Art Ayris, CEO of Kingstone Media, said for years as he worked with at-risk kids, struggling to find the right materials to help them learn the Bible.
“Working as a pastor, I was very strong with the Bible, so when I began creating Christian comic books, we began to see huge responses to what we were putting out, both domestically and internationally,” he said in a recent interview with Christianity Today.
He said he remembers going to an apartment complex once with some of the comics, thinking a few people might grab a copy, and it was “like a shark-feeding frenzy.” Another woman who served as a missionary in Papua New Guinea said she had put the comics out on her coffee table and “literally everybody was all excited to read them.”
“There’s something compelling about the rich imagery of art,” Ayris said.
And that’s how “The Kingstone Bible” was born, a three-volume, more than 2,000-page work with artwork from veterans of both Marvel and DC Comics. It’s the most ambitious graphic novel biblical adaptation to date, according to Christianity Today.
It joins a niche but steady market that has seen decades of Bible stories adapted to comics, from VeggieTales to “The Cross and the Switchblade.”
“The Kingstone Bible” is aimed at the preteen and young adult audience, said Ayris, who served as editor for the project.
“I read an article in 2009 by a Vatican archaeologist who found all this artwork in the catacombs, and he basically said it’s all just a big advertisement trying to get people to repent. And when I would go to Barnes & Noble, I’d see all these kids spread out all over the floor reading graphic novels,” he said. “So we really felt, with this big problem of biblical literacy, that this would be an effective way to communicate the whole biblical narrative.”
Difficult topics
The book deals with adult themes like murder and genocide accurately but not in an over-the-top way, Ayris said. He told Christianity Today that it took several years of marketing and making changes to the art to get the product on the shelves of LifeWay Christian Stores and other Christian bookstores.
“We had to do a careful balancing act throughout,” he said. “All of our artists have done work for Marvel or DC, where they don’t necessarily have these kinds of restrictions. I had to kind of rein them in a bit without sacrificing the real biblical content. I’m really proud of where we ended up.”
Ayris said he’s done evangelism before in jails, schools, hospitals, overseas and in a lot of other places, and one thing he’s always seen is that evangelism needs a connection point to have an opportunity for engagement.
“And since a lot of people really don’t understand the Scriptures, this is one way of reaching those folks,” he said.
And it’s a good method of teaching, he said. “We are really big believers in marrying graphics with the text.”
Text gets stored in the brain’s short-term memory but images go in its long-term memory, he said. “There’s a lot of research showing that people can recall much more information and gain a better overall understanding of content if you give them both images and text together as opposed to either text or images separately.”
For example, he said, one woman who works at one of Ayris’ ministries adopted a young girl from a dysfunctional family situation and she brought her to church with her. Along the way the girl got a graphic Bible, Ayris said.
The pastor made a reference to an obscure story from the Old Testament and asked the church if they knew the answer.
“The deacons who’d been at that church for 50 years had no clue,” Ayris said. “Nobody knew the answer — except for this girl because she’d read it in her graphic Bible.”
There’s also an efficiency with the format, he said. “You can convey large amounts of information in a very short period of time. So when you read a novel you can do pages and pages that are just description of a specific place or situation. But in a graphic novel one panel can cover what might’ve taken several pages to describe.”
Every page has the Scripture reference on the bottom so that it’s not a Bible replacement but a Bible supplement, he said.
“Somebody who’s never read the Bible before can take ‘The Kingstone Bible’ and they can take away a good understanding of the Bible’s major stories, narratives and doctrines: the character of God, the history of Israel, how it points to Christ in the future, how God feels about sin and how He responds to disobedience,” Ayris said.
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