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The whole "Comics are under the radar of the Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy" thing has my warning bells ringing, too, and not in a good way.
Anyhow: Seems to me there are only a couple of effective ways to use Scripture as a source for fiction. One is to be utterly upfront about it, writing historical fiction that fills in the cracks in scriptural narrative—Per Amundsen's Barabbas, for example, or Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. Or Ben Hur. Or, y'know, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, for that matter. Although it is, on the surface, a very blatant and obvious move, it can yield very interesting results—it's the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead approach, coming up sideways on source material that is too holy holy holy for you to examine directly, and thus finding new ways of looking at/talking about that text—by focusing on what it omits, rather than what it includes.
The other way that comes to mind is to incorporate general themes from the archetypal scriptural stories, but to cover your tracks really well w/r/t actually referencing the stories themselves. Steinbeck's East of Eden, f'rinstance: the brother-brother conflict that plays out in the book is not literally a "retelling" of the Cain and Abel story, but another aspect of an eternal struggle woven into the human condition. These kinds of stories are not explicit translations of Bible stories into modern drag, but are deepened and enriched by resonance with scriptural messages.
All well and good. Problem is, there are also a lot of really crappy ways to write Scripture-inspired fiction.
For instance, there's the way Doug Rushkoff is doing it—trying to split the difference in the two above approaches: ostensibly telling stories of the second type but making the scriptural connection explicit, underlining it—in red—via stupid character names and ploddingly obvious dream sequences—so that his (presumably dim) readers don't miss the connection and miss exactly what a fucking postmodern genius Doug Rushkoff is: SEE WHAT I DID HERE? VERY CLEVER, YES?
Very clever, no. |
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