The Panharmonion Chronicles (review) —“Don’t mess with a missionary man”

Writer: Henry Chebaane

Artist: Stephen Baskerville

Supanova Media 2023

BINGE AN HOUR or three through the recently released 200-page graphic novel THE PANHARMONION CHRONICLES, and you won’t notice the time passed. Artwork by Stephen Baskerville engages with slick, highly colored scenery that sets fully rendered figures and faces in fully rendered backgrounds with pleasing perspectives, like a tv drama, always attentive to the direction of light and shadows. Under the glare of the brightly inked art, writer Henry Chebaane enters with a rhythm of drumbeats: time‑and‑place stamp, sound effects of a crashing window, flames, screeching tires, terrified voices; then silence, until snatches of dialogue gradually pipe in the play.

Opening art indicates two perspectives, one in the present, and another reflected in a duo-tone style of an earlier era, the steampunk period, say 1870 to 1910, when discoveries of chemicals and processes, matter and energy brought hosts of inventions and ingenious weapons to wonder at as we still do for that pregnant period of science and mechanics that wrested fabulous powers from myriad invisible forces of nature, or in the case here from possibly alien forces of nature subdued in an ancient artifact. Action focuses on a particular place in the past, the same place as in the present, where beneath a block of real estate in London, underground, transformative experiments in the fabric of space-time were once conducted, funded by the military, but since buried in rubble. The property eventually reverted to private hands, and became for a time the Panharmonion Institute, directed by two enterprising women, mother and daughter, who conducted experiments in the “hidden harmonics of the universe.”

The heroine in the present in Chapter One, Alex, is descended from the heroine depicted in the past in Chapter Two. The story reels from Ontario in Canada to London, England, and from present to past in a dense whirl that stays sensible by the spare use of language. Text boxes only stamp the place and time. The story runs in dialogue over a vivid tapestry of expressive faces, places, hands and gestures that make it move and hold the pace.

The good guys here are the forceful women on the ends of the time spectrum brought into contact through the place, the institute to be restored, and the power of the ancient artifact discovered there. Alex’s racial descent through parents from southeast Asia on one side, and from the Mohawk in Canada, a people related to the Iroquois nation, is apparently the reason for a mysterious personal connection to the artifact. This could be a long, maze-like origin story for a superheroine with powers over time and space, told sedately with a cup of tea in hand most of the time, and spurts of action when the bad guys get busy.

The bad guys represent two current icons of evil combined as a mighty fist: a highly capitalized landlord, and a cardinal heading a church with aspirations looking like Hitler ruling Catholic Spain, both aiming of course, to save the planet. Some individuals, or institutions, have long lives, and manage to be in both time periods, the bad guys due to legal formalities in the profit realm, and an enduring church hierarchy in the nonprofit realm, where wealthy family donations perpetuate streams of capital off the books to direct the course of generations toward salvation. At least, one might say, someone has a vision to offer.

The good guys have family, and maybe a reverence for the harmonics of the universe on their side, with roots more ancient possibly, if ever this mysterious artifact that bends space and time shall become less mysterious, and more like an adaptable tool.

The brazen mood of the present is evident in the way a minority character sometimes makes a snide side remark about some past atrocity or injustice to their people, which in the case of the half-Mohawk woman brought to my mind instant images of the ferocity of the Mohawk against the Huron and other tribes surrounding the great lakes, eager to access inland furs they had already depleted in their own territories, to trade with newly arrived Europeans on their borders. Vulgar tropes about the trouble my people have seen in long ago times leaves one open to vulgar tropes in return, and lades others with memories maybe larger than yours not fit to dwell upon.

This first six-issue set of The Panharmonion Chronicles is called “Times of London” with posted stops in England and Ontario. It’s a charming journey on a flying carpet that appears prepared for a much wilder ride indeed, with heroine Alex worked up and not about to be whipped.

[Editor’s note: more information about this title can be found here – https://www.panharmonion.com/ ]