the Jesus Comic

This book by Jason Ramasami (this guy) is a graphic illustrated retelling of the biography of Jesus, based on selected extracts from the four biblical gospels. Ramasami does a stellar job of communicating the life and character of Christ and his contemporaries in engaging and likeable drawings, using a small set of simple recurring symbols to convey grand theological truths in simplified-but-that's-exactly-appropriate-in-a-comic forms. These drawings are striking, often amusing, and once you get the gist of the semantics of his pictures, very easy to follow - lubricated nicely by a small amount of text explaining the theological, historical, or social events depicted in each panel, page, or spread. There are twelve sections to the comic, following a particular chunk of Jesus's life (e.g. his birth, his temptations, one or two healings, angering the Pharisees, his trial, his crucifixion, his resurrection and its implications, etc), by no means comprehensively covering the contents of the gospels - Jason prefaces the comic with a short note explaining that it is not a replacement presentation of the gospel, rather a supplement to aid the flow of understanding for people who engage better with comics than with tomes of systematic theology or YouTube videos. It's extremely readable - I breezed through it while lazily half-watching the tennis after a family picnic (indoors, it rained, #England) earlier this afternoon. Jason Ramasami also does a really good job throughout of showing how the theological truth's he's conveying tied into the story of Jesus have implications for the beliefs of the reader - obviously a comic isn't the place for robust apologetics, but the appeal and cohesiveness of it will no doubt help embellish and give graphic life to readers' understanding of Jesus's story and significance. A pretty great little resource for anyone who's keen to explore scripture and the gospel in a fresh way, and it might even work as an evangelical prompt for visual learners (provided the prompter is willing to discuss the theology and biblical narrative padding behind the graphic system in considerable depth, as despite how accessible this book is, there's still a great deal I'm not sure the average non-Christian reader would grasp).