Manga Salad #4

I'm pretty unfamiliar with the Bible, but so is the intended audience of The Manga Bible and Manga Messiah, so perhaps it's okay if I review them anyway. Most of my knowledge of the Bible comes from Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the World, old Peanuts strips, and Jack Chick comics. I did have an old hardbound comic version of the Bible when I was a little kid, which wasn't as interesting as any of the above, but was perhaps closest to Manga Bible and Manga Messiah in intent; retelling the Bible for young people in an easy-to-understand medium. In the '60s the buzzword was comics; today, it's manga, and even the most tenuously manga-influenced comics end up getting stamped with the label.

Manga Messiah is published by Tyndale House, the publishers of the Left Behind books. Between it and The Manga Bible (and Zondervan's rival Manga Bible, drawn by Korean artists, which I haven't read yet), it's the only one that technically counts as a manga, being drawn by Japanese artists (adaptation by Hidenori Kumai and art by Kozumi Shinozawa, as well as a few others). Tyndale House is an evangelical publisher, and Manga Messiah was clearly designed to shock the Gospel into manga-reading teenagers. "Do you DARE to read his story… even if it may change your life FOREVER?" tempts the back cover text. Then there's the little ways in which the book attempts to get around people's prejudice against reading something with the words "Bible" or "Jesus"in it; for starters, the book is named Manga Messiah (nice alliteration), and Jesus is referred to throughout by the original Hebrew pronunciation of his name, Yeshuah. In the world of manga publishing, in which books like Judas, Go Go Heaven and Angel Sanctuary continually play with Christian imagery in the shallowest possible fashion, perhaps Manga Messiah does well to distance itself from that mayhem.

The name Manga Messiah is more fitting than "The Manga Bible" or "The Manga New Testament," though, because Manga Messiah confines itself to one subject. Merging the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a single narrative, it tells of Jesus' conception, birth, life and death, over 288 pages crammed with miracles, parables, and computer coloring. From young Mary's visitation by the Angel Gabriel, to Jesus' final ascension into heaven, the book incorporates seemingly every story about Jesus and his works, with Bible verses listed below the pages for reference. (The Manga Bible has the same annotations.) So much is included that the book at times seems like a rush of information and fails to emphasize any one thing. Jesus said enough things that one can pick and choose what seems most important (welcome to the history of Christianity for the last 2000 years), but one thing that struck me was the emphasis on "salvation through faith," not laws or rituals, with Jesus telling off the Pharisees and other "holier-than-thou white sheep who think they're already in with god." On the whole, it is a very straightforward and encyclopedic adaptation, without much in the way of digressions or humor, except perhaps unintentionally due to "manga-isms" (demon-possessed people mumbling "Uunnghh! Urrr…urh…urr! Urr!"…the earring-wearing bishonen Judas…a man on his first glimpse of Jesus, blushing and his heart going "tha-thump tha-thump" as he thinks to himself "He really is the son of God!"). Although there are no real "jokes," one jarring aspect, at least to me, is the use of modern language for all of the Bible's most famous lines. John the Baptist is "John the Baptizer." "Get thee behind me, Satan" becomes "Get away from me, Satan" (to which Satan replies "@!&#X!"). Jesus tells his disciples "Anyone who checks out another person with greedy desire…that person has already committed adultery in their heart!" Even the Lord's Prayer from the Sermon on the Mount is spelled out in the plainest modern English, which sounds weird to me, as someone who is used to the traditional renderings of the 1800s and early 1900s.

In the process, is some of the glamour and majesty taken out of the text, to be replaced with computer-rendered sunsets and lighting effects? Going out on a limb, I imagine that Tyndale's answer to that would probably be, "Listen, you ritual-obsessed ex-Episcopalian, despite all the nostalgic affection you feel for old Bible talk, in the end you aren't a Christian, so it didn't do its job, did it?" If the text has a certain blandness at times, it at least makes the message clear. The blandness of the art, however, serves no such purpose. Shinozawa's art is the most basic kind of manga shorthand—awkward geometric faces with big eyes, big hair, exaggerated expressions. As a Christian reviewer, Deirdre J. Good (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/6254), pointed out, Jesus and the other good guys look blandly attractive, while the minor characters and bad guys are drawn as dorky caricatures who look like the king's incompetent advisors from a fantasy RPG manga from the 1980s. If the character types are clichéd, the backgrounds and environments are even cruder. Only the coloring manages to barely support it, making grass look like grass, dirt like dirt, the sky like the sky (invariably covered with flashy cloud filters), and so on. At times it has a pleasant simplicity, but for the most part the art is disappointing and points to a common problem of comic adaptations: if you care enough to produce an adaptation, you should care enough to give it your personal touch. Instead, regardless of the theological clarity of Manga Messiah (and the helpful character chart and maps in the back), the artistic aspect looks like hasty work-for-hire.

The Manga Bible has attracted a lot of press for its "hip, happening, groovy" depiction of the Bible, but compared to Manga Messiah it's a little more upfront and less melodramatic about its intentions. The introduction reads, "The creators and publishers hope that The Manga Bible will inspire you to read more of the full-text Bible. The Bible is an amazing book—the world's all-time best-seller—which can offer guidance, comfort and wisdom for life if you take the time to read it properly." In another difference, The Manga Bible is clearly presented as the work of a single artist, Siku (full name Ajinbayo Akinsiku, an Englishman of Nigerian descent), unlike Manga Messiah whose creators' names don't appear on the cover. Despite the title of the book, Siku's art owes more to recent superhero comics. Luckily, his art is quite good; simple and stylish, with strong shapes and bold black-and-white imagery. The windswept deserts, the gardens of Eden, are evoked in a few lines, while the human characters look attractive, stylized and sinewy. For the serious scenes, he uses a slightly more realistic art style, but for short parables he often gets cartoony—in one of Jesus' parables a rich businessman is drawn in a three-piece suit, and in the story of Job (reduced to one page!), Job's misfortunes are symbolized by an Atom Bomb about to drop on Ground Zero.

There's not much time to ponder the art, though, because Siku attempts to compress all of the Bible into 200 pages, a Samsonean task. Beginning with a sort of frame story—Moses telling the story of Genesis to the young Israelites in the desert—it rushes all the way from Genesis and the Old Testament past Jesus' death to the Book of Revelation. (The book's subtitle "From Genesis to Revelation" isn't lying.) The result is a lot of information, and a lot of excluded scenes, but despite the large amount of small, dense text, it's fairly well-paced. Tiny panels alternate effectively with grandiose images and spread pages, giving the narrative at least a little room to breathe in the middle of this biblical marathon. The great jump between the Old Testament and New Testament is quite clear to a casual reader, and the Old Testament in general seems like a better match for Siku's heroic art style. There are pages and pages of warriors fighting, Biblical giants in Final Fantasy armor, Bronze Age armies caught in a clash of speedlines under sweeping cloudy skies…battle, battle, battle! (Although it's still not as over-the-top as Mecha Manga Bible Heroes.) (http://www.mmbibleheroes.com/) When Jesus comes into the picture, it's almost like taking a breather. Things wrap up quickly (the Book of Revelations in four pages!), and the book ends with an interview and commentary from the artist, in which he explains why he chose to emphasize what he did.

Plenty of other bloggers have commented on the cheesy jokes in The Manga Bible (Adam naming the animals: "What do you think of the name 'lion'? I think it's got bite!"). The book stumbles occasionally at moments like these, and tries to do too much, but at its best it has something which Manga Messiah never quite achieves: a feeling of awe. Though the name "manga" seems to be chosen for marketing purposes more than any legitimate Japanese influence, the result feels like one person's interpretation of the Bible, and as such, it's internally consistent, readable and interesting. Siku is currently working on a manga life of Christ, which I assume will draw even closer comparisons to Manga Messiah; meanwhile, Tyndale House has recently released their own Manga Bible, which appears to have a different artist than Manga Messiah, although I'm not sure because the artist's name isn't listed.

At worst, the desire to retell the Bible (or Shakespeare, or the autobiography of Warren Buffett, or whatever) in "manga" form might simply be a crass marketing ploy—dumbing it down because "kids don't read real books." But for Christian creators dating back to Jack Chick, the willingness to tell the most important story imaginable—the Bible—in comics form can also be a powerful validation of that form. Who can tell to what extent these motives are mixed in each individual? One thing I'd like to see, which I'm not sure I've seen yet, is what kind of comics Japanese Christians produce among themselves and for other Japanese people. According to Tyndale, the creators of Manga Messiah are Christian, but if Manga Messiah was designed with an eye for eventual translation, as I suspect it was, does it count? Even the most agnostic American grows up in a more Christian background than most Japanese people, but somewhere in Japan, I imagine, there must be manga designed to convert people whose idea of Christianity comes from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Saint Tail. In the meantime, though, we have Manga Bibles and Manga Messiahs which are made for us.