“Yesterday’s” Comic> Life Of Christ: The Easter Story

I think my faith is keeping me from making fun of this cover, too.

The Life Of Christ: The Easter Story

Marvel/Thomas Nelson (1993)

As far as I can tell, the CBN edition I own has the same front cover as the regular edition, although the inside back cover has contact information for CBN along with the prayer of salvation.

For some reason, every time the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, whether in the Bible or in an account like this, gets to the part where Caiaphas manipulates Pilate into doing what he wants I get mad and when they get on his case about the tomb I keep wanting him to turn around and tell them that if they come back they’ll either be locked up or killed. I don’t know what it is about this part that ticks me off so much but it does. It’s no different here, which tells you that Simonson got it right in this story as well as the Christmas story not only as a writer (she’s one of my favorites) but in the adaptation. Again, I don’t know if she’s a Christian but she adapts the Gospel so well I wouldn’t be surprised. This time we don’t which, if not all four, Gospels were used in the adaptation, although it does quote Mark 10:33-34.

Within the space allowed, Simonson gets all the important details in, but unlike last week’s Disney’s Tarzan comics I reviewed last week the emotion is there. You feel the power of Jesus on the cross, the emotions of both the people mentioned in Scripture and the kids made for this story, minor as their appearances may be. The art is also well done.

If I had any complaints it would be that the kids are just asking questions that the readers themselves should be asking themselves rather than being prompted to, except for one girl whose question leads to an explanation of something Jesus says to the women and mothers (who are of course women but you know what I mean) about the innocent’s punishment versus the guilty. There is also an truncating of Jesus talking to the disciples who fell asleep as Jesus does his final prayer. Instead of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” he simply says “you are weak”, which doesn’t come off the same when Simonson is using more modern (but thankfully not 90s slang) ways of speaking in her characters’ dialog. Really the only thing I can go into critic mode about.

I don’t know of any other comics that tell the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection to point you to. They may exist but I’m not aware of them as of this writing. So I do recommend this book and The Christmas Story as intended, a way to introduce young people to Jesus or for young Christians (ah, the days when young people could have comics to read from Marvel that wasn’t a cartoon tie-in) to have to remind them of Jesus’s last days on Earth, and return, and next last days on Earth. Christian parents should try to track both comics down.

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• “Yesterday’s” Comic> Life Of Christ: The Christmas Story