03-28-07

Heresy Most Divine
Okay, if you're a Christian, or you know a Christian, or you're thinking about becoming one, you may want to just skip down to the thumbnail, because I can guarantee you that Holy Bibble by Lucas Daniels and Cannan Jacobs is not going to be your cup of tea.  Unless you're pretty easy-going about religion, like my sister, and manage to be a devout Christian and still tell Jesus jokes.  That's about how far Bibble goes:  the gentle mocking of the Jesus joke.  They'd still burn in Twelfth Century France for it, because it is mockery and it's very definitely heresy.  Okay, maybe they'd sit in an Abbey prison with Cervantes.  I dunno.
          Holy Bibble is almost an adaptation.  It's as if the Classics Illustrated version of the Bible had somehow been redrawn to include Precious Moments figurines as characters.  Except it's not.  At some point in each strip, a modern viewpoint emerges.  The comic opens with the Archangel Gabriel explaining to Adam how the World, the Garden, and everything (including Adam) came to be.  Adam questions Gabriel on the Genesis version, bringing up things like plate tectonics and erosion.  Gabriel doesn't take it that well.  And off it went.  Chapter by chapter, verse by verse, Daniels and Jacobs have set themselves the monumental task of adapting the entire Bible for a webcomics-reading audience.  At this writing, they're about halfway through Genesis.
          They have, of course, taken some side trips.  Right after they opened, they wander off the canon and into the Hebrew Myth of Lilith, before jumping back in with a Tarintino-esque telling of the advent of Eve.  Later there were forays into a superhero riff on Abraham, and a return to that after Abraham's death.  I'm of two minds on these side-trips:  they're not as tight as the adaptation work, but they are necessary (if only to keep the authors from going insane from trying to come up with a punchline for every verse of the Bible).
          The writing is tight.  The jokes rarely miss, and when they do, they don't miss by much.  More importantly, with rare exceptions, Bibble manages to remain funny without being openly hostile to the Judaic faiths, or particularly crass.  And that's a good trick.  I can honestly say that Holy Bibble is the least offensive comic in the entire Bible-Mocking genre (of course there's a Bible-mocking genre—there are more than 25,000 comics on the web; they can't all be Orc Porn and Gamerz).
          A good part of that trick is in Daniels's art.  His characters are glistening-eyed crosses between Peanuts and the South Park kids, and Daniels is a master of expression.  There is enough frivolity in the artwork to blunt the sting of almost every joke. 
          I honestly wish I could find something not to like in the comic (my must-see list is getting a little large), but I can't.  If you have a sense of humor, whether you're a Christian or not, go see Holy Bibble.  You won't regret it.

Holy Bibble by Lucas Daniels and Cannan Jacobs
Updates:  More or Less Daily
Caveats:  Extreme cuteness, Unrepentant heresy and blasphemy, math
Rating: