The Witches of World War II treats "The Magical Battle of Britain" in graphic novel format, collecting six issues of a comic book of the same title. In this case, the author Paul Cornell has made Doreen Dominy (later Valiente) the central protagonist as the leader of an intelligence cell that includes Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Dion Fortune (whose actual name Violet Firth is never mentioned), and Rollo Ahmed. Cornell admits that he has taken significant liberties with the history involved, as extreme as having Crowley die as a martyr for England in Nazi Germany.

The book is furnished with an afterword from historian Ronald Hutton, who is a noted and reliable researcher of twentieth-century British occultism. Professor Hutton points out many of the likely errors and evident impossibilities in the story, along with some of the actual events and likely facts that were used as scaffolding. He does so in a friendly spirit with an allowance for inaccuracy among the surviving sources.

Allowing for creative license and storytelling efficiency, I was still bothered by the story showing antagonism between Crowley and Fortune (Cornell admits to knowing better himself), collapsing Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler into a single character, and repeatedly calling Crowley "the most evil man in the world," rather than his actual yellow press title of "The Wickedest Man in the World." If the book had been using the story to court larger ideas the way that Douglas Rushkoff did in his graphic novel Aleister & Adolf, I might have been more willing to cut it some slack. But mostly it seemed to amount to a superheroine origin story for Doreen Valiente.

The illustration work by Valeria Burzo is in a very traditional comics style, effective for the characterizations and action. Colorist Jordie Bellaire kept to customary flat colors, but did some nice non-black line work in visions, dreams, memories, and reflections.

I have read other reviewers who found The Witches of World War II "boring." It held my attention pretty well, but I'm a soft touch for the subject matter. For a better comic on the subject, I would recommend the aforementioned Rushkoff book, and for a far more sprawling and sophisticated fiction that uses the capture of Hess as a touchstone event, Jake Arnott's The House of Rumour.

How can a book about occultists recruited by the British government to fight Nazis be this boring?

Received via NetGalley. ( )

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley. Content warning for racism and violence.)

At just nineteen years old, Doreen "Dominy" Valiente is a recently widowed, junior intelligence officer, when she is approached by a British General for a covert mission. "I know you're a witch, Doreen Dominy! And that is the capacity in which you can best serve your country." A hobbyist of the occult, Dominy is plagued by doubts about the existence of magic and the supernatural. However, she soon realizes that this is immaterial to her operation: as long as her targets believe in the occult, she can use this to the Allies' benefit. Trouble is, her hatred of Churchill rivals her hatred of Hitler.

I really wanted to love THE WITCHES OF WORLD WAR II, but I often found the storytelling confusing. Based on a true events - Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente was a crucial figure in the English Wiccan movement, and in Operation Cone of Power, a group of British witches attempted a "magical assault" on the mind of Hitler - the story felt incomplete and, well, surprisingly boring. Cornell spends entirely too much time focusing on Dominy's personal doubts and existential crises. Crowley feels like a caricature (although perhaps this is accurate for a man dubbed “Wickedest Man In The World”). And I never did understand Dominy's antipathy toward the war (aside from blaming it for her husband's death at sea). ( )

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

I originally requested this book because it intrigued me that it was based on real-life pagans. I know in part, some of Aleister Crowley's history, and I knew that Gerald Gardner is referred to as the father of Wicca. (By the way, this book misspells multiple times. It's not "Wica", it's "Wicca". There IS Seax-Wica, which is a denomination of Wicca, but that wasn't created until the 1970's.) This novel felt very...bland. Something about the dialogue felt off and a bit stilted. The dialogue also swaps between barely any to there being way too much of it. I shouldn't be reading a comic page and have more than fifty percent of it be dialogue. I also found myself getting very annoyed by Doreen always responding with "I don't know...I can't..." when asked about her beliefs. She says that exact sentence multiple times, enough for me to notice it and be irritated. The plot was somewhat interesting, though I kept getting lost as to exactly who was doing what for what reason quite a bit. The character building felt a bit surface-level. There one who gets the most fleshed-out character building is Doreen, but even then there is not much to be had. I guess the weak character-building can be partially excused by the fact that the majority of the main cast is based on real-life people. The art style is fine. If you like classic American-style comics, you will probably love this novel's art style. I just personally don't much care for it, there is nothing wrong with it objectively. ( )

I'm afraid I struggled with this one. The 20th-century occult isn't exactly under-explored in British comics and there's nothing of the weirdness or elevated invention we've seen from Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson or all the others who've been this way before. True, Cornell's aim is to be more grounded than any of them, possibly producing something a bit Graham Greene-ish, but it all comes across as bit too uncertain, a bit... meek, for want of a better word; straying far enough away from fact that it's not directly informative, while not being bold enough in its fiction to reveal any deeper meaning. ( )