(link via Philippine Genre Stories and Zen in Darkness)

“Take any of the metaphysical poets, almost any of the Victorian poets,” he says. “Even reading the great romantics like Keats requires you to know things about the Fall, who some of the people in the Bible are, ideas of sinfulness and virtue. It’s also essential for Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, and needs to be there in the background of the modernist period. Even a writer like TS Eliot is re-imagining all kind of mythological structures.

Apart from Stephen King’s ‘Christine’, one of my earliest books was a picture bible (a version that Jehova’s Witnesses or Born Again Christains use, I think). Its illustrations were comic-book type, complete with word bubbles and stuff. So i guess you could say it was a ‘comic-book’ version of the Bible rather than just an illustrated one. I remember I would tuck it in my backpack during school days, reading it during breaks and after school hours (yes, even when I was in first grade, I frequented the school library). Our family wasn’t the church-every-Sunday-type. I just read the Bible because of the stories. People turning into a pile of salt, surviving a night in the lion pit, a day where the sun stands still and the apocalypse, these were the stories that had me hostage. The stuff of legend.

Someone once said that the religion of one generation is the literature of the next (or something like that). A fine example would be the Greek and Roman myths (fact: how do you know when you’re becoming a full-fledged geek? You have a copy of Edith Hamilton’s ‘Mythology’ which you have already read, thrice). I remember being enthralled with ‘Revelations’. I read it in an actual Bible. How the illustrations would be in a ‘comic-book’ type Bible, only Dave McKean knows). I was in the fifth grade then, already enamoured with ‘The Beast of the Apocalypse’ and the Horsemen (yes, mid-90s was the time when everyone was fixated with the Apocalypse) and this ‘love affair’ was probably the one that led me to seeking other horror/post-apocalyptic works dwelling somewhere in our dusty public library.

Until now, Bible-based/Religion cop-outs infused with fiction are what interests me most (see The Sandman: Seasons of Mists, Good Omens, Vellum and Ink) and two of my earliest stories are post-apocalyptic shiznit.

If you think about it, the Old Testament is one great source when it comes to stories, far-out or not, this is the era when God was vengeful, jealous and spiteful. Like what scientist Richard Dawkins said in his brilliant ‘The God Delusion’ (another required reading, I must add) “The God in the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction…”

What’s sad is actually a lot of young people today see the Bible as an ‘uncool’ book, an issue that Bible publishers are trying to address today. I remember reading about an ‘Illustrated Bible’ which had contemporary pictures including pictures of Bono and Angelina Jolie. You may get all ‘WTF’ and shit but if this will be the way to get youngsters read the Bible for what its worth, then so be it, religious propaganda or not.