Like so many kids, I grew up reading comics. My daily experience of the newspaper was first checking the box scores to see how the Blue Jays had fared the night before and then heading straight to the back where the comics lived. I would read most of the page, but always lingered over a few favorites: Peanuts, The Far Side, Foxtrot, and Calvin and Hobbes. Even today I’ve got volumes of all of those strips and pick them up from time to time. Even better, I see my children reading and enjoying them just as I did.
There are some comics that exist purely for entertainment purposes and some that exist to make a point, sometimes through humor or sometimes through straight-out teaching. Adam4d.com is a “curiously Christian webcomic” that does a little bit of both. Sometimes it is just plain funny and sometimes it is dead serious. Sometimes it is thought provoking and sometimes it is laugh out loud funny. Sometimes it is nuanced and sometimes it is heavy-handed. Whatever the case, it ends up being a good combination and one that makes for enjoyable reading. As is the tradition in comics, Adam occasionally gathers his strips into printed collections. He did this first with Implications Abound and has followed it (in a superior format, I believe) with Thy Kingdom Comics, a collection subtitled “Curiously Christian drawings and writings about Jesus, tolerance, abortion, atheism, homosexuality, theology, and lots of other stuff.” I’m sure you understand that it is difficult to review a book of comics, so perhaps what I can do is share a few representative samples.
Pro-Abortion Logic
This one makes a clear, blunt point by pointing to a blatant contradiction.
Name It and Claim It
This one goes right after some troubling theology that is all too alive within the Christian world.
The Prayer Fairy
This one just pokes fun at an experience just about every Christian can identify with.
Thy Kingdom Comics contains around 60 of these strips and weighs in at 238 pages. Unfortunately, in order to keep printing costs reasonable, he had to stick with a black and white rather than full-color format though that is but a minor complaint. I have always enjoyed Adam’s work and am glad to see him continuing to follow standard comic practice by making his work available in print. His comics are always insightful, always theological, and almost always comical. I think most Christians will find them enjoyable reading.
