Dark Satanic Mills

It seems to me that dystopia is the default setting for the graphic novel, and I am not sure that this example offers anything new, despite its gestures towards greater significance. You will catch the William Blake reference in the title, and the future England depicted here is no longer a green and pleasant land. It’s in the grip not only of climatic catastrophe, with London periodically flooded and the Lake District a radiation ridden desert, but also on the verge of a take-over by a fundamentalist Christian sect, with its own militia, the Soldiers of Truth. These new puritans hope to win an impending general election by staging a ‘miracle’ involving the dangerous manipulation of the cosmic mirrors that protect the earth from the sun. Our heroine, with the resonant name of Christy England, is a motorcycle despatch rider who unknowingly comes into possession of a document that would expose the miracle as a fraud. A cross country chase ensues, with Christy and her atheist doctor companion fighting off the militia and groups of less organized thugs, and  meeting other dissidents on the way (the literary reference here is The Wizard of Oz), including a young woman rescued from a witch burning and the heretic religious leader, Blake. The climax is reached at a power relay station where the miracle is to be staged. Despite the literary and artistic references – and Milton and Goya come in too – the story is basically the familiar one of recurring flight, capture and fight. I wasn’t convinced that a general election could be organised let alone have any significance in the world of physical devastation and social collapse depicted in the illustrations nor can I see how this future, stitched together from aspects of Christianity centuries ago, might have developed from a present society in which Christianity is but one of a number of religions and most people profess no religion at all.