Joshua Malbin

Several of the volumes of Rex Mundi now have been careful to point out, on their back covers, that the comic predates The Da Vinci Code. The latest and last, Rex Mundi: Gate of God is no exception. It is true, but they were both beaten hollow by Foucault’s Pendulum a good fifteen years earlier, which made merciless fun of the conspiricizing they both take so seriously.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story so far, it’s far more inventive than Dan Brown’s, which seems to be a pretty straightforward mystery based on other people’s conspiracy theories. (From what I know of it. I haven’t read Dan Brown and don’t plan to.) Rather than setting his conspiracy about the bloodline of Jesus in the modern Catholic Church, Arvid Nelson constructed an entire alternate world in which the Reformation and the French Revolution both failed. The setting is France in the 1930s, still ruled by the monarchy, in a Europe where the Catholic Church (and its Inquisition) are still major political forces. Also, magic works.

It started out highly promising, with political and mystical forces all at work together in a major mystery whose surface the main character, Dr. Julien Sauniere, is only beginning to scratch. I was puzzled by the fact that France devolves into Nazism around book 3 or 4, setting off a war more similar to World War I than II—does Nelson mean to imply that Nazism was historically inevitable, even under vastly different political circumstances? And as the curtain was drawn back further and further on the central mysteries, I found myself disappointed by them.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. It’s always easier to hint at mysteries than reveal them.

Anyway, this last volume is entirely given to a final cataclysmic confrontation between good guy and bad guy, with the help of some pretty silly magic wine and a collapsing castle. It’s satisfying in a formal way. Thematically, it’s supposed to have something to do with Baha’i prophecy, apparently, but I wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

Preview of book 1 here.

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