Exlibrium () is an urban fantasy comic book series about the adventures of a young girl named Lilia Romanova, published by the Russian publishing house Bubble Comics. It ran from October 2014 to December 2018. The author of the comic, as well as the writer of most of the issues, was Natalia Devova. The art for the early issues was drawn by Andrey Rodin and Alina Erofeeva, and since November 2016, other artists began to work on the series: Konstantin Tarasov, Yulia Zhuravlyova and Marina Privalova.
The comics series is set in Moscow. The protagonist of the series, Lilia Romanova, a teenage girl fascinated by popular culture, accidentally enters the Order of Bookwizards. The main task of the Order is to protect the boundaries between the real world and the world of fiction. Lilia is trained in the Order, and eventually becomes a Bookwizard herself, mastering to the full her supernatural abilities: the ability to emit destructive rays from her eyes and mouth. In the Order, the girl meets other students; together they confront villains and deal with problems, mostly involving the escape of literary characters from books.
Critics received Exlibrium very favorably, welcomed the concept of the comic, including its elaborate world, the plot and the very idea of the "book magic", as well as the art of Andrei Rodin and Alina Erofeeva. However, they lamented the protractedness of the first issue's storyline and the overabundance of references to popular culture. The character of Lilia seemed ambiguous to reviewers, as some commentators noted that it would be easy for readers to associate themselves with the character, while others saw the heroine as a typical example of a "socio-phobic geek".
Story
Setting
The story takes place in modern Moscow. The plot is spinning around the mysterious Order of Bookwizards, which is made by the first Bookwizards for protection of the borders between the real and the literary worlds. Their main duty is to catch literary characters who have escaped from their books and who are causing damage to the real world due to mutations of their body, caused by their presence in our objective reality. Every ordinary person can become a bookwizard, after being infected by literary ink from revived books. However, the adepts of the Order firstly need to limit the movement of a person affected by the ink, because he begins to attract the attention of "mad" books that spit out everything they have inside into the real world. Next, the infected person must pass a test in the Bone House, which is an astral place, where shadow-like creatures live. If the shadows take over, the ink absorbs the person and he becomes a Shadow of the Library (Russian: библиотень), a little phantom creature, serving the Bookwizards. The thing is that in that case he will be forgotten by anyone who ever knew him before transformation. If the person takes over, then he gains the ability to control the ink inside of him. During the test, the ink color is also being defined, which affects the supernatural abilities that the newborn Bookwizard obtains. There are ten colors in total: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue, purple, gray, black, and white (the last two are called "monochrome colors" and are special and extremely rare) and their shades. With the help of the first 8 colors, Bookwizards can influence the subjective reality of books in various ways, while black and white let their owners control our reality, opening up perspectives to limitless possibilities (the abilities of both can only be used together with the opposite color, which means that two magicians are required to activate them; they can't be used separately). That's why the Order of Bookwizards is haunting after magicians of monochrome colors, whose fate in case of capture is death.
The Order of Bookwizards owns Libraries, which are headquarters, as well as training places for new magicians. In one of those Libraries, the Real Moscow Library, the most of Exlibriums story takes place. Every Library has its manager, who is similar to the school principal, and tutors. All Libraries obey the council of the Order, called the Circle. The Circle includes four people and an equal number of senior Shadows of the Library (a special kind, more intelligent and powerful than their smaller colleagues). Together, the participants of the Circle solve global problems of the Libraries crisis.