The typical response to this comic’s artwork.
Tales Of Wonder #4
Pet Shop Comics (1998)
Once again no credits and once again the artwork is terrible. Look, I want to see a good Christian comic either for Christians who want an alternative to the more atheistic approach to comics even when it has Judeo-Christian themes, or even as a Gospel-teaching tool. I’m a Christian myself. It’s why I got these two issues after hearing about it. However, I have seen better Christian comics with better art than this. As for the individual stories there are other problems.
“My Brother, My Keeper, My Killer” is our Old Testament story for this issue. As you can guess from the title it’s about Cain and Abel. We all know that story by now. Most of the story is told through caption boxes simply reciting the Bible and the text from the Book Of Genesis, which includes the lineage portion that doesn’t mean a lot to modern readers. It works in the Bible but reading it as a comic comes off as dry and uninteresting, while the art does little to show us what’s going on with the brothers or the lineage leading up to Epoch. And yet it doesn’t explain how there was anyone else to kill Cain because it doesn’t go into how many other kids Adam and Eve had to populate the Earth since scripture doesn’t go into their daughters or their other sons until Seth is born and the lineage portion begins. What results is a rather boring retelling of events with artwork that barely shows what’s going on, focusing more on montages of close-ups even when Cain kills Abel. Oh, did I spoil that? Sorry.
I”m guessing the New Testament story for this issue is titles “Repent, For The Kingdom Of Heave Is At Hand just because the line of dialog is written in the style of the previous titles. Jesus gathers his followers and begins his ministry…and it’s a good thing the text tells you this because the art really doesn’t, following the same error as the Cain and Abel story. It’s all close-ups and more of Jesus having hair and facial hair that looks like the grass from your Easter basket. At this point you could just read the Bible because the art isn’t doing a lot and it’s just straight-up the wording from the Bible. This problem also persists to the Letter From Paul entry and I didn’t bother reading it.
If you want to see better translations of the Bible in comic form find The Picture Bible or a book I reviewed once called Proverbs And Parables. There are other comics that put the teachings of Scripture into practice I could recommend over this series. I can see why it only lasted five issues. The love may be for the Lord but it isn’t for the storytelling and that’s where this series falls.
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