doctor Mirage is a female story written by a screenwriter, Magdalene Visaggio. Doctor Mirage is an exciting and rare character because she certainly has powerful talents allowing her to go into the world of the dead, but she is also a sensitive woman and in love with her deceased husband. This doctor is often depressed because she would be a misanthrope preferring the dead to the living. In this volume, she finds herself in the opposite situation after the loss of her power. She must trust the visions of a strange woman. Indeed, Grace is the most ambiguous. By her vocabulary, she seems to know more than the specialist Shan by esoteric terms borrowed from antiquity but also close to the slang of drug addicts. Unlike Doctor Mirage, Grace has a much more colorful view of the world of the dead. However, as the narrative progresses, this world becomes darker and darker. We can salute the beautiful work of Nick Robles on colorization to put all this in image. Grace also hears voices as Hwen asks her to go see Shan. Of course, no doctor believes her, and even Doctor Mirage is skeptical, which causes tension between them. 
The book accelerates the action in the second part when Shan and Grace face off against ancient monsters. The magic then goes back very far in the past in the Pharaonic era with the appearance of Anubis and a priest reciting formulas in hieroglyphics. Eight months earlier, Shan was looking for a solution so that her husband could return from the living so that they could start a family. This past and the present come together in the last episode in a construction that, if it has become classic, remains very effective. The outcome is surprising in its sadness. True to the character of Valiant, Doctor Mirage offers a touching story about magic and grief. This new creative team takes Shan elsewhere to older and more colorful worlds forcing him to a painful realization. Bliss offers here a new pearl to its very beautiful catalog doing as always an excellent work of editing, offering at the end of the volume, all the alternative covers and two very beautiful double pages of Nick Robles before the lettering and colorization. If you want to have a different journey into the world of the dead, you can check out links to the complete Shadowman and to Rapture.
