TOLKIEN: Lighting Up The Darkness, or me recommending a comic book to you. No, really!

TOLKIEN: Lighting Up The Darkness
WILLY DURAFFOURG (illus. Giancarlo Caracuzzo)
Ablaze Publishing
$16.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: JRR Tolkien was not always the old Oxford professor, pipe in the mouth, refining his extraordinary work.

In 1915, at age 23, he left for the front with his high school friends, whom he loved like brothers. They take part in the Battle of the Somme which will kill 450,000 people. The horror of war will brand his relationship to friendship, love and creation.

This graphic novel explores the youth of the author of The Lord of the Rings, and his traumatic experience of the battlefields of the First World War, which will forge the imagination of his literary work.

For fans of The Hobbit & Lord of The Rings looking to learn more about the genius behind their favorite epics.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Okay. This is how you know for certain that we are in the End Times.

I am recommending to you, dear blog reader, a comic book. A format I avoid because I do not "get" it. One that is, to boot, about the author of The Lord of the Rings. A book series that I famously dislike with the utmost vigor.

Have the GQP released some personality-altering chemical into the atmosphere? It feels like that is not out of the realm of possibility, given how many of my shibboleths I am smashing by recommending this read to you. The issues I have with graphic works always comes down to, what am I supposed to do, read its words or look at its art? I am not wired to do both...I read fast, so am the right audience for subtitled film and TV, and less so for sequential story-telling which is, of necessity, light on words.

Then we come to Tolkien. Not my jam, as the middle-aged whippersnappers say. I never caught the Middle-Earth bug, despite my love for The Hobbit in childhood. I seem to have acquired sterile immunity to Tolkien from that story-inoculation. No idea why, really. It should have been so totally my thing, only it wasn't.

What led me to get this DRC was the fact that, despite my dislike of his stories and his conservative, anti-progressive politics, I think I need to know about the man that changed the entire publishing industry, and the popular culture I grew up in, with the stories that were inspired by his experiences in the Great War. The fact that this is a translation from the French, and is illustrated by an Italian master of sequential storytelling art, made the prospect of reading the story much more attractive to me.

The artwork speaks for itself in the samples from the publisher posted below. It is, to my art-savvy eye, lovely stuff. It is well-chosen to make its storytelling points succinctly, and very aesthetically pleasing.

I think the light shined on the origin of the world-beating work done by Tolkien makes this graphic treatment of his life all the more interesting. The plight of a WWI soldier is, as always, interesting to me. That it is the story a soldier who went on to use the horrors of his time at war to write effectively of the cost of battles on the unprepared and unsuited people who always have and always will predominate among the combatants...priceless.

Kudos to the writers and to the publisher for seeing that this take on the life of JRR Tolkien is important, illuminating, and quite beautiful.