magical comic books?

I realise that there wern't any comic books in medeaval times but would magi create something like it for illiterate magi?(to help them learn spells & such)

The Miniatures and "Books of Blind/Libros de ciego", illustrated pages with stories (sometimes byblical or religious) of people with the Profession: Storyteller, hat worked like help to tell their stories and performances.

The idea of visual narratives is not at all alien to the medieval mind. Illuminated manuscripts like the History of Edward the Confessor tell his life story in sequential pictures, compete with ribbons of text flowing out of their mouths. Trajan's Column and the Bayeaux Tapestry tell their stories of recruitment, mustering, invasion and aftermath in sequential pictorial form. Dante recognized this and put it in the Commedia in, if memory serves, Canto 7 of Purgatorio, when the Pilgrim walks past friezes which depict Trajan's story scene by scene. Dante describes the images as talking to the observer, but without speech.

Your question is phrase as "would magi do this." The answer is totally up to you, as it is your Saga. But if your question is "could magi do this" the answer is an unequivocal "yes."

could stories/adventures be based upon the books we are discusing?

Here's an idea:

One of the PC magi is embarking on the training of a young and illiterate apprentice. He searches out a primer on Hermes Lore written almost two centuries ago that includes a great deal of illumination as well as text, to present the youngster with the opportunity to start learning both about the Order and about reading Latin. Two copies of the original text become available, and the magus might discover that the copies are not actually identical. While the text and pictures fundamentally match, some pictures in one of the copies has subtle additions to the illustrations: facing peeking out from behind robes, trees with branches in different configurations or birds on certain branches, certain animals changed (a wolf in one book becomes a cat in the other). If the magus spends a season studying the two books, he realizes that the changed images begin appearing slightly before the Schism War in the chronology, and become more frequent after. Could the images contain clues to hidden Diedne knowledge?

On a slightly related note, one of the magi in my home saga discovered a book on Church History that was apparently made from a palimsest (reused parchment). She is still in the process of trying to decipher the older writing, as the pages are out of order, with some having been trimmed, but the text appears to be about some mercurian ritual.

good adventure ideas!

My Ph.D. is in Medieval/Renaissance lit and comics, so forgive me if I go off a little here. It's rare I get the chance.

You might have a Mage with the Inscrutable Flaw who wrote all his books as pictorial narratives, encoding specific techniques for magic in the images either literally or allegorically. You might leave clues to treasure, NPCs, or locations in a pictorial narrative. For instance, there is a dwarf -- I use the medieval phrase, by which I here mean a human being of very short stature -- in the Bayeaux tapestry, and there is a legend that he is reciting the Song of Roland to the Normans. If there was an illustrated book that told of a Hermetic legend, a particular person depicted in those illustrations might be key to unraveling the Mystery, and the pictures would leave clues to where that person or his tomb might be found.

A magus could make the illuminated pages of his text speak or convey information silently, as the friezes do in Dante's purgatory. If a Mage can already talk to plants and rocks, perhaps there is a way for a Mage to talk to an illustration by way of magic. See, for example, the Ellesmere Chaucer and its illustrations of the Canterbury Tales and their pilgrims. If an illustration depicts Belin of Mercere, could you somehow cast a spell which let you talk to that image of Belin? It would not be the real Belin. It would not know everything Belin knew. But it would know everything that happened to Belin in that book, and you could ask it questions and learn much without taking the entire season to read the book. For magic who do not read (there's one in the Theban Tribunal, a Tremere), this might be a way for them to use a book anyway.

Archimedes and DoctorComics, NEAT ideas.

Heh, i bet. Well it´s good you get a chance for it at least sometime.

Another idea:

Primers in Latin and Magic Theory that are actually enchanted books that explain the theory by TALKING to you in a soap opera style. The story of a magus teaching his apprentice in the lab, or discussing magic theory between 2 magi. Could be used using the Teacher rules instead of the Reading rules maybe. Maybe with some exposure into Order of Hermes lore, for example.

Great ideas for the books everyone

Xavi