Magna comics find Jesus (and he's a samurai badass)

From today's New York Times: The Bible as Graphic Novel, With a Samurai Stranger Called Christ: Artist Ajinbayo Akinsiku's Son of God is here to shake things up in a new, much-abridged version of the Bible rooted in manga, the Japanese form of graphic novels.

Writer Neela Banerjee talks about book publishers' latest push to reach the Bible market, this time it's Doubleday with a magna version of the text. Magna is known for action and epic (and sex) so in Ajinbayo Akinsiku's graphic novel "Abraham rides a horse out of an explosion to save Lot. Og, king of Bashan, looms like an early Darth Vader. The Sermon on the Mount did not make the book because there was not enough action to it." Akinsiku's next graphic novel will focus on Christ's stories only. Banerjee writes "He has 300 pages to lay it out, which means there will be a lot more action, a lot less talking, something like Clint Eastwood in the Galilee."

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