Summary: While the Rebels are picked off one by one a tale of a daring Ewok adventure unfolds.
Plot: While the framing narrative still doesn't hold up I'm a sucker for Ewoks and it looks like Scott was a fan too as he includes references to both the cartoon and the two stand alone films. I might be alone in this but I've loved the Ewoks since I was a kid and I think that both the films and the cartoon still stand up really well so it was fantastic to see someone who obviously felt the same write a new fun adventure for them that included the Duloks, boar-wolves and a Gorax! On top of that I really liked the horror elements here like the allusion to the Wicker Man with the giant wicker Ewok sacrifice to the Gorax and the  just desserts the Ewok shaman got. While not perfect it was definitely the best story presented so far and something I'll definitely re-read in the future.
Art: Along with the much improved storytelling the art here is also much better than previous chapters:

Summary: Our fearless Rabbit Ronin and Inspector Ishida find themselves between a real rock and a hard place only to find an unusual ally.
Plot:  Endings are often the hardest part of a story to get right, especially in a thrilling story such as Sakai's look at the intrigue of Hidden Christians in in feudal Japan; there were so many plot twists and characters involved along the way that it's difficult to imagine so many loose strings being tied up so neatly in a single issue...but The Hidden arrives at its conclusion and delivers upon every single character introduction, mystery, and thematic thread he introduced across the previous six issues. It's truly a master stroke of storytelling that will in time, I think, make it one of my favorite Usagi stories to date.
Art: Sakai is a legend of cartooning, he's able to bring so much pathos to his animal characters that at the end you're left forgetting that they aren't people which is a wonder to see. While the big action scenes in this issue with all the bandits attacking Usagi and Ishida do get a bit muddled at times, and the bandits come across as a little too generic to the point where they all look the same after a while the book is still fantastic. 
Grade:9/10

Summary: Jumping in where the original series left off we find Tim Hunter at the cross roads of magic and mundane, he chooses magic but learns it isn't as simple as that.
Plot: I love Neil Gaiman's original Books of Magic nearly as much as I love his Sandman, and I even enjoyed a few of the sequels not by him so I felt this iteration in the Sandman Universe would be a sure thing when it was announced...but as the other titles came out and seriously underwhelmed me I became more and more worried that this would be another miss...and in that regard it sadly didn't disappoint. It's not that this new Books of Magic is a bad book, the pacing is good, it lays out it's premise well quickly introduces its cast before introducing a mysterious threat at the end...but it's over all content isn't exciting. The original Tim Hunter was a bit of a two dimensional stock character, it's true, but he didn't have to be more as he was just the plot device needed to string the history of magic in the DC universe together, but here we get a straight forward fantasy adventure story, and in a world populated by Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and literally a hundred other young fantasy heroes Tim really had to be something different to stand out...but yet he remained that same old every man character. 
As I said though, it's a technically well crafted tale, so it's not as if Howard has no skill, and maybe Tim will become something more down the line...but with the way the rest of the Sand Man Universe books have gone my hopes are not terribly high. Still I think I'll go for atleast one more issue and see for myself.
Art: As pedestrian as the plot may be, the art by Fowler definitely fares better. Fowler had the unenvious task of encapsulating the entirety of Gaiman's previous Books of Magic into a few short pages, and the heavy lifting of that retelling was laid squarely on his shoulders with only a few captions to lead the way. In the hands of another artist that easily could have come off just as rote as the rest of the plot, but Fowler showed us he's no ordinary artist as he gave us that summary in the style of an illuminated text which really fit perfectly with the subject at hand. I'm thinking my will to trudge on may be largely thanks to the art here as I'd love to see how he'd render a more magical world, but even that hope will only get me so far.
Grade:6/10