REVIEW: The Mythmakers
The Mythmakers
By John Hendrix
Abrams Fanfare/224 pages/$24.99
In 1976, SUNY-Binghamton offered a comparative literature course focusing on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Unfortunately, I was a freshman, and it was a senior seminar, so I ignored it (my clever wife ignored that prerequisite and took it as a freshman anyway). Thanks to this graphic novel, I finally feel like I took the course.
Tolkien’s influence these days looms largest over Western literature with his reinvention of High Fantasy and worldbuilding that has been imitated but never surpassed ever since. Lewis’s work is deemed more Young Adult these days, and his religious works, other than The Screwtape Letters, have dropped out of the mainstream. The film adaptations of his Narnia novels have paled in comparison to the Peter Jackson-directed Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Although Greta Gerwig’s Netflix take on Narnia may be cause for hope.)
Hancock mixes prose and graphic storytelling to trace the backgrounds and lives of Lewis and Tolkien until they met at Oxford. Both had their share of personal travails and challenges growing into adulthood and both used literature as a balm. It’s no surprise, then, that they would meet and bond over their passion for Norse Mythology.
With a Lion and a Wizard acting as avatars, we are walked through their lives, loves, and letters, watching the famed Inklings form then fracture during the 1940s. By then, Lewis had written his best-selling space trilogy and become a nationally recognized voice on the radio. Tolkien had the surprise smash success of The Hobbit to sustain him while he stalled in writing a sequel.
Hendrix shows how they admired and supported one another, even after their careers and lives diverged and the friendship waned. Even late in life, Lewis loved and supported Tolkien from afar, being the one to nominate him for the Novel Prize in Literature.
Hendrix provides tons of context for what the state of imaginative literature was like at the time, but he wisely takes the deeper dives and places them as appendixes, letting readers choose to flip to the back for more or carry on. Reading it either way is fine, but it works best by reading it all. His artwork is pleasing and well-suited to the subject matter.
The review copy provided was in black and white, but one glance at the color sample suggests this will be a well-received volume. Anyone who appreciates one or both authors will do well to add this to their library. And for teachers like me, this is an excellent distillation of the power of myth and its influence through the centuries.
