The Mythmakers
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SME116: A lion and a wizard argue about the nature of story while telling you the story of two men who spent their lives arguing about the nature of story. That is the conceit of The Mythmakers, John Hendrix’s 224-page hybrid of graphic novel, illustrated biography, and something harder to name — and it is the reason this panel could not stop talking about it.
Thomas Salerno, Patrick Mason, Rob Leonardi, Rob Story, and Fr. Bryan Shackett came to the recording expecting a quick read and found a book roughly two Roverandoms long. It is marketed to readers ten and up. It is also, all five agree, written for anyone.
The Tolkien and C.S. Lewis friendship is well-trodden ground, and the panel knows it — what they keep returning to is how Hendrix tells it. A prologue through a hall of myth, statues of the world’s great epics, almost no text, and a reader who will happily spend half an hour on a single page. Appendices you reach by going down a rabbit hole. A raccoon, a Professor Thistle, and puns riding alongside letters from real children about Aslan. Campbell’s monomyth laid out plainly, then quietly applied to two actual lives that begin in loss and cross a threshold into the trenches of the First World War.
That war section gives no quarter. A shell kills the man standing next to Lewis, on the page. Tolkien’s trench fever — carried by lice — invalides him home before his unit is destroyed. Hendrix calls the chapter the Dead Marshes, and the panel doesn’t need that explained.
Then Addison’s Walk, Hugo Dyson, a gust of wind, and the long argument that ends with the most reluctant convert in England on his knees. Then the Inklings: criticism that builds rather than wounds, and friendship as the thing that makes both men’s work possible.
And then it goes wrong. Charles Williams arrives. Tolkien tells Lewis the first chapters of Narnia “just won’t do.” Lewis publishes nine major works while Tolkien perfects one leaf. Why did Tolkien and Lewis fall out is the question every reader brings to this book, and Hendrix answers it without picking a villain — including the marriage to Joy Davidmanthat Lewis did not tell his closest friend about. Fr. Bryan Shackett explains what the Church actually holds about validity, and declines to rule on the case. Patrick Mason argues the Yoko Ono comparison is too easy.
What Hendrix gives them at the end, history did not. The panel calls it eukatastrophe, and Thomas admits he wept. Grace, not record-correction — and it sends you back through the whole book in a different light.
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