Thanks for reading Fetus Christ. If you enjoyed reading it half as much as I enjoyed making it, then… well I guess I had twice as much fun as you did.

Fetus Christ is just scratching the surface of the projects I am working on for Holy Comics! The closest to this one in terms of theme and concept is tenatively titled Jesús. It’s nothing less than a complete overhaul of the Gospels, updated for the modern era. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did a nice first draft, but this will be a total re-imagining, much like West Side Story did for Romeo and Juliet, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan did for Moby-Dick, or Battlestar Galactica did for… Battlestar Galactica.

But up next is Captain Miracle. Inspired by such classic characters as Captain Marvel and Miracleman, Captain Miracle is a superhero whose powers come from none other than God Almighty! With powers that match those exercised by God in the Bible, he fights the modern scourges of secular humanism, feminist paganism, Islamist terrorism, and… well, telling the rest would spoil the fun. You’ll be able to find it at CaptainMiracle.com.

Meanwhile, I’m working on some projects that fall outside the realm of Holy Comics!, including JAQrabbit Tales an ongoing bio-porno-graphic novel about the life of a guy named… Jason A. Quest!

What?! You think that priest looks like me? Nonsense! What kind of egotist would put himself into his stories? (I’ll tell you what kind: the kind who would use his own sex life as the basis for a porno-graphic-novel… but that’s for later.)

Anyway.

This brings the epic saga of Fetus Christ to a close. Seriously, this is it: there will be no sequels, no prequels, no retcons, etc. Not that anyone was calling for more, but it’s the principle of the thing. Stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is The End.

Not that this means the end of Jason A. Quest. No such luck. In fact, a week from the posting of this will be the launch of another all-new story. Captain Miracle is another Holy Comics! feature, but with a different approach. It’s a superhero story (sort of), about a hero with powers given to him by God Almighty. Superheroes with powers from “the gods” are nothing new. Captain Marvel is an example of that, almost as old as Superman. Superheroes with more scientific powers are also old-hat. Alan Moore’s Miracleman is a perfect example of that.

Captain Miracle is something else. He’s a superhero who gets his powers from YHWH Himself. And he’s here to save the world, from homosexuality, from paganism, from secularism, from science, from terrorism, from Islam, from…. the forces of Satan himself. And worse. It’s written by Jason A. Quest, with art by Ozzy Longoria. You can follow it week to week at CaptainMiracle.com.

Alcoholic poet Dorothy Parker is commonly credited with a rather clever spoonerism: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” I’m forced to agree with her. As evidenced by… the bottle in front of me. Hell, I’d even substitute a juice box (like the li’l disciples here) for the bottle, if need be. At least liquor leaves some creativity intact.

I have a confession to make. No, not the one that every good Christian on the internets is praying for me to make, but a creative one. You see, when I got to about this point in writing the first draft of the story, I still didn’t know how it was going end.

I’d started with just the premise of the story – just the name to be totally honest – and was just kind of running with it. I was as oblivious as to how this version of the Christ story would turn out as Fetus Christ Himself. In fact, that uncertainty slipped into Fetus’ dialog here and there, as I projected my own thoughts into Him. (After all, I’m the Creator of the universe this story takes place in… why shouldn’t I identify with the God character in it?)

But I figured it out as I started to write the Last Supper scene, and it immediately seemed perfect to me. As if God Himself had handed the idea to me. Which is how the name came to me too. As I did revisions to the earlier parts of the story, the foreshadowing of the ending worked its way in seamlessly.

There’s a lot about this story that’s worked out that way. The idea, some of the gags, the ending, the fact that the scripted story had exactly the same number of pages as there were Fridays between Christmas and Easter this year. It was as if God wanted me to write it, and to publish it, now.

But unlike the folks who wrote the original version of this story, I don’t think that I’ve got God whispering in my ear, directing my thoughts, nudging me along. I’ve got something even better: human creativity. It’s better because I know it’s real. I see it, hear it, feel it, taste it, and even smell it, every day. It’s responsible for the past 17 pages, and it’s responsible for the conclusion that’s coming next….

Did you know that Judas was a red-head? It’s true. At least it’s a part of long-standing church lore, which (according to the Vatican) is pretty much the same thing.

But he didn’t really have a Justin Bieber haircut. Oh, be quiet, Justin haters. He isn’t anything like Judas Iscariot. He’s more like the Anti-Christ. No, really, he is. Like the Anti-Christ. He isn’t actually the Anti-Christ. To my knowledge.

As for the other 11 disciples, gathered here in one shot for the first time, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which of these kids is which. Of course I’m exercising a little artistic license by even having them all present. In all likelihood, some of them were Jesus’ age or younger, in which case they wouldn’t have been born yet in this timeframe. But comics is a visual medium, and how can you have a Last Supper pastiche without twelve characters sitting at a long table?

You may have noticed that John the Episcopalian/Ass has disappeared. Those of you who know the New Testament know what really happened to him; I didn’t want to get into that gory business here.

Seriously: Do you really think I could pass up a verbal gag like “Palm Sunday”?

I just got a brilliant idea for how to extend Fetus Christ, beyond the originally-planned 18 pages, into a 300-page epic. It’ll mean retooling the last few pages I’ve been working on, but it’ll allow me to do a full-length bio of the character. I’ll continue to publish it 1 page/week, until September 16, 2016, with Fetus Christ’s death: alone, unmourned, and unloved.

Or not. Check the date of this post.

For the many who won’t recognize the reference, the above is a take-off on Cerebus the Aardvark by Dave Sim. Originally begun as just a Conan the Barbarian parody, Sim got the idea along the way to make it into an epic biography, promising to continue it for 300 monthly issues, concluding on a specific date with the death of the title character “alone, unmourned, and unloved”. He did it. Even with my more modest goal… I won’t. I have too many other things planned to devote the next five years of my life to this piece.

But in all genuine seriousness, we are now in the final stretch of this story. Fetus Chris is in Jerusalem. He isn’t facing crucifixion… how could he, when He’s already risen from the dead? What could His final fate be? Only three more pages until the end….!

This is not obscene.

It isn’t pornographic.

It wasn’t even all that fun to draw. While I have strong feelings (pro/con) about Bush and Gore, I’m indifferent to bush and gore.

To be honest, I was a little intimidated about drawing this page. Although I am not entirely without experience with the female of the human species, I’m really more of a gentleman’s gentleman (if you take my meaning), and the porn I prefer to look at is definitely of the male variety. And on the various occasions when I have enjoyed the company of the fairer sex, I haven’t exactly made mental notes of what the girl parts look like. So the risk of getting it “wrong” was pretty high. And there’s a huge audience out there who know this subject material pretty damn well. (At least without the premature fetus crawling in and out.)

You’d think that the easy availability of porn everywhere would solve this, but it’s not that easy. You see, most porn is a lie. It’s all exaggerated, and you never get… normal. And for this page I didn’t want shaved, groomed airbrushed photos; I just wanted reference images of the business end of the adult female reproductive organs.

So here ya go.

OK, a little overt political commentary here; skip it if you have a problem with that.

One of the most callous side effects of the efforts to outlaw abortion would be its impact on miscarriages. Because if a fetus is a “person”, and aborting one is “murder”, then any miscarriage that wasn’t obviously the result of an accidental injury to the would-be mother would have to be treated as a possible homicide. A woman who is understandably traumatized by the loss of the little baby boy or girl she was expecting would have to go through the further trauma of being the number one murder suspect. The would-be father would be suspect number two. Even if it was treated as just a bureaucratic formality, the questions they would have to ask would be a cruel slap in the face to the real victims

But anyway, back to talking about the story. Of all the miracles performed by Jesus, the raising of Lazarus was the one that I really wanted to reinterpret in the context of an undead unborn messiah. It’s really kind of an interesting miracle to begin with, because Lazarus was the only person whom Jesus agreed was actually dead before He raised him. Otherwise, it was “only sleeping”. So here He is, dead before birth, and He’s asked to do something about another fetus, dead (of natural causes) before birth. And just how gross the whole situation would be if depicted in graphic form….

Next page: “Bush v. Gore”! (ADVISORY: Contains explicit depiction of both bush and gore.)

If there’s one thing that’s true of every great villain (at least in fantasy fiction), it’s that they’re never as easy to get rid of you as you think they’ll be. You might assume that you’ve seen the last of them, but when you least expect it… they’re back! The inability to get away from them is especially powerful when you consider the fact that Fetus Christ’s arch nemesis is more than just the person who once killed Him, she’s His mother! So of course Mary’s back.

If you went to Sunday School as a kid, and paid attention at all, you should recognize the lad in the tree: that’s Zacchaeus. He’s every li’l Christian’s favorite tax collector, on account of 1) being short, and 2) climbing trees. Getting to shout “YOU COME DOWN” as part of the “wee little man” song is icing on the cake. Of course in our story, Zach is far too young to have gone to work yet for the Imperial Revenue Service yet, but he’s not too young to have taken up the sport of tree-climbing.

Zach’s “I can see my house from here” line is a reference to an old joke. In it, Jesus is hanging from the cross, faintly calling to one of His disciples to come closer. The loyal disciple strives valiantly to do so, suffering abuse and injuries from the executioners and guards, but he perseveres and finally reaches his Lord’s side. Jesus faintly croaks, “Look, I can see your house from here.” The same joke was riffed on for the cover art of an old LP by the prog-rock band Camel, called… “I Can See Your House From Here”.

Understanding where this scene is about to take us requires a little more familiarity with Who’s Who in the Bible. The text doesn’t say for sure about the family relationship, but Jesus evidently knew these people who lived in Bethany….

OK, so I included a cheap-shot contemporary political gag. So sue me. After all, it’s not as if this whole story isn’t a contemporary socio-political commentary. Give me points for not giving this Palin look-alike 21st century glasses like the abortive governor of Alaska.

A big chunk of the Gospels – and apparently Jesus’ ministry – consists of the Son of Man (as He liked to call Himself) going around and healing people. That’s what a holy man did in those days, to show people that he had connections with whatever deity he was claiming to represent. Now, Jesus obviously didn’t go around curing everyone of everything. It was more of a sideshow to get people to pay attention to Him, so He could do His real work: telling people how to live their lives.

Kinda puts those modern-day so-called “faith healers” into perspective, eh?

In our story here, Fetus Christ is making lemonade out of lemons, and being a walking, talking fetus really must help him with the attention-getting part of His plan. He’s hardly need to perform real miracles; just showing up and doing a little dance would be enough. But maybe when your voice is on the volume level of a chipmunk’s, throwing around some healings and the miracle of the clown-car basket of loaves and fishes would help.

This could have been a Watchmen-length graphic novel. Plenty of material for it. But I decided not to. Hence, this montage-style highlight reel.

Fetus Christ is trying to salvage as much of his plans as possible. That includes the Sermon on the Mount (which actually talked about the meek, and not so much about the unborn), socializing with prostitutes and children (and other socially inappropriate things), the famous walking on water stunt, and the ever-popular miracle from the wedding at Cana: turning water into wine.