Marked
Very cool looking graphic novel of the Gospel of Mark. (via Jason Clark) Be sure to check out the Flash Paper of the beginning of the book. Here's more information on the book in which the "devil rides in a stretch limousine, Moses bears a striking resemblance to Frederick Douglass, and the angel left at the tomb is a clown":

Why turn biblical imagery upside down? “For centuries, we’ve seen the long-haired white middle-class guys who have co-opted Christianity. That was my beef,” says Ross. “Those images of Jesus and his followers were created by really talented artists during the Dutch Renaissance, and after hundreds of years our culture is still bound by these images’ tyranny.” That’s why this Jesus, who starts out holding a circular saw and sporting long hair and beard, is bald and clean-shaven by page 17.

To the uninitiated—and perhaps to the uptight—Marked may appear blasphemous. Ross’s art was inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel The Last Temptation of Christ, and the format of graphic novels encourages sophisticated play with the sort of shocking images and complex themes that have made Art Spiegleman’s Maus both a prize-winner and a classic. “I fear that two thousand years of 20/20 hindsight have sucked the surprise, awe and sheer weirdness out of the Gospels,” says Ross, and Marked works hard to restore those qualities to the familiar story.

But Ross is a man of deep faith and abiding love for the Gospel story: “I just wanted to see if I could receive the Gospel of Mark with a lover’s heart and then recount it with a troublemaker’s eye,” he says. “Like Picasso stripping away layer after layer of preconceptions until he finally arrived at a new way of seeing.”

posted by Jimmy at 8:17 PM | |