Damascus Moment

A two panel dealy that was a lot of fun to draw, but very scary to research. Mary wrote this script based on the few pages of 'Glorious Appearing' (the final 'Left Behind' book, at least until 'Kingdom Come' is released next year) that she'd read, but to get detail for the background and for exactly how Jesus was killing all these people, I skim-read half the book. And man, is Jesus a nasty bastard in that book. I don't know what happened to Loving Jesus - possibly beaten and hogtied by Pissed Off Jesus at some point - but this one is walking around using the word of God to slice people open, melt the flesh from their bones, and drive them to suicide. Damn, Jay! I know you got nailed to a cross last time you were down here, but I'd have thought 2,000 years would have mellowed you out a little!
Everything but the dialogue here is from 'Glorious Appearing': flying Jerusalem, rivers of blood, craters in the desert... in fact, the most unrealistic thing about this from the book's point of view is that Jesus is only killing five people at once: in the book, Jesus wipes out millions. MILLIONS.

I can honestly say that even just skim reading half of one of the Left Behind books is the worst research I've ever had to do for this strip. I've researched abortion methods and made animated gifs of eels coming out of a girl's arse in the service of Shit Happens, but this is by far the worst thing I've had to do. The prose is awful; it's sub-literate at such a level that even an editor with a reading age of nine should be able to pick up on the fact that it's just horribly, horribly, worded. Contractions, nicknames and colloquialisms litter the page like the bodies of Jesus's victims line the desert floor. (And that, by the way, was a simile -- you won't see any of those in the Left Behind books unless it's 'the bell of the church rung like the cash registers in the writer's head'.) Such is the adherence to the crap reading of Revelations that the series is based on that the protagonist spends the second half of the book doing nothing but watching Jesus kill an entire army and then dispatch of the three main villains without a single hint of forgiveness or pity. The whole thing should have been called 'Deus Ex Machina,' and I can't imagine how cheated a loyal fan of this series would feel if they'd made it through a dozen books only to have Jesus turn up and for no-one to be in any peril whatsoever after that point. Although presumably by that point a committed reader would either be more upset by JESUS KILLING PEOPLE or else would literally be unable to find fault with the book.

As a bonus, here's a two-panel excerpt from a comic Mary and I did a couple of years ago. It's from a comic that Mary scripted for her Comparative Religion class; I illustrated it and thought it would be funny to make the person reading the 'Left Behind' book into Shakra. It wasn't until last week that Mary suggested reprising this idea as a full storyline. So here's the image that sparked this off: