The Messiah as superhero

The first English manga version of the world's bestselling book, The Magna Bible, was released in February last year. The publisher, Hodder Headline, describes it as "a faithful adaptation of the Bible, injected with new energy" by the "dynamic, action-based artwork" of Siku, "one of the UK's hottest comic talents". You can get various editions: "Extreme" contains the full Bible text, "Raw" has the Bible comic strip without the text and there are New Testament versions. And just to confuse the issue, Tyndale House Publishers released another manga Bible in November, plus English-language versions of a series of Japanese manga comics based on the Bible, starting with Manga Messiah. The bloggers are agog. "I really want to read this. I have always envisioned a mangafied Jesus: I imagine him as having the amazing ability to shoot nails from his palms and, in times of extreme peril, to join with his 12 disciples and form a gigantic mecha-Messiah," one says. But why do we need a mangafied Jesus?

SMH 5 Jan 2008