God’s’Dog and a New Apocalyptic Storytelling

In 2022, my brother Matthieu and I, with the help of an artist named Cord Nielson, published the
first volume of our graphic novel series God’s’Dog. It is an epic story with cosmic stakes set in
the legendary fringe of the Christian world. God’s’ Dog portrays a dog-headed St. Christopher
alongside an ensemble cast of St. George, St. Mercurius, and St. Symeon the Stylite, all set in a
legendary world with an early Byzantine aesthetic. One of the main motivators for this venture
was the desire to propose a new template for storytelling. This “new” template is rather a return
to an old one, exemplified in ancient texts such as the Sibylline Oracles, the Alexander Romance,
the Arthurian romances, and especially in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In those texts we find the
Christian worldview as the culmination of ancient history--not a denial of Troy, Alexander or
Augustus, but hinting at how the world has always secretly been moving towards the Christian
revelation as the culmination of all history and all storytelling. We hope to see the birth of a new
storytelling mode--stories told within a Universal History, within the Christian Mythological
order.
At this current time, it seems we are experiencing a kairotic moment when a return to this
Christian mythological template has become possible. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are the
precursors of this movement. In their fantasy works, they embody what we could call the first
part of this grand universal story. In the very founding of the fantasy genre, they inscribed a
Christian hope, a vision of imaginative storytelling yearning in birth pangs for the story of
Christ. They created a fantastical narthex of pagan imagery, a return of mythology filled with
wizards and fairy folk, shadows and whisps of the Christian promise. On the other side of this
equation there were strange rumblings of what was to come, a reverse pattern that might
nonetheless contain the key to the next step for imaginative stories told in a Christian world. For
me at least, I started to notice this possible key in the world of comic books.
From Superheroes to the Occult
As a young child, I had grown up with Saturday morning cartoons, and in particular the animated
adventures of the Super Friends, Spider-man, and of various Marvel superheroes. By the time I
was 12, I was immersing myself in large black and white compendiums of silver age comics
translated into French for the Quebec market. At 14, I was a full-blown comic book collector and
had plastered my room with comic pages.
As I got older, I realized that comics were growing up with me. As a child I had been fascinated
by the archetypes, the costumes and bold interaction of different qualities of power and
personality. As a teenager, I was provoked by what many have called the “British invasion,”
when authors Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison were brought in to write for DC
Comics and began to reimagine the world of superheroes with a strange new religious twist.
There had always been something religious and mythological about superheroes--we need only
remember Kirby’s constant mythological musings with Thor or the New Gods, or Marvel’s great
cosmic figures like Infinity and Eternity. But the religious patterns developed increasing
sophistication in the late 80’s and early 90s’. During this period, it became common to insinuate
religious and mythological motifs, not only in large colorful story arcs like those of Kirby, but by
weaving subtle tapestries filled with literary allusions and esoteric connections.
Grant Morrison presented Batman’s roster of villains as archetypal expressions of Batman’s own
psyche and of analogical cosmic forces in Arkham Asylum, a change which remains with the
franchise to the present day. In Arkham, the Joker is no longer only a quirky and mischievous
clown with a dark sense of humor, but an expression of chaos and fluid identity. Alan Moore’s
Killing Joke further develops this take on the Joker, exposing the readers to a dance of marginal
patterns and disruptions, showing us how the entire aesthetic of the carnival--and its adult
version, the Burlesque--was an expression of the anarchy of the fringe. We were shown a
challenge to order itself, and how an absurd, violent event can almost upend sanity and social
hierarchy.
Writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were avowed occultists, and this began to
increasingly show in their works. Occult influences were already apparent in Moore’s Swamp
Thing, but they became more pronounced in Morisson’s Invisibles or Moore’s Promethia, where
the very books were considered by their authors as magic rituals of transformation.
In this vein, the comic book that most affected me in retrospect was Neil Gaiman’s Sandman
series of graphic novels, especially a story arc called “The Season of Mists.” In this series,
Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, discovers that Lucifer, ruler of Hell, has decided to abdicate his
role and empty Hell of its inhabitants. The entire roster of gods and demons from all times and
cultures came to bid and compete for a claim to this precious piece of spiritual real estate. What
fascinated me most in this telling was realizing that the Lucifer of this series was a version of
Lucifer from Paradise Lost. That simple seed of possibility haunted me as I began noticing
movies, comics and other media introducing Biblical characters and Christian motifs in the field
of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
If Tolkien and Lewis had created surprising pagan worlds with underlying Christian patterns, in
Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing or Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, we could find stories with confused
Christian strains fed upon underlying atheistic and pagan patterns. Ultimately, we have reached a
strange moment in culture, where the only place where even a pale caricature of a Christian
worldview is still really celebrated is in Horror stories--a technical world of monster fighting
with crucifixes and holy water inaugurated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or else in fantasy versions
of the divine hierarchy where angels and demons contend with each other in allusions to Dante’s
or Milton’s visions.
Of course, the allusion to Christian cosmology in fantasy stories today is almost always
subversive of the Christian hope, mostly bleak and ambiguous, a cosmic war without the vision
of an all-loving God. (An excellent example of this is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
series, which has recently been made into a series by HBO). And so, although Neil Gaiman uses
an image of the Divine hierarchy in his “Season of Mists,” his God is cold and distant, and Christ
is most definitely absent. The worldview in these stories is always twisted somehow through a
cynical, occult lens, and the Christian themes are leveled through a form of post-modern
intertextuality, with multiple gods, demons, and practices all co-existing in that big “new-agey”
jumble that has characterized contemporary spirituality. All of this at first glance appears as a
major challenge for the Christian storyteller, one which might seem impossible to overcome, but
once again we notice we are standing in a kairotic moment, where all the tools to overturn the
chaos are in fact at hand.
Three Bright Lights Guiding us from the Occult back to Christ
The first bright light to appear to us —even as the Christian worldview is being derided and
twisted—is the fact that the story of Christ cannot be extinguished from culture. It has embedded
itself in the very notion of the hero and protagonist, the very definition of a virtuous person who
uses their power and sacrifices themselves for the highest good and in service of others. Even in
the anti-hero it shows itself by contrast. The constant return to the story of Christ is true
especially in big-budget blockbusters, expensive films where a non-compelling narrative risks
serious financial failure. Storytellers know, if only implicitly, that the story of Christ is the one
which garners the most attention. This is why it is the big, generic blockbusters where the story
of Christ always shows up again--sometimes well-managed, sometimes formulaic and
superficial, sometimes inverted into that of the anti-hero. But the story cannot go away. The
image of the Messiah appears and reappears, especially in the “chosen ones”--Skywalker, Harry
Potter, Superman and so many more, all shimmer with aspects of the Christ.
The second bright light to appear in the last few years has been what might be called the
celebration of “weird Christianity.” For centuries, certain types of modernist Christians fought to
paper over the strangeness of the Christian world with dubious translations of Scripture, by
rationalization of miracles, and by dismissing cosmic hierarchies. This tendency towards a
“rationalized” Christianity is now being vehemently challenged by scholars and thinkers. At first,
and for most of the last two decades, this challenge was brought by atheists and cynics in order
to accelerate the destruction of Christianity. But the tables have now turned--the pattern has
flipped. This rediscovery of “weird Christianity” is part of what I have been trying to do with the
Symbolic World, but it is also coming from the work of thinkers as diverse as Fr. Stephen
DeYoung, Michael Heiser, the Theopolis Institute, and even authors like David Bentley Hart.
Through the works of these authors, many Christians are re-entering what we could call a new
Christian monolatrous polytheism--that is, that we worship the Infinite God, the origin of all
reality, but we also understand that there are innumerable numbers of principalities in the world
which exist and are often worshiped and venerated by other people, simultaneously recognizing
that there exists a divine hierarchy of principalities (saints and angels) which still serve the
unoriginate God. While this is happening, the modern scientific tools of Cognitive Science,
Systems Theory, with new models of intelligence and consciousness are helping us see what it
can mean for us today to acknowledge that these ancient gods and monsters exist, that religious
rituals work, that sacrifices are effective, and that everyone engages in prayer and submits
themselves to trans-personal intelligences. In the works of atheists and non-deists like John
Vervaeke, Jonathan Haidt, Don Hoffman and others, we see an inkling of re-enchantment and a
new capacity for secular people to know and understand what that re-enchantment could entail.
The third, surprising bright light has been the possible shift in storytelling from collage to
apocalypse. In the last decades, "collage” has been a driving force and often the primary
worldbuilding approach in several fantasy stories. This has been the case for many of the
religious themed stories I have mentioned already, series like Hellboy or Sandman. This is an
interesting “mythical” take on a technique used in comic books from very early on. The idea of
the Superhero team, starting with the Justice Society of America, and culminating in many other
teams such as the Justice League, the Avengers, and the X-Men, is commonplace in the comic
book world. So although Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were all independent
creations, the Justice League was a way to bring the characters into shared, often more cosmic
story arcs. Of course, there are ancient versions of this--Jason and the Argonauts is the story
which immediately comes to mind.
This collage technique was recently used by the Marvel Cinematic Universe to build a series of
stories about independent characters towards larger cinematic events, such as the Avengers films.
With his usual perspicacity, Alan Moore took this one step further with the League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen where he used the superhero team model to join together 19th century
literary figures like Captain Nemo, Moriarty and the Invisible man. Ultimately this idea would be
taken into the world of myth and legends to create many potent story possibilities. Neil Gaiman
did this in Sandman and would later go further in his book American Gods.
Another striking example of this approach has been used to re-appropriate fairy tales: inspired by
many of the authors I have already mentioned, DC Vertigo comics created a series called Fables,
a dark rendition of fairy tales where characters like Snow White, Big Bad Wolf and others co-
existed in an American Gods-style collage. This idea would have massive cultural ramifications
as it affected children’s perceptions of the classic stories. It would appear in Shrek, Into the
Woods or the Disney series Once Upon a Time. The notion of creating stories which smashed
myths and fairy tales together was a brilliant spark born in the superhero genre, even if often
twisted in cynical and deconstructive gestures of meta-analysis.
From Post-Modernism to Apocalyptic Storytelling
In God’s’Dog, my brother Matthieu and I wanted to bring this collage structure into the world of
Christian legend itself, intending it as a final trick, a deconstruction of the deconstruction, which
would reverse the idiosyncratic collage approach into something like an apocalyptic synthesis.
The characters themselves are anachronistic: St George and St Symeon the stylite did not live in
the same century. There is very little desire to be “historically accurate” and the story does not
shy away from legends like that of the cynocephalic St Christopher, a legend which would give
perverse delight to any postmodern analysts. In a similar vein, God’s’Dog blends existing
legends and Biblical stories with fictional elements in a way that does not then try to disentangle
them.
We are in many ways creating a cosmic story with giants, dragons, relics which will also, as in
the works of Alan Moore or Mike Mignola, connect these Christian elements to several pre-
Christian and pagan traditions. Although this was common fare in the old world, --encountered
in Dante, the Arthurian legends as well as in Beowulf and Russian fairy tales--we know that as
God’s’Dog progresses, it will possibly appear shocking to many today. The story will hopefully
carry the reader into a space where these images, brought together, will reveal deeper aspects of
each thread and character and how they participate, even in their anachronism and multi-faceted
presentation, in what I could call a meta-pattern, or a pattern which makes all these dancing
threads exist within the great Universal Christian story itself.
Interestingly enough, we have seen fascinating inklings of the possibility of Apocalyptic stories
recently, the most surprising of which was the recent Spider-Man movie, No Way Home. When
the Marvel Cinematic Universe started to introduce the idea of a multiverse, I wondered if this
would be a way to drown the original stories in new characters and versions of characters which
represent current political concerns about equity, diversity and inclusion.—as happened, for
instance, in series like Loki and What If. But to my own surprise, this is not what happened in the
Spider-Man movie.
Perhaps this was in part because the version of Spider-Man in the MCU was already a strange
variation on the original pattern created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in the 1960s. In this MCU
version, we never see Spider-Man’s origin story. He did not have an Uncle Ben who died in front
of him. Peter Parker’s aunt May was not an old woman. Parker was not a burgeoning reporter
and his character quickly came into the possession of massive power, connections and
technology through his relationship with Tony Stark. It is as if in the very way his story had been
presented suggested the multiverse as a narrative tool, if not yet a conscious part of the narrative
itself.
In No Way Home, the multiverse is bridged and multiple characters from the different Spider-
Man movie iterations from the past begin to be drawn into the current series, represented by all
the same actors, though often digitally rejuvenated. This created 3 spider-men co-existing,
corresponding to three iterations of the Spider-Man story from the past: the first series directed
by Sam Raimi with Tobey Maguire, the second less successful series renamed “Amazing Spider-
Man” with Andrew Garfield and the current MCU iteration with Tom Holland. Of course such a
sprawling idea was bound to be full of contradictions and plot-holes, which it was, but I think
that by looking at its strengths, one can see the possibilities of Apocalyptic storytelling.
Inevitably, the movie takes the Super Hero team into a type of post-modern self-awareness,
where the team is made up of an assembly of variations on the Spider-Man story. The multiverse
makes the movie aware of its own function as story, by being a collage of preceding stories, and
some of the jokes and comments were meant to even be an acknowledgement of the quality of
the different movie iterations in the franchise. In an interesting moment where the ‘spider-men’
compare their different stories and realities, Andrew Garfield, from the Amazing Spider-Man,
which was less popular and less acclaimed, beats himself up for being a lesser version of Spider-
Man, to which the others insist that he is in fact “Amazing”. In this way the multiverse trope
offers an “in-world” knowledge of the 4th wall without breaking it.
The most powerful apocalyptic aspect of the story, and which is really in my opinion a master-
stroke of storytelling, is how by bringing all the characters together, the different spider-men
resolve and heal the other spider-men’s sins and failings. In this way, it really is apocalyptic
because it provides an end which is also a revelation. For example, in the Tobey Maguire
version, Peter Parker’s actions lead to both the death of Uncle Ben’s killer and to the death of the
Green Goblin, Norman Osborne. In the No Way Home version, Norman Osborne kills the MCU
version of Aunt May in a way that was narrative genius: it is Aunt May who tells Peter that “with
great power comes great responsibility” which we know to be the last thing Uncle Ben tells Peter
in the original comic book, and this signals for those who already know the Spider-Man story,
that she is going to die. This is what I mean by “revelation”, because one is able to see the
pattern emerge within its variability, even predict the next step, opening up the possibility of
insight.
When the Tom Holland version finally comes to murder Osborne for killing Aunt May, it is
Tobey Maguire who stops him, healing both his own sins and preventing Holland from going
down that path. In the same way, the Andrew Garfield version had not been able to save Gwen
Stacy when she fell to her death, which was both a repetition of how Gwen Stacy dies in the
original comic, but this thread had already received a twist in the Tobey Maguire movie where
he saved MJ from such a fate. When the MCU version of MJ falls, it is Garfield’s Spider-Man
who saves her. Once again, one is faced with a multi-faceted post-modern situation of
intertextuality, comment upon comment, but instead of it leading to a kind of narrative explosion
which is the usual result of post-modern storytelling, it leads to a revelation about pattern and a
healing of the character.
The end of the No Way Home movie brings about an end: it signals the end of the Avengers films
by removing the Captain America shield from the Statue of Liberty and leads everyone to
completely forget Peter Parker through a self-sacrificing act. But just like any apocalypse, this
forgetting is also a very profound re-membering, for the story ends by reinstating a return to the
‘garden’, that is a return to a purer, yet importantly self-aware, version of the Spider-Man
character. Peter Parker moves into a small New York apartment, and becomes the lonely, poor,
and struggling Spider-Man who must sew his own costume and deal with the everyday problems
of a young New Yorker. What we have experienced is kind of meta version of the Hero’s
Journey, where the very breakdown of narrative, of post-modern fragmentation, self-reference
and irony, becomes, like the variations in a Bach fugue, the exploration and transformation
which leads to a higher state of healing and re-membering.
I believe that this apocalyptic approach is the future of storytelling, one which the Christian
storyteller must not be afraid of engaging. It is a type of storytelling to transform the dark
fragmentation of the Christian cosmos which has animated so many fantasy and sci-fi franchises,
into a revelation of its unity within variability. The door is open for us to explore all the nooks
and crannies of the Christian Legendarium, to rejoice in its strangeness and explosive variability
while ultimately pointing to its unity. We will discover that this possibility has always been
there, hinted at already in the preservation of four distinct and different gospels, but this is
something which can be also be seen in the wild and powerful journey presented to us by Dante
or Milton or in the Universal Histories such as the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. This
Apocalyptic approach is of course the path my brother Matthieu and I have set upon for our
God’s’Dog series, taking into account the crucial role comic books have played in the emergence
of this form of storytelling, and it is a path we are anxious for all of our readers to discover as the
story develops.