The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix is an outstanding book that covers not only graphic memoir (the biographies of two famous creators of fantasy stories) but the nature of friendship, belief, faith, and storytelling.
It begins with friends Mr. Lion (a talking lion is the key metaphor of Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia) and the Wizard (similarly reminiscent of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) having tea together. They know they’re in a book, and they’re talking about the nature of myth.
The two authors and professors were fantasy writers before that was a popular thing to do, academics with their own kind of imagination. Lewis wrote about how astonishing it is to a man to make “the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.”
There are some fascinating aspects to this telling. Beyond the mythical narrators, the author makes space for some digressions, or “portals”. The reader can follow the doorways into deeper dives, or continue with the main story at their choice. The First World War played a huge part in shaping their lives, as well as those of their generation, given the trauma involved.
There are chunks of the book told in illustrated text, which I normally dislike in a graphic novel, but there’s so much information to cover about the details of their lives (and it’s hard to illustrate “he was born, the family moved, someone died, he was sent away to school” visually without taking a lot of space) that it’s appreciated. It’s disappointing to find out that this wasn’t a lifelong friendship in ways I hoped. But the book is a lovely, thought-provoking, dense read.
