** spoiler alert ** This trilogy was recommended to me by one of the students enrolled in my World Religion class in fall 2009.

A couple of interesting ideas couldn't make up for the poor writing and graphics. Alan Moore has said that film and comics are diametrically opposed art forms, and this graphic novel supports that assertion; Ted Dekker writes like Dan Brown, translating all the cliches of American blockbuster cinema into print, and the artwork mimics the conventions of film rather than using the power of the image to supplement and subvert the accompanying prose.

The story is about a young man on the run from mobsters (an irrelevant detail that only seems to start the story off in media res) who discovers that he exists in two worlds at once--the contemporary world and a fantastic far future world where talking bats have cleanly divided the Earth into a good half and an evil half. He unbelievably manages to convince a famous biochemist (after kidnapping her, no less) that he has insight into the future and knows that her company has developed a new vaccine that will instead mutate into an apocalyptic plague. (No wonder so many folks are now afraid of being vaccinated against swine flu.) Unfortunately his good intentions are used by the agencies of evil to prepare the ground for unleashing the plague, and, in the other world, forbidden fruit is consumed, unleashing the forces of evil onto the good half of the planet.

I began the second installment in the graphic novel trilogy after I finished volume one, but I just couldn't go on after the first couple of pages. I've got a lot of other things I'd much rather read than a poorly written re-hashing of the Bible-as-rewritten-by-C.S.Lewis.