God Wants Your Lunch

Lately, I've been noticing that I make three kinds of comics:
1. Learning comics. These are comics that teach. These are my T.A.I.L.S. comics and Curriculum Comics.
2. Art comics. At least that's what I call them. These are comics that are my own personal expression. They come from ideas that I have that make me say, "That would make a great comic!" I put The Mighty Andar and other comics making experiments in that category.
3. Bible comics. I am fascinated with how comics can be used to tell any kind of story there is to tell. The Bible provides a lot of inspiration to me, and I like re-telling the stories from this book using my own style of drawing.

This comic strip illustrates the Biblical story of the Loaves and the Fishes. I made it to share with the children in our church. I will give them a copy, but I also present it by putting one panel up on a Powerpoint screen and talking a little about each picture.

Everyone always asks, "How long did it take you to make it?" It's hard to say. First I read as much as I could about this story. This story is told in all for gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Each author adds slightly different details. I combined all versions into one. Then, if I can, I try to find commentary by from Bible scholars that explains the significance of various elements of the story. (One site that was very usesful is here).

I like to look at how various translations of the Bible say the same thing but with different words, King James, NIV -- but my favorite to use is the Message Bible. This is a Bible paraphrase that attempts to publish the Bible in "street language" -- the way people really talk, without the thee's and thou's. The script for this is almost straight out of that Bible, with a little artistic license here and there.

Once I had the information, script, and plotted out how many boxes on each page, I started and finished it yesterday in one day of drawing! Ideally, I could spend more time on five pages, but I gave myself the deadline of having it finished today.