Meanwhile, in a secret chamber beneath the Eagle & Child ...

Rebecca Traister of The New York Observer (scroll down past Kate) reports on a really bad idea:

November will see the debut of a new comic book from G.I. Joe publishers Image Comics. "Heaven’s War" focuses on the Inklings, the scholarly cabal that was centered around ... C.S. Lewis ... J.R.R. Tolkien and ... Charles Williams. ...

According to an advertisement in the Previews catalog published by Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the book will be set in 1938, with the world hovering on the brink of World War II when "a secret angelic battle is waged in the heavenly realms to determine mankind’s fate."

The Inklings are pitted against the infamous occultist author Aleister Crowley, who "plans to manipulate those angelic struggles and thus shape the world according to his will." In order to stop him, the Inklings "must decipher a landscape of sacred geometry to intercept Crowley at the threshold of heaven."

It's like the Justice League, only with more tweed.

It's appalling that Lewis -- whose Screwtape Letters is profound and keenly observed -- should be conscripted into what sounds like rewarmed Frank Peretti. Peretti's literal-minded "thrillers" about "secret angelic battles" seem to have provided the inspiration (if that's the right word) for this "Heaven's War" comic.

The folks at Image Comics would have been much better off with a graphic adaptation of, say, Charles Williams' Descent Into Hell.

Comments

[Jon H]

Call it "The League Of Tweedy Gentlemen".

[Eli Bishop]

That's hilarious.

For those who haven't read much of Lewis or Williams... actually quite a few of their books are pretty melodramatic in contrast to the measured philosophical satire of "Screwtape." In Lewis's "Perelandra" and "That Hideous Strength," a linguistics professor ends up in mortal hand-to-hand combat with a demonically possessed guy on Venus, and Merlin is dug up from under a university campus to help annihilate a conspiracy of mad scientists. Williams' "War in Heaven" is about a modern quest for the Holy Grail pitting scholars and small-town parsons against an odd cabal who can turn people to dust and make houses invisible; there's a surprise appearance by the mythical Christian king Prester John. They're ripping good yarns, with an odd mix of pyrotechnic action and philosophy which doesn't resemble anything else I've read, except possibly (in a decidely non-Christian variant) some of the later non-horror novels of Clive Barker. Williams' books also have some pretty unorthodox theology at times and lots of hermetic imagery from Tarot and Kabbalah.

However, the Inklings did take their theology seriously and I don't think they'd take kindly to the notion of an "angelic battle" in which a human being (even a legend-in-his-own-mind like Crowley) is able to influence goings-on in heaven.

I would LOVE to see an Image comic of "Descent into Hell." Its two main storylines involve a ghost wandering around doing nothing, and a historian sitting at home going slowly crazy from frustrated lust and ambition. (It's great.) I can see Todd McFarlane searching helplessly for something to draw fangs on.