Seekers Into the Mystery – the Complete Collection


By J. M. DeMatteis, Jon J Muth, Glenn Barr, Michael Zulli, Jill Thompson & various (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels)
ISBN: 978-0-486-80843-7

Isn’t everybody looking for ultimate truth and a bit of personal revelation?

That spiritual quest for enlightenment has moved millions of souls, thousands of philosophers, thinkers and mystics and – at conservative estimates – hundreds of writers and artists over the centuries.

At the dying fringes of the 20th century spiritually invested thinker and writer J. M. DeMatteis convinced a high-powered publishing company to let him look for Revelation in the pages of a comicbook.

As detailed in his Introduction ‘And Ye Shall Find’ – which details the origins and simultaneously troubled yet blessed release of the tale as a periodical publication from DC Comics’ creator owned Vertigo imprint – his story concerned a modern man lost and yearning for something greater than his sorry self and pointless, dead-end existence.

In the nature of such things, the series briefly blossomed and – like so many spiritual moments – tragically faded before a clean, clear-cut culminating finish.

However, viewed as an instructional excursion in this new complete compilation from Dover Books, Seekers into the Mystery is a superb fantasy-drenched magical mystery tour that asks big questions with no real answers through a cast of utterly amiable characters you’ll wish were real.

DeMatteis, whose other works include long runs on numerous mainstream costumed champions such as Justice League, Defenders and Spider-Man, introspective, genre-warping serials such as Moonshadow and a string of uniquely quirky graphic novels such as Blood: A Tale, The Last One, Brooklyn Dreams and Greenberg the Vampire, is a smart scribe with a solid appreciation of the light side of life as well as comics’ usual trendy angst-driven nihilism.

Thanks to that broad vision, SITM abounds with human warmth, sentimental uplift and wild whimsy to counterbalance the horrific sight of a man who slowly drives himself through hell and madness in pursuit of a dream…

This is not a book you want me to be too specific about. Like the adage goes, it’s all about the journey, but here at least are few directions you might appreciate…

Seekers into the Mystery gathers all fifteen episodes of the Vertigo series, subdivided in a sequence of self-contained Books which open with ‘The Pilgrimage of Lucas Hart’ as a washed up, crashed-&-burning Hollywood screenwriter begins to see that he is not just destroying himself, but also taking with him his devoted girlfriend, ex-wife and daughter as well as everyone who ever knew or cared about him.

And then the universe reaches out to him, in the form of visions and visitations: bombarding Hart with every kind of hint and message and above all else a recurring image of a gentle beatific man all the new age weirdoes suddenly afflicting him refer to as “The Magician”. More obnoxious and certainly most noisome is the recurring appearance of a foul, homeless lunatic dubbed Charlie Limbo who might just be God’s agent on Earth…

Illustrated by Glenn Barr with an Epilogue Chapter crafted by Jon J Muth, the horrors and wonders Lucas experiences inescapably lead to a shocking revelation that his memories of an idyllic childhood are all false: his formative years were actually the stuff of nightmare he has forgotten that he forgot, leading him to make a leap of faith and search out a woman who actually knows the Magician…

Michael Zulli (with Muth again contributing an Epilogue segment) beatifically illuminates the next stage of our suffering pilgrim’s progress as ‘Falling Down to Heaven’ traces the writer’s search for Absolute Truth and the elusive Man Who Knows Everything; encompassing encounters with psychics and mediums, confrontations with Angels, Aliens, Elves and Demons, and a shocking revelation that Lucas’s daughter Aimee has been seeing all theses impossible visitors since the day she was born…

The journey culminates with Hart reaching a tipping point in his own re-creation, but that only gives rise to his greatest challenge yet in Book Three as ‘God’s Shadow’ (art by Jill Thompson) makes her presence known.

Maya, the malevolent Spirit of Illusion, is determined to derail Lucas’ evolution towards enlightenment and employs torment and seduction in equal measure to achieve her aims. She has not, however, fully appreciated the power her intended victim’s loved ones still exert over him and his own desire for ultimate clarity and truth…

When all the illusions are at last undone, Lucas is in possession of the totality of his occluded memories for the first time in decades, but one last horrifying recollection indicates that there is only one possible outcome which manifests in ‘Finale: The Death of Lucas Hart’. As is normal for this story that does not mean what you think it means…

Supplemented with a cover gallery by Barr, Muth, Zulli and John Bolton, plus a large selection of Character Sketches from the series’ artic originator Glenn Barr, this monumental voyage of miasmic self-discovery is a weird, thrilling, disquieting, scary, enlightening and magnificently engaging walk on the astral wild side: one that readers in search of a different comics experience will be well-rewarded by…
© 1996, 1997, 2017 J. M. DeMatteis. Introduction © 2017 J. M. DeMatteis. All rights reserved.

Seekers Into the Mystery will be released February 24th 2017 and is available for pre-order now. Check out www.doverpublications.com, your internet retailer or local comics-store or bookshop.