First Conflict Tower payoff:
"By portraying the Bible as essentially one long text message from a deity who hasn’t quite figured out how to self-edit, these publishers are putting it in direct competition with the thousand other similarly draped media productions screaming for teenage approval. Given the choice between a secular source that honestly wants to engage with their concerns and a Bible that is cynically aping an interest in order to keep itself stumbling along another couple of centuries, there’s little doubt about where a modern adolescent will turn."
As a Christian, an aesthete, and a human being, I heartily agree with DeBakcsy’s scathing critique of accessory Bibles. In fact, as I grew up being bombarded with such monstrously packaged, tendentiously framed, and nakedly manipulative messages, I would dare say that the kitsch of Christian pop-culture may well have been the greatest threat my faith needed to survive. However, I don’t find it particularly surprising, nor do I consider it to be a new development, at least not in a larger sense. Ever since Emperor Constantine bowed the knee in 313, thereby ushering much of the empire into at least a nominal affiliation with the church, Christianity has been big enough to draw a massive crowd, which in turn, as in all other fora, draws droves of power mongers and would-be gatekeepers all eager to get their grubby fingers on a piece of the action, usually under the guise of “protecting the faith” or some such. The organized church, like so many other organizations, whenever it succeeds too much, is always in danger of becoming little more than a country club where power brokers rub shoulders and make important decisions in back rooms. So it goes whenever you get people together and force them to make decisions as a group. And this is why Augustine’s distinction of the visible vs. the invisible church is of the utmost importance. As I see it, every age since the foundation of the Christian religion has inflected the institution in both glorious and appalling ways. This again should not surprise, as both culture and faith are carried by the same organism. That an age of unrivaled consumerism and mass-media manipulation should spawn the gimmick Bible seems to me inevitable. Is it more gaudy than Vegas, more vapid than the home shopping network, or more intellectually dishonest than network news? More incongruous, to be sure.
I had a "cartoon" bible when I was a kid. It was in three paperback volums, the art was good, it faithfully followed most of the major tales that a kid could get it's head around. I probably read individual stories a hundred times. I'd say that it was one of the foundational works of my cultural literacy. While I can't say much about the other works described here I do plan on buying my child a cartoon bible. I am not going to buy the action bible shown in the piece, but a somewhat less sensationally produced one. I can't think of a better way to introduce the fables in the bible to my child and it's a matter I've considered long and hard.
I just want to read the "sidebar text messages from God" in the book of Revelations... Christian publishers really jumped the shark. The most effective (from a evangelical and positive long-term impact POV) gimmick Bible was Gideon's, by far. Instead of dumbing down the text they focused on a really kind of genius chain of distribution, getting their text to millions of people in moments of quiet isolation and detachment from their normal distractions.
The Gideons are pretty brilliant, no mistakin'. And props to them for proceeding with an element of subtlety. Still, I think the benchmark for Christian publishers is still Johannes Gutenberg. Now, that man could set some type! Actually, I'm wistful for the days of books being laboriously copied by hand onto expensive sheets of vellum made from animal skin. It's not that I begrudge the animals their skin, quite the contrary. Papyrus would have been way more cruelty free, though longevity issues might have arisen (as they most likely will with digitally encoded media, incidentally -- perhaps a blessing). It's just that nothing got published by accident, or as some kind of half-assed afterthought, or inevitably, by rote, at the hands of disinterested script grinders working to fill an anticipated demand. There were doubtless no "Zombie Apocalypse Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guides" in the outhouses of the thirteenth century peasants. (Though I must admit, of frivolous publications, that is one of my favorite).
The companion of the survival guide; World War Z, is actually a quite thoughtful look at the world through the lens of zombies. That sentence might come off as a bit of mindless post-modernist thinking but I think there's genuine value in both books despite the apparent triviality of them. Although I certainly agree that a lot of what is published today is useless or vain.