Spurred on by Hong Teck's blog postings, I've been looking around for Christian comics, animation material and even manga for the HopeKids children recently. Found this wonderful article on Anime Network.
Tyndale House Publishers announced that it is launching a yearly series of Christian manga drawn by Japanese artists in September, as well as a Manga Bible with three manga sections in November. Amazon lists Hidenori Kumai as the author, with Kozumi Shinozawa and Atsuko Ogawa as the illustrators, of the first manga book, Manga Messiah. The Manga Bible will include the entire New Living Translation of the text with three 32-page manga tip-in sections that summarize the narrative.
Christianity has been covered in the Superbook anime series, and "The God of Manga," manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, worked with the Vatican on the In the Beginning: The Bible Stories anime series just before he passed away. Gundam character designer Yoshikazu Yasuhiko created a manga series about Jesus and another about the Catholic saint Joan of Arc. A recent ANN review of a Christian world manga started a discussion on this field.
Wow. Osamu Tezuka, "The God of Manga", making a book on the topic of God. God really is the God of gods! :) But seriously, it's so cool. Getting top-notch industry professionals to do this kind of stuff to spread the good news... Yes! :D
Hmm! But I realise also there's a dearth of good quality Christian material for children. The problem is, if the art's good, the storyline is so... flat. And if the story's excellent, the art's not good enough. If I remember correctly, Hong Teck also told me that he's experiencing the same problem too.
One reason I'm passionate about finding good-quality audio-visual material for children is because when I was a young boy, I read some excellently-rendered Bible stories for children. The art was so good that even now, when sometimes I'm feeling a bit down or confused, I remember the art and the Bible dialogue from those comics and take heart that the Lord is indeed with me. These comic books really helped to plant a seed of God's Word in my heart as a young boy. :)
Children are very visually stimulated by good visual images. Cartoons are a powerful way of transmitting messages to them. Thank God we have some EXCELLENT artists in our church. I'm wondering how we can get them to do comics or storybooks for the children.
But at the moment, I've found one good Pixar cartoon that I think will be a great help to the kids. It's very excellently-rendered and the storyline, while meant for kids, is also relevant and encouraging to the adults too.
Think that's how Jesus did it too with His parables. When He told His parables to illustrate what the Kingdom of God is like, he didn't use lengthy quotes or expositions from the Torah (the Old Testament), but told very crisp and real-life stories from normal everyday surroundings, to get His points across. So likewise, I can source for relevant materials from the world, and Hollywood too. :) Bollywood... haha, that's an idea to consider too!
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