writer/editor Paul Buhle’s triptych look at the teachings of Jesus takes for its title a similarly evocative, provocative title: Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith.
The album-sized graphic novel from Herald Press is split into three sections, each illustrated by a different artist in a distinctly different style, and each concerned with the ways Jesus’ words and actions challenged authority in different time periods, from Jesus’ own lifetime to the modern era.
Obviously, it’s a religious book, but Buhle and the artists don’t seem to be overly concerned with preaching. Rather, the book reads like a work of history, albeit the history of a faith, and, as it enters modern times, the liberal, left-leaning reading and application of that faith. (Buhle’s previous comics works include contributions to adaptations of Studs Terkel’s Working and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the American Empire. He also collaborated with Harvey Pekar on 2009′s The Beats: A Graphic History.) The final section, “Radical Resistance,” is drawn by Nick Thorkelson, in a style highly reminiscent of the loose, urgent work of many modern political cartoonists; he even uses symbolic and labeled imagery the way many political cartoonists do, although the pages are broken up into panels, and tell stories, here a series of stories within a series of stories. In this section, then, we learn about Sojourner Truth, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war activities of groups like Catholic Worker and Christian Peacemaker Teams from the Vietnam War to the hotspots of the Cold War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
