 31/12/2012 10:52 |
|
| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 26.004
Post: 8.496 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Master | |
|
A new US comic book on
the life of Benedict XVI
Lella posted a link to a Korazym item on a US comic book about the Pope, HABEMUS PAPAM: BENEDICT XVI, which led me to seek out the comic book itself online, remembering that there was one such comic book with the same title published for WYD in Madrid in 2011. Indeed, the new one turns out to be an 'expanded' version of the WYD comic book (or manga, to use the trendy Japanese term). Here is the blurb for it - it's available on amazon.com.
NB: The comic-book publishers should have known that Joseph Ratzinger has always spelled his first name (as did his father) spelled with a '-ph', not an '-f'.
Habemus Papam! Pope Benedict XVI (Manga Hero, 2012) is the story of an extraordinary young man who thought he was ordinary.
Young Josef Ratzinger faces a number of challenges growing up in German Bavaria: all he wants to do is learn, but the Nazis keep closing down his schools. His father, Captain Ratzinger, a retired police officer, has been trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, but as Josef grows older, Germany moves towards war, and every German youth must serve in the army Hitler has taken over.
Little does Josef realize that the plan God has for him goes beyond books and the academy - and even beyond Germany!
This graphic novel about the life of Pope Benedict XVI is an expanded version of Gabrielle Gniewek's book that was officially published for World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid, Spain, and distributed to 300,000 people. Also included is a nine page appendix with fun facts about the Holy Father, his vehicles, and the Swiss Guards.
Here's the WYD Madrid edition, with illustrator Jonathan Lin:
Here are some pages from the new comic book made available on the Amazon site - sorry, they are from thumbnails, so the print is not readable:
Obviously, the illustrator needs lessons from Ann Kissane Engelhart or Natalia Tsarkova on how to draw the face of Benedict XVI!(Quibble: Why is the entire
comic book not in color? B&W these days seems so passe. Surely there must be a program to colorize the sketches if they were not executed in color, to begin with.
Commentary about the new comic book makes much of the fact that Benedict XVI - with his previous media incarnations as the Panzerkardinal and God's
Rottweiler - was an unlikely comic-book hero, but since when have extraordinary people been unlikely comic-book heroes? In the religious genre, Bible
stories, the life of Jesus, and lives of the saints have always been inspirational sources of comic books for children. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United
States Information Service (to whose libraries I owe a great part of the books I read as a child and pre-teen), published comic books about life behind the Iron
Curtain, and one of the most memorable for me was the story of the Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty.
In 1983, Marvel Comics published a comic book on the life of John Paul II up to the assassination attempt in 1981.
P.S. Beatrice on her site
recalls that back in 2005, she came upon a French comic book (or BD, for 'bande-desinee', comic strip) published to introduce
the new Pope to young readers shortly after his election. She came upon it by chance in the bookstore of the Basilica in
Montmartre, but that it is still available today at FNAC (the large French bookstore chain).
The graphic quality is decidedly superior to the work of the two manga artists responsible for the WYD and US editions, who I am sure did their best. However,
memo to comicbook artists: The medium is not an excuse passable or middling work, i.e., a comic book deserves as much care and attention as any other medium...
Yesterday, Photobucket revised its entire system overnight, and it took me some time to figure out how to use it,
so I will be slower than usual in posting new photos...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/12/2012 16:53] |
| |
|
| |
|
|