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.
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