U.K. author's graphic novel links his London to ours in 'time-space fracture'

Article content

When U.K.-based brand strategist and interior designer Henry Chebaane first visited our London more than a decade ago, he never expected the city would leave such a lasting impression or help inspire a graphic novel series.

He was in Toronto on a work trip, spotted a place called London on a map and decided to make the trip. The city, he said, felt strangely familiar.

“There’s a Thames River, there’s a Middlesex County, there is Hyde Park,” he said. “It’s like an alternative version of London, England.”

That impression helped plant the seed for The Panharmonion Chronicles, a self-published graphic novel series that blends speculative fiction, history and political allegory. While London, Ont. isn’t the main setting, the city helped shape the novel’s imaginative world.

Chebaane described the Forest City as “a city in process,” one that’s “vibrating between different possibilities.”

He added: “There’s so many forests everywhere and so many parks. You have that absolutely outstanding interaction with nature.”

At the same time, he noticed a “crazy interaction between the original heritage part of London and this strange experimentation in architecture,” pointing to Canada Life Place as “a strange thing to see in a city of this size.”

That blend of green space, industrial past and layered identity gave Chebaane a creative foundation for his graphic novel, a story of time entanglements between 1864, 1880 and 2024, where London, Ont. and London, England are linked through a malfunctioning military experiment.

In the book, a 19th-century British machine is built beneath London, Ont., to move supplies across the empire but instead, it fractures space-time and links the two Londons in a loop. “If somebody wanted to develop a machine to teleport supplies, weapons, ammunitions, then it would make sense that they would want to have that in London, Ontario.”

The story follows Alex, a mixed-heritage musician from Montreal, raised in Toronto, who inherits a property in London, England, but soon finds herself tied to Ontario’s version of the city and caught in a web against an American supremacist cult.

“She connects to London, Ont., which then, in a strange way, connects her to Edinburgh in Scotland, which then connects her to Nova Scotia, so it’s like a web,” Chebaane said.

To build the story’s world, Chebaane investigated local landmarks such as Victoria Park, Wolseley Barracks, and the legacies of London’s historic breweries such as Labatt and Carling. He also wove in fictional detail sparked by personal experience.

He recalls one moment during a basement renovation that inspired part of the story: “As I was digging down, I could feel tremors and then I found an old bottle of chutney from 1880. And I wondered, ‘What is this doing here?’ and then I started thinking, maybe there’s a fracture in space-time.”

Originally drafted as a 1,000-page novel during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chebaane adapted part of it into a graphic novel format, hiring illustrators to bring it to life. After publishers turned it down for “too many social issues or [being] too complex,” he self-published the first volume, Times of London.

“It’s quite a good midpoint between a prose novel and a film,” Chebaane said.

The book may soon be available at Heroes Comics on Dundas Street downtown, he said. Book 2 is set mostly in Eastern Canada but Chebaane says the third volume will return to Southwestern Ontario. He hopes to one day adapt the series for screen and film in the Forest City.

“If there was one nexus on the planet you would have these configurations of values and so forth, power struggle and so many possibilities, then London, Ont., might be as good a place as any,” he said.

asathiaseelan@postmedia.com