Dark Satanic Mills

In a Britain laid to waste by catastrophic global warming, a motorcycle courier, Christy, and an atheist campaigner are on the run. In their hands is the key which might prevent a violent Christian cult, the Soldiers of Truth, from gaining power and locking England’s dreaming in chains forever.

As the title suggests, much of the inspiration for this graphic novel comes from the poet William Blake and his opposition of the dead hand of dogma with freedom. Accordingly, the Soldiers of Truth are as dismal a collection of zealots as one might hope to avoid, and at stake for Christy and her friends is nothing less than the future of England itself. Yet though Blake figures prominently, perhaps a bigger influence here is 2000 AD: in both style and content this book owes a lot to classic series such as Halo Jones or Judge Dredd, and Higgins’s distinctive artwork (himself a 2000 AD veteran) gives it the appearance of a lost classic of British comics. Unafraid of big ideas, inventive and action-packed, this dystopian adventure is an impressive first foray into comics from Marcus and Julian Sedgwick.