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!

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….

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….!

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.)

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.