I was born and raised in Hollywood, California, and I live there to this day. My Dad worked as a set painter on such TV shows as STAR TREK and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, among others. Later, he worked for a small studio that filmed a lot of commercials. Hanging out there (and part-time working), I was able to meet some fun people like Adam West (BATMAN), Burt Ward (Robin), Don Adams (GET SMART) and others.
My sister was always a wonderful singer and the music teacher at the school took her under her wing and eventually started taking her to church. My sister became Born Again, and within a year I had followed her. When I was 15, a new Christian (though I always believed in God), I started reading the Bible—starting with REVELATION! I came to feel that the time was short and that I couldn’t afford to waste any time! I took a test to get out of school early (I was 16 then, and I only attended 3 weeks of 12th grade) and…everything stopped. I don’t know why (or maybe I do!) but, for the next three years, my parents let me stay home and do nothing. Nothing but read the Bible. And draw.
By the time I was 19, I had read the entire Bible and I had taught myself to really draw—it was during this time that I did my first comic book/paneled/storytelling pages—samples of Green Lantern or whoever and sent them in trying to get comic work. And received the first of hundreds of rejections. I entered Los Angeles City College and became the most obvious Christian on campus (you wouldn’t think that merely carrying the Bible with your school books would cause so much friction!) and (it seemed) the best artist at school. (Not that I was counting—or maybe I was!—but my assignments got placed in the display cases more than any fellow student’s.)
I also started going to church then. My sister had taken me a couple of times previously, but it never felt right—those three years it was just my Bible and me (and God!). Then, she started attending Angelus Temple, the very first Foursquare Church, built in 1923 by a single mother with no money—the controversial Aimee Semple McPherson. No matter her personal controversies, God soon raised up other godly men and women who helped turn the movement into a denomination with a great emphasis on missionary work and evangelism. I was very shy—even fearful of people—but good friends in the young adults group helped draw me out and I would eventually end up teaching the group and even leading the members in street-witnessing! We used tracts from Foursquare Missions Press, but I preferred my own tract that I had compiled which proved from fulfilled Old Testament prophecies that Jesus was the Christ.
When I was 23, I started attending the school at the church—Angelus Bible Institute or ABI—where I ended up graduating with honors. At the same time, I worked at the Foursquare Bookstore and I helped run sound and lights at the church, but I had to quit those jobs when another church asked me to be its youth pastor.
To help me out because I had quit my full-time job to work part-time as youth pastor, that church’s Assistant Pastor set me up with a job where he worked—Foursquare Missions Press. I was to do a little bit of everything, but especially I was to re-draw all the amateurishly illustrated tracts they were then producing. It was the perfect job for me. For some reason, after five weeks there, I had a falling out with the man who had hired me. He decided not to give me any artwork to do and instead I would just help on the printing press. I quit, but it all felt wrong.
Over the next few years, I split my time between some college classes, working seasonally at a costume shop on Hollywood Blvd. (do I have stories from there!) and trying to be a freelance artist. I was invited back to be the substitute/assistant teacher for two of the teachers I knew back at the Bible School, and I also found myself being a regular guest speaker at one particular Foursquare church that “moonlighted” during the week as a martial arts dojo! But I still wasn’t a comic book artist. I went to the San Diego Comic-Con for the first time and tried my hardest to get a job in comics. I would end up going there every year, hoping to finally start my comic book career, impressing various editors and publishers, leaving with promises of jobs and work with business cards in my pocket—but none of them came through.
UNTIL…a small-time publisher hired me to do a book he had created. I illustrated it and also fixed all the story problems. It sold well enough and we continued with issues 2 and 3—which didn’t get enough orders to print. He shut down production.
Still, with the money I had made, and using the knowledge I had gained from working so closely with him, I self-published my first real comic—FREEDOM FIGHTER #1. It was in the comics shops and made the rounds and somehow Don Ensign and Ralph Miley found it and saw enough Christian content in it to track me down and ask “Are you a Christian?” Yep, I said. And that was my introduction to the independent Christian comic book movement. But, still, nothing came of the book and I had spent all my money.
For the next year, I felt that I should get a regular job—give up the ministry AND art. I tried all over town, but every door was shut. At the end of the year, I told God that I would do whatever job he wanted me to do, no matter how menial. It turned out that my sister was looking to change jobs and her friend mentioned that Foursquare Missions Press needed someone. She looked into it, but they didn’t need an office person, they needed a production person. We discovered that the person who had hired me there years earlier (and, for whatever reason, turned on me) had left and someone else was in charge now. I decided to send in my resume and the new boss interviewed me. He was an artist himself and he loved my work. He was also impressed by my self-published FREEDOM FIGHTER. And he said that he would definitely like to publish my Jesus comic. He hired me to…do a little bit of everything and re-draw the tracts that still were outdated. But part of my job would be helping out on the printing press (it was a newer one than before, less noisy and less dangerous).
I took the job. The first tract I redesigned became extremely popular, but “production assistant” work kept squeezing out “artist” time. Then, after an hour of scrubbing the press clean, my thumb decided to stop working. For five months, I couldn’t make my thumb work, and the doctors didn’t know what was causing it. I could no longer scrub the press, but I also couldn’t draw. It was the one time in my life when the future truly looked bleak. At the same time, I caught a large mistake in one of our books and from that moment on everything we did was given to me to proofread. And during that time, I was able to push through my Jesus comic, which had stalled. (It had to be computer re-lettered, a cover designed, etc.) Finally, THE CHRIST OF PROPHECY was published! My boss and co-workers knew how much it meant to me and they brought in balloons and we had cake!
Then, my thumb came back to life, but now I had an office where I could write and draw and proofread, and I never had to clean the press again. Since my thumb came back, I drew another comic and many other comic-like tracts—all of which are very popular. To date, more than half a million of my comics have been printed there—PARAMAN (300,000), LONELY LADY (just 10,000 so far—it’s brand new), LITTLE THIEF (100,000), and my fulfilled prophecy comic on the life of Christ THE CHRIST OF PROPHECY (100,000).
Some of my close calls with comic book companies were closer than others (I’ve actually received paychecks from three companies!), and I’ve been able to do a lot of publishing on my own as well. The books I’ve self-published under my God And Country Graphics imprint are INFILTRATOR, STALKER SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, and A CHRISTMAS TREASURY. (PARAMAN and THE CHRIST OF PROPHECY are actually GACG co-productions with FMP.) Recently, I have illustrated and published Kevin Yong’s TALES OF HEMLOCK.
Some of these books can be viewed at the website http://ericjansentripod.com/godandcountrygraphics/ and I can be contacted through the website. Our mailing address is God And Country Graphics, 1005 N. Alexandria Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029—write for our catalog.
I am working on a number of new projects, and, hopefully, they will see print sooner than later. God has blessed me immensely so far, and I feel there is more to come. God is good.
Of course this brings up several issues. One, are comic books art? If they are —then does the combination of literary/storytelling elements(dialog, captions) with the purely visual put it into a different category than what Rookmaaker is speaking of?
The third group sees room for both approaches. For instance, when Ralph Miley and I were working on our Valiant Efforts title several years ago we opted for the second approach. Previous to this I had developed a comic called Tales of Antediluvia(reprinted in AOs #14-17) which was strictly evangelistic as is the recent AO Challenge. My point is — it is OK to operate in either one or the other or on different occasions both modes.
Having said this another separate but related issue comes to the forefront. What makes a better story—the evangelistic or the pre-evangelistic approach? If the main criteria is to avoid “holy propaganda” then the pre-evangelistic is probably the best. Themes of value can turn up in either type of story. In my Antediluvia story, the hero Kenan sheds tears of remorse over the deaths of enemy soldiers he killed in self defense and ministers to the dying. I feel that compassion is a very important theme. “Love Your Enemy,” should set apart Christian comics. This theme is increasingly alien to the non-Christian comics writer. The worth of a single human life and its eternal destiny as portrayed in the AO Challenge is a extremely valid theme.
From Alpha-Omega #56, 1994
How should the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ be presented in comic books by Christian creators? Should it be openly evangelistic or more subtle it its delivery of the message?
First of all, I don’t believe the item here is—an either or proposition. First, some people who will do comics from a straight evangelistic perspective (complete with a receive Christ as Savior prayer at the end). They see a comic as a tract. Second, some people will develop comics that have a Biblical world view with Christian characters and strong morality that will not necessarily preach salvation.Third, are those Christian comics writers who will produce different comics that will fit into both of the above categories.
The first group may be motivated by the urgency of the times. Christians of a pre-millennial orientation believe in the soon second coming of Christ which is a real motivator toward seeing primary life goals in terms of evangelism and discipleship. The desire is to see as many souls won for the kingdom before Christ comes back as possible. (Please note those of you who hold post-millennial or a-millennial viewpoints I am not trying to promote a controversial doctrine). While I do not want to downplay this motivation we should realize that another valid motivation for evangelism is the fact that people are dying around us all the time and going into a Christless eternity whether Christ is returning tomorrow or 100 years from now. This, of course, could lead into a discussion of spiritual gifting(are we all mouths, etc. Are we all equality gifted in evangelism?).
The second group may have the same urgency to see souls won into Christ’s Kingdom, but see their job as a watering the soil or seed planting endeavor(pre-evangelism). A Christian or Biblical world view that underlays a story would involve things like moral absolutes, actions do have consequences, God as creator and sustainer, the ideas of evil and righteousness and salvation. These ideas are evident in books like C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Christian philosophers like Franky Schaeffer would say that stories of this nature should be the natural overflow of the heart and imagination of the Christian writer. They should not be an uninspired, calculated, mechanical combining of thematic elements that sets forth a message. A variation of this concept is propounded by the late Christian Art historian Hans Rookmaaker,
“To fit into the patterns of evangelism, artists have often compromised, and so prostituted their art. But Handel with his Messiah, Bach with his St. Matthew’s Passion, Rembrandt with his Denial of St. Peter, and the architects of those Cistercian churches were not evangelizing nor making tools for evangelism; they worked to the glory of God. They did not compromise their art. They were not devising tools for religious propaganda or holy advertisement. Precisely because of that their works were deep and important. They were not the means to an end, the winning of souls, but they were meaningful and an end in themselves. They were to God’s glory.
Art has too often become insincere and second rate in its very effort to speak to all people and to communicate a message that art was not meant to communicate. In short, art has its own validity and meaning, certainly in the Christian framework.
The Christian’s art must be Christian in a deep sense, showing the fruits of the Spirit in a positive mentality and with excitement for the greatness of the life we were given.
We are Christians whether we sleep, eat or work hard; whatever we do, we do it as God’s children. Our Christianity is not only for the pious moments, our religious acts. Nor is the aim of life evangelism; it is seeking the Kingdom of God.
(Hans Rookmaaker, Art Needs No Justification, Intervaristy Press, 1978, pp. 30-31)
From Alpha-Omega #56, 1994
As readers can see in the new chapter of our Ragged Capes webcomics, we are presenting a character named Lioness who is an African American woman with a deep hatred towards white people. As her story is told, we’ll see that her rejection of Christianity is based on her perception that Christianity is “The White Man’s” religion.
With the election of an African American to the office of President of the United States, is race now a moot issue in the U.S.? All we have to do is look at the church of the U.S. and see that there are still challenges to be addressed. Why do so many of our churches remain racially divided? There are many African Americans who ask the question, “Why does the imagery most often on display of Christ depict him not as a Jewish man of the Middle Eastern decent, but a white European?”
In theory, the ethnicity of Jesus Christ should not be an issue. In truth, Jesus was not African or Asian or Latino, but it would also be safe to say that He was not European. He was born in the Middle East, to a Jewish woman who is from the Middle East, which means we can expect that Jesus would at least have had that ethnic complexion from that time period. Yet, we can go the any Christian bookstore in the United States and we see images of a European Jesus. That is an issue for many African Americans.
The church is making progress, and integrated congregations do exist -- but for now these are the sadly the exceptions and not the norms. And pastors of these churches have had to confront the prejudices of their own congregations when people of different races begin to join and become active in their churches.
These are some of the questions that the character, Lioness, struggles with. But as we continue to read the story, we will that there are deeper issues that come into play for her as well. In Ragged Capes, we are trying to tackle topics like race, judgment, hatred, anger, grace, and forgiveness (as much as we can, using the language of superheroes).
These are uncomfortable issues that still deserve to be talked about and discussed, if the body of Christ is to come together as one. Because until we have such open discussion about topics like race, our churches will continue to be catorgorized as White churches, Black churches, Latino churches, Korean churches, Native American churches… and the list goes on.
“For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.” -- Galatians 3:27-29
