The Mythmakers | Review

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
Writer/artist: John Hendrix
Harry N. Abrams; $24.99

Despite what some reviews, blurbs and even the solicitation copy from the publisher itself may claim, John Hendrix’s The Mythmakers is not a graphic novel…even by the extremely wide and generous definition of the term that the publishing industry has come to use, which essentially amounts to any form of comics that are bound between two covers.

Rather, Hendrix’s book, a sort of joint biography of the two British literary figures focusing on their friendship with one another and their shared and argued over conceptions of faith, myth and literature, is probably best described as an illustrated prose/comics hybrid.

Large sections of the book, mostly those concerning the biographical information, are told in straightforward prose (albeit occasionally embellished by Hendrix’s drawings), and it is generally for only the more dramatic moments in the two subjects’ lives that the form shifts to straight comics, with several passages taking on an almost liminal form as the imaginary dial between the forms of “illustrated prose” and “comics” is turned by the creator to find the right setting.

But then this prose/comics hybrid biography, which resembles the creator’s own 2018 work The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, is itself embedded into a more traditional comics/sequential art narrative, featuring two host characters that guide the reader through not only the lives and thinking of the subjects, but also the fertile terrain the pair of writers studied and found inspiration in.

In fact, at three points during these characters’ wanderings through a beautifully illustrated metaphorical adventure/quest setting, they encounter special portals that invite readers to take a deeper dive into the background material.

These portals that can be safely ignored if one wishes to proceed with the narrative as it flows or “opened” so that the reader travels through to appendices in the form of comics, detouring into the subjects of “The Roots of Myth,” “Origin of the Fairy Tale” and “The Artifact Attic.” (If one chooses to skip these during the first read-through, they are, of course, available to read afterwards, almost giving the book a choose-your-own-adventure aspect.)

As for these host characters, they are a Mr. Lion, an anthropomorphic lion in a suit, and Wizard, a stereotypical wizard, complete with beard, staff and pointy hat decorated with stars and moons. The former speaks his dialogue in the same rounded balloons that Lewis will when he’s on-panel in a comics passage, while the latter speaks in square-shaped balloons with a different font, like Tolkien’s comics avatar. Additionally, the former seems to be the Lewis expert, and the latter the Tolkien expert.

The book formally begins with this pair of hosts sitting down to a pot of tea together in front of a fireplace, Wizard reading a fairy tale from a book. This leads to talk of myth, and the appearance of a magic key, which is then inserted into a door, through which their journey begins. After pages set in an underground realm, with a sort of museum of myth and a few active monsters that seek to impede them, the pair eventually ascends to see “The Ancient Tree of Tales,” and then enter another doorway, after which we get to the first real chapter of the book, and the life story of Tolkien, the elder of the two subjects, finally begins.

This is the beginning of what is essentially the book-within-the-book, an illustrated prose book for younger readers recounting the biographies of the two writers, which is itself enveloped in the Mr. Lion and Wizard book, which is more about Tolkien and Lewis’ ideas.

It’s a fascinating approach to a biography, not just in its rather unusual, hybrid format, but in the way it gives precedence to the interior lives of the two men. Not simply a pair of parallel biographies, nor, after their lives intersect, is it simply the story of an extremely influential friendship that produced seminal, foundational works of fantasy (not to mention science-fiction and Christian apologetics) that continue to influence the worlds of literature, pop culture and philosophy today.

Rather, it is the story of the imaginations and intellectual passions that bound the two men within that friendship. It’s a very big, ambitious and occasionally even amorphous subject for a book, but Hendrix is able to grasp it, grapple with it, and ultimately tell it as a sort of layered double narrative.

The unique ability of comics to marry words and images, the latter sometimes serving as something akin to an illustration or a diagram of a complex idea while still retaining the ability to communicate a story and move it forward, serves Hendrix extremely well. His book is as unique and unusual as its format, and a great way for readers of any age to get to know C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien…not just as historical figures, but as the readers’ fellows or, indeed, as their friends.

It is, after all, now impossible for anyone to actually join Lewis and Tolkien at one of their regular meetings of their Inklings group, the now legendary gatherings where they joined fellow writers and intellectuals to talk about their thinking and their writing and to encourage and criticize one another, but Hendrix’s The Mythmakers may just be the next best thing.

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