Unabridged, historically accurate graphic novel of the Bible with a high view of scripture. This page contains a blog of the features and discoveries that have been made through the work and research of this project.
In order to draw a place, I have to research where it was and what it might have looked like.
In this video, I briefly describe how I collected together some of the information to get a picture of the location of Ai, that shows up in Joshua 7-8
The Book of Joshua is under construction but Judges if available as a special prerelease copy to backers at ...
The last month has mostly been characterised by illness, unfortunately. This has had some impact on the progress as I took a week off to look after the children and a poorly wife. I'd managed to dodge the bullet in regards to this virus until now, but am hoping it will be short lived. Please pray for good health for us all.
I've had a few new leads in regards to publisher which will probably be the last ditched attempt before accepting that it will need to be self-published. These are a few big publishers so again please pray they see the potential of this project and sign me up.
I've booked into several comic cons and Christian conventions that will be happening over the next few months, the plan is to sell off the remaining limited edition copies. So lastly pray this goes well and we don't loose any money on any of them.
Here's how the progress pie chart is looking.
I had a few great responses from asking for feedback last month so if you didn't do so and you are a backer and you've received a hard copy of Judges please get in touch and tell me what you thought of it. It's always good to get feedback, encouragement and critique.
wordforwordbiblecomic [@] Gmail.com
I also discovered a site which allows you to basically continue your Kickstarter campaign and offer rewards for donations to the work. So please refer your friends to buy the limited edition copies of Judges and they can even still get themselves drawn into Joshua.
Thank you for following the progress please keep praying for the project.
This weekend my wonderful wife has taken the kids to granny's and I have been working non-stop trying to keep on target with the book of Joshua's progress. It's slightly frustrating as I just hit a bunch of pages which needed a lot of work! That is the fall of Jericho (Joshua 6), so lots of falling bricks to draw and tiny soldiers climbing up the ruin to attack the city and all the dead bodies everywhere.
A few months ago I upgraded my computer from a Windows XP(!) machine to a new Mac, thanks to the kind donation to the project by two lovely families in my church for the purpose. But, there has been teething issues as some of my old peripherals have not been compatible. A couple of weeks ago I said to my wife "Right, I think I need a new graphics tablet, scanner, printer, monitor and keyboard." (as my graphic tablet also broke that day). She said "Great, where are we gonna get the money for that?" , "God(?)" I replied tentatively. Since then I've had a graphics tablet lent to me, a new monitor and keyboard given to me and one Sunday someone anonymously gave us £100 in an envelope, which I have used to buy a graphics tablet for £65 on eBay. Now I just have to figure out the scanner and printer and it will all have been taken care of. Amazing.
Here's how the progress pie chart is looking.
At the end of January I sent off a few copies of the book to possible publishers, so please pray that come back to me soon and are keen to get it out there this summer.
If you were a backer and you've received a hard copy of Judges please get in touch and tell me what you thought of it. It's always good to get feedback, encouragement and critique.
wordforwordbiblecomic [@] Gmail.com
I also discovered a site which allows you to basically continue your Kickstarter campaign and offer rewards for donations to the work. So please refer your friends to buy the limited edition copies of Judges and they can even still get themselves drawn into Joshua.
Thank you for following the progress please keep praying for the project.
Just a quick progress report on how far along we are.
Over Christmas there was a fair bit of illness and with the kids around progress was somewhat slow, even with a week set aside for it. However Things are picking up a pace and my wonderful wife is taking the children to Grannies next weekend so I can work from dawn 'til dusk and beyond and catch up.
The pie chart is not looking to bad and I have to keep reminding myself that some chapters don't need to much illustrating as they are maps.
This month I hope to track down a publisher, sending out hard copies to the key ones. Please pray this is successful and the right one that God wants us to use is found and found in time.
Thank you all for your support
That’s right I didn’t do a November Progress report. October and the start of November has been filled with manically trying to get the Judges book to print and then getting the printed books out for the backers.
Pretty much everyone in the UK should have theres now, and the rest of the world should receive them in the next week.
Joshua
However during November I have been storyboarding the whole book of Joshua so I can tell you now it will be 128 pages, the same as the Judges book. I’m actually quite surprised, but I have storyboarded Joshua with an average of three lines per page, unlike Judges which had four. I hope this will give the text and the action a little more breathing room.
It will be interesting doing Joshua and I hope a lot quicker than Judges as it its one long story with the same recurrent characters, spanning 30 years, unlike Judges which was several short stories with few recurrent characters spanning over 300 year.
This is a picture of the whole book of Joshua in sketched thumbnail format. I have to thumbnail the whole book to ensure themes from the end are foreshadowed in the beginning and set up from the beginning are concluded by the end.
I’ve allowed a little room for action scenes where the Bible briefly states things like "they had a battle”, "they took a city” or "they defeated the Anakim”
Prayers
One our key concerns is still finding a good publisher. This is something I’ll be really hammering in January, sending them printed copies and chasing them. It’s not worth sending now as Christmas is a very busy time for publishers. So please pray that in January we can get signed up ready for the Summer.
Well, the pie is finally all green. That means all the pages are drawn, inked and coloured! You will notice there are also little ticks on thirteen of the chapters. This is where I have opened up each page and made sure all the text is correct, the boxes are consistent and in good order.
I've added little bits to the images to clear up confusion based on feedback I've received or errors I've noticed. For example, I noticed that the tabernacle was not drawn correctly so I had to adjust it quite significantly.
It's a good example of the sort of thing I'm doing. They are often minute details that "no one will ever notice" but due to the aims of this project to be as accurate as possible I've had to adjust these things to ensure their validity.
Having completed the last three chapters today (Judges 19,20,21), I now need to add them to a pdf and send them out to the backers who are due to receive them (in the next few days). This includes all the new backers from last month's successful Kickstarter and they will therefore get the whole book of Judges in one go digitally in October as promised.
The hard copies are due to be received by the end of November and I have just been negotiating some of the final points with a the printer, including way to make these limited edition copies even more special for all the wonderful backers who've have made this graphic novel series a possibility. We are looking at a local printer which is ethical with use of materials, is obviously closer and therefore reduces the transport environmental issues, and is nearby so I can go in and see them if necessary.
If you missed the update on social media the project also picked up an amazing endorsement from the world of comics...
...I am so happy that John Wagner has agreed to endorse the work and I hope this will really help to reach a broader readership among comic fans who might give it a go, but might not have otherwise.
I am still pursuing publishers through connects and applying direct. This has gone on the back burner somewhat in the last few weeks with Kickstarter, but nevertheless I have a big Christian company viewing the proposal at the moment, so please pray they like it and get in touch with me about it, so I get a chance to answer any questions and handle any objections they might hold. With the new endorsements and second successful Kickstarter (thanks to all my supporters) I hope they will take note. Especially since The Action Bible (an abridged comic of the whole Bible) announced that it has sold one million copies to date!
I plan to start an email newsletter, so if you'd like to sign up to that please use the link below. It hasn't started yet but should do so in the next week or two.
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Recently, I had a friend who is a graphic designer read through and check the comic over for usability and design, to find errors and quality check it.
One of the points raised was regarding the typeface used in the narrative boxes, he said that where there are several lines of capitalized text it's not that easy to read.
In the illustration below you can see a panel which is the worst offenders when it comes to having a lot of text on the panel. This is not typical of the comic at all, but in a few places there is a lot of text which is important but doesn't need a great deal of illumination in pictures so you get a few of these panels in the book.
Anyway, typeface number 2 in the example is the typeface I currently have running through the whole book. The question is : Is it going to significantly improve readability to use one of these alternatives?
Please view the examples below and comment below or on the social media post your saw.
Please say which typeface you believe is the most readable and also if you think it's significantly easier to read or only a little easier. Alternatively, (Option B) if I space the original font with more room between the lines ("leading") it may be a little easier to read - compare the second boxes on each map. Clearly, if it is not significantly improved with these typefaces or spacing, I will be able to leave it as it is, so please say if you think it is fine how it is too.
The images are "zoomed out" on the blog to help you see the fonts as if from afar, but you can click on it to see it larger.
I look forward to your comments.
This month has been a month full of Kickstarter promotion. It launched on the 15th of August and is roughly half way now. Due to this my part of the creation process has not progressed a great deal (the pencilling and preparing for colourists) but as you can see the colourists, Leslie and Ryan have powered on and the pie is looking very full of dark cyan now.
Just over a week ago the family and I, were at Westpoint, it's a regional Christian weekend away. I was promoting the comic and it was very well received with lots of interest.
This weekend I was at ICE comic con in Birmingham letting people know about the comic and learning from the professionals in the second day's talks. Generally, all the delegates I spoke to were encouraging about the idea even if it wasn't their cup of tea, which was kind of suprising as I thought some would be dead against it.
I had some great talks with publishers from some of the biggest names in comics, with greater or lesser degrees of interest in taking on the project, but all were positive in the concept and the artwork which is good stuff coming from professional editors.
Next week I have a stand and even get to introduce the project on stage at the Catalyst Men's one day conference in Bristol.
Please pray those who were keen to support the project at both events get behind the Kickstarter sooner rather than later, and the publishers that I will be following up with will take on the project.
This month we got a new endorsement from an Old Testament scholar. Dr David Beldman, Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University College (Ancaster, Canada). His doctoral research was on Judges, he is the author of the forthcoming book Kingless in Canaan: The Book of Judges (Lexham Press), and is currently writing a commentary on Judges for Eerdmans' Two Horizons series.
His full endorsement statement was...
I have researched the book of Judges for a number of years and enjoyed its stories since I was young, so it was exciting to discover that Judges was the first installment of the Word for Word Bible Comic. Judges seems designed for the graphic novel format. Adventure, warfare, intrigue, betrayal, tragedy--Judges has it all! A surprising feature of Old Testament narrative is that physical description--of people, places and objects--is often quite sparse if it is not important to the purpose of the narrative. This leaves readers guessing about what the landscape looked like, what people wore, and so on. On the basis of careful archaeological, historical and cultural research the WfWBC not only tells the story of Scripture using Scripture's own words, it also gives readers an accurate window into the Old Testament world in its ancient Near East context. In the WfWBC, the ancient narratives of the Bible are creatively and freshly portrayed in a modern visual format.
Cut down version for the website and Kickstarter.
What I am really please with is that David has also read through all the completed sections of the work and did not find anything that was in error, but there are a few more chapter for him to see so I guess there is still time. ;)
In regards to the project, the plan is to finish the work on the project by the end of the month, prepare it for print in October and have it printed and sent out in November.
This final stage is so important to get done on time so please pray that nothing gets in the way of completing everything on time, especially the Kickstarter being successful or it could impact this a great deal if it does not reach it's goal. The funding is currently 38% so it is a little behind the curve but we are confident it will make it in the end, however to do so we do need quite a few more backers. So please tell your friends and back it now if you haven't already.
Kicktraq Graph: From today's graph you can see the projection is close to the wire. It is common for much of the funding to be in the last week, but please get in there now and help it keep rising.
