Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, Daniel Bernard, Danielle Storey, kickstarter, Luisa Russo, The Chieftains

3,000 Years Before Katniss And Bella There Was Deborah

Published Sun, 09 Feb 2014 15:00:17 -0600

Daniel Bernard writes for Bleeding Cool:

A gifted young girl from the rural hills rises from her unlikely station in life to become a heroine of destiny, a uniter of peoples under a flag of revolution, and a legend until this day.

Sound familiar? Katniss? Bella? This broad heroic trope thrives these days in comics, film, YA fiction, and television. But, no, I'm not describing some speculative dystopian fantasy story. I'm actually describing the over 3,000-year old saga of the seer Deborah. And it's from the Bible.

I've never read the Bible as scripture, but as literature. It contains all kinds of genres since it was edited together over centuries from sources collected over even more centuries. I've spent my adult life studying that long process of redaction as a professional scholar of ancient religions, and writing about the cultural backgrounds of the texts within the biblical canon.

And of all those stories, the story of Deborah is the most exciting, and the most astounding to a modern reader with a bias about what the Bible is supposed to be like or about. It's also painfully short while at the same time implying a complex and intimate character drama behind the scenes, far more than we readers get to see. We are left mostly to guess, to imagine, intrigued: how did Deborah get to this point? How did she become the legendary commander of a coalition of patriarchal tribes?

A complex world lays shrouded, hidden behind this story, begging to be uncovered and explored.

So I wrote a comic book about it.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Oh great, a Bible comic." And I feel you, they're mostly godawful.

But The Chieftains is something else. A limited-run, twelve-part serialized graphic novel, this series for mature readers focuses on telling Deborah's story, on fleshing out the characters and plots from the already gripping original source material. This is the opposite approach of the usual contemporary takes on the Bible, which, in obvious attempts to educate or convert, adapt these complex stories speedily and superficially.

When so much of today's new pop mythologies recycle the conventions of biblical sagas, The Chieftains, rather, ignores the conventions for biblical adaptations. No grand posturing, no supernatural creatures, no McGuffin quests. Instead, by getting to know a realistic cast of characters, we get to experience the nitty gritty of every day ancient life during the trying collapse of the Bronze Age. Slowly following these characters' overlapping or conflicting choices in a world of harsh survival, The Chieftains makes for a far more satisfying telling of Deborah's against-all-odds origins and journey to heroism.

Because this kind of iconoclastic adaptation cannot be funded through the usual route (religious institutions), we hope that you'll help us produce our first issue through Kickstarter. Until February 21 you have the chance to make a reality of this series.

We offer a copy of our first issue at all pledge tiers over $10 (CAD), as well as other cool rewards. But today we have also added a special Bleeding Cool Reward Package. Normally only available for pledges of minimum $100 (CAD), our empty notebook with specially designed cover art will now be available to Bleeding Cool readers for a minimum pledge of only $45 (CAD)–and you also get issue #1 signed, and a signed conceptual illustration!

There are only 40 of these Bleeding Cool Reward Packages available in total, so reserve yours today, and please help get us that much closer to adding this unique series to the racks.

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