W: Micah Harris
A: Michael Gaydos
120 pages, b/w, $12.95
Image Comics
A while back I took a quick look at Heaven’s War, a fantasy-cum-conspiracy-theory graphic novel by Micah Harris and Michael “Alias” Gaydos. Chances are you never heard of this book–and that’s a crime. Two of its main characters–C.S. Lewis and (especially) J.R.R. Tolkien–are very much in literary and pop-culture vogue, and given the popularity of books that are plumbing the self-same area of conspiracy-theory legend–most notably Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its “nonfiction” antecedent Holy Blood, Holy Grail–it seemed to me that Heaven’s publisher, Image Comics, had a hit on its hands and punted. I have no idea whether the coup d’etat that happened at Image in the interim will affect how (or if) the book is marketed in the future, but I feel it’s worth drawing your attention to it yet again by reposting my review. Fans of intelligent, slightly heady Christian-mythology genre fiction would do well to snap up a copy post haste.
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I spent part of Super Bowl Sunday reading Micah Harris & Michael Gaydos’ excellent graphic novel Heaven’s War, from the increasingly indie-feeling Image Comics. The book concerns the race between legendary occultist Aleister Crowley and legendary fantasy authors the Inklings (Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien) to unravel the secrets of the Priory of Sion as encrypted in the church at Rennes-Le-Chateau.
At this point you probably fall into one of two camps: You are either saying “Holy Moses, I’ve got to get that!” or “Huh?” And if there’s a problem with this fascinating little book, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough to draw members of the latter group into the former. I’ve spent the last decade drenching myself in fantasy and occult esoterica, to the point where simply enumerating the names of the real-life figures who are characters in the book and the places and groups involved in the story is enough to tell me exactly what’s involved and what’s at stake. According to the notes offered by Harris at the back of the book, the published version of the graphic novel is much shorter than what he’d originally planned to produce. I can’t help but wonder if additional pages build-up, place-setting, and character development wouldn’t have been helpful to those readers who weren’t already familiar with the players and their milieux. In other words, to crib a criticism Tolkien levvied at his own novel, “the book is too short.”
That being said, I think the book still holds up: for its charming and involving depiction of the personalities of its four eccentric protagonists; for its deft and appropriately mystical exploration of conspiracy-theory metaphysics; for its gorgeous black-and-white art by Alias cartoonist Michael Gaydos, whose sensibilities in both action and portraiture are subtle yet perfectly clear; for its optimism in the face of awesome horrors, a sentiment appropriate to the work of all three of its heroes; and for its ambition, tackling in relatively short order the type of mysteries of faith and history that were previously the exclusive comics territory of Moore & Campbell’s From Hell. If you enjoyed, for example, William Gull’s guided tour of London in that book, this will rivet you to your seat.
If the work of any of its characters appeals to you, please do pick up Heaven’s War. I continue to find myself thinking over the issues it tackles, and the images it offers.