Josh and Caleb Chapter 6: Judgment Episode 02

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Director's Commentary: As art, I love these pages. The layout looks good to me, and I'm very happy with the colour job. This is grim stuff, though. I based the way these guys die on something involving the original Hebrew in this passage - basically, the smiting here was of the worst kind, and I wanted that reflected. The Hebrew here is  מַגֵּפָה (maggephah), which means either slaughter or plague. I was clearly in a much darker mental space, as I now find it rather disturbing. I must have at the time as well, or Josh wouldn't have been questioning it. Here's the original warning that acted as a link to the page where Igal and crew have their guts being turned inside out.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 6: Judgment Episode 01

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Director's Commentary: Love the colouring across the board here, but I hate the line art in the first image. Much happier with the second strip. By this point, I'd settled on a design for Moses, just in time to never draw him again. I really like the clean approach I took here. Again, much of the dialogue is taken from Eugene Peterson's The Message.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 07

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Director's Commentary: Sorry about the lack of update yesterday - Blogger's dashboard was down, so I couldn't update.
And here we come to the doubling of episodes. There are two of the original episodes on this page. At this point in the series, I made the decision to change the orientation of the strips to reflect the design of the original Gotthammer site. This ensured people didn't have to scroll to see the episode art. Sadly, it doesn't work so well for Blogger, but c'est la vie. You can just click on the images to see the art in all its full-sized glory, or lack thereof.
I was reading On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism by Gershom Scholem when I was writing these strips, which is why I chose the Shekinah as the manifestation of YHWH in these episodes. Moses' speech is a paraphrase of a section of Scholem's book.
While I'm not thrilled that Moses is changing his look yet again (different eyes from last page), I like everything else about these strips. I really like the second episode as Igal picks up Josh's sword, with ill intent in his eyes. Very happy with the reflection of the flames in the sword.
The lines spoken by the Shekinah are from Eugene Peterson's dynamic translation of the Bible, The Message.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 06

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Director's Commentary: I hate how I kept changing Moses's look. On this page, he's clearly Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. I should have had him say "Takin' it to the streets" or "Yah mo be there" at some point. I also didn't make Caleb's line clear enough to be a joke - they're in a burning ring of fire - get it? As to why Josh is injured, who knows? After all, the rock hit him in the head. Maybe somebody stepped on him. It's a gong show on this page, folks.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 05

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Director's Commentary: I love this page. There isn't a thing I'd change about it, short of having had hours instead of one hour to do the line art. One of the ongoing challenges of making Josh and Caleb was always time. Sequential art is a big time investment.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 04

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Director's Commentary: While I'm not thrilled with my line art on this page, the coloring and "post-production" elements are among my favorites in the series. My coloring for the Ark of the Covenant led me to throw out the line art in that panel entirely, except for the bottom of the curtains. For those unfamiliar with Jewish theology, the curtain separated the people from the Holy of Holies - here we see it blowing back, and the glory of God coming down like a pillar of white fire, in response to Caleb's call.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 03

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Director's commentary: The wheels fell off in April, as they always do. It gets so busy, even just updating a pre-made post is too much! My apologies to everyone who was faithfully following along with Josh and Caleb for this "re-release."
I'm feeling pretty reticent about posting the rest, given recent events in the world. Osama bin Laden's death has reminded me yet again about religious violence. Ultimately, I've decided to continue with the repostings, mainly because Josh's attitude comes to mirror Sun Tzu's in The Art of War: "Treat your victory as a funeral." In other words, don't be gleeful at the death of your enemy. It's been sobering, looking at these comics with hindsight, and the eyes of a post-evangelical. Hopefully this commentary adds to the conversation in a real-world way.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 02

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Director's Commentary: Nothing to report, save to say, yes, that is a reference to O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Josh and Caleb Chapter 5: Azra'il, Episode 01

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Director's Commentary: I pulled one of those "fast forward" narrative moments, to reveal that Josh had lived through the debacle I cliff-hung the last episode with, leaving Caleb's fate unstated. I don't think my motivation was being clever though: I was just sick of drawing the crowd, Igal, Moses, etc. I was itching to do something different, and was playing around with photo references, which I used to draw the first four and final panels. I used a photo background run through Photoshop filters for the final panel. I clearly went back to my burn and dodge approach, but it's more understated here. I think there was a month or two in between the last episode and this one, but I can't recall. What I remember is actually scripting this episode, then thumbnailing it, before finally drawing it rigorously at my drawing table, unlike the whole series to date, which had been drawn quickly on coffee breaks and stolen moments throughout the day. 

I hate that I called the chapter "Azra'il," which is the transliterated name of the angel of death in Arabic, since I'd later be referencing the Shekinah. It really should have been called Shekinah.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 10

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Director's Commentary: I don't have many good things to say about this page. It was clearly a rush job, both at the level of initial line art, and in the coloring. I like the first panel and the mob, but I'd definitely re-color Igal and re-draw the last panel (aside from Josh talking out the side of his mouth).

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 10

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Director's Commentary: I think I should start calling this "midrash," the Jewish practice of reading between the lines of a sacred text. Or maybe that's what I'd call the whole series of this web-comic plus the Ezekiel comic Nathan Thomas and I did together, since neither is totally faithful to the original text.

I really like this page - it definitely raises the issues that started running around in my head as I was reading the Biblical passages associated with this narrative. "Everyone's been partying with a golden calf! Joshua, pick up your sword and kill everyone who was doing it and isn't sorry!" And Joshua obeyed. I'm pretty sure he had to kill some friends that day. One of the things I'd definitely change if I had the chance would be to give Josh a beard. I don't like that I've unilaterally drawn the "bad" guys with beards. Not a good policy when you're drawing a story taking place in the middle east, even if you're only viewing it as a mythic space. At the time, my thinking was to offset Josh and Caleb as being young men, even though they were in their 40s, according to the text.

The flashback image was drawn independently of the actual paneled art, and then combined in Photoshop when I colored it. There's a full-color image of it I'll post in the "DVD extras" when the series wraps up.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 09

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Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 08

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Director's Commentary: Mostly just little things here - I love the stars above Igal, and the unfocused background crowd behind Caleb in the fourth panel. I'm sure a scholar of comics could say more about my composition, but I feel like it's pretty good for just going on pure instinct and years of reading comics. Aside from the sudden disappearance of Igal's name brand logo, I love it.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 07

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Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 06

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Director's Commentary: My villain, Igal, is the ultimate opportunist: first, he uses the grapes as proof of the giants - obviously, a land with giant grapes must produce giant people. Then, when Josh and Caleb produce the spear, it's further proof - a spear that big could only be thrown properly by a giant. He's unstoppable. Unfortunately, I neglected include why he's relentlessly dissuading his nation to stay out of the Promised Land. I include that in the "deleted scenes" from Chapter 2.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 05

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Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 04

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Director's Commentary: Things I'd change if I were doing it all over again: Moses' beard on the page immediately prior, so it matched how it looked on this page. Most of the characters had a continuity to their appearance, but Moses goes through some radical changes from page to page. This is the joy of doing a web comic in your spare time when your time isn't so spare.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 03

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Director's  Commentary: I love the ongoing joke of the crowd getting misinformation from each other, especially the giant grasshoppers. 'Nuff said.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 02

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Director's Commentary: I've been listening to Karen Armstrong's lovely book, The Bible, which approaches the history of scripture as a sort of biography. In many ways, I find it more comforting than our pastor's recent sermons on the Bible, which were a rudimentary introduction to Bible study for lay people. While I applaud the intention, he wasn't telling me anything I hadn't read or heard before. Nevertheless, wanting to be on track with where the rest of the congregation is, I've been focusing some of my reading on either the study of scripture, or in this case, the book itself. Armstrong's history of the development of the Judeo Christian texts included two thoughts that put my mind at ease somewhat regarding re-posting Josh and Caleb. The first was that consensus among Biblical scholars of the Jewish scriptures is that Israel's invasion of Canaan likely didn't happen, so I'm working in mythic space. Second, the presence of violence in scripture is a testament to the way the Judeo Christian texts present the warts-and-all picture of the development of the Bible and the people who call it sacred. Accordingly, we can view the texts advocating violence as moments when we missed the point, which is some of what I was doing with Josh and Caleb. What started as an adventure will end with ambivalence about how things play out. So while that isn't where I was at when I wrote it, I'm glad to be reflecting on it again, in light of where my journey has taken me. I guess I'm thinking of Josh and Caleb as midrash, the Judaic "reading between the lines" of scripture.

Josh and Caleb Chapter 4: The Return, Episode 01

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Director's Commentary: All of "Chapter 4: The Return" was colored while working the summer as staff pastor at Greenbay Bible Camp in Westbank, BC during the summer of 2002. I can't recall if the line art was already produced before I went out, or if I worked on it while I was there, but the completion of so many strips over a two-month period is due largely to the encouragement and support of Nathan "Monkey" Thomas, who allowed me to steal time at his desk and use his Intuos tablet to colour the strips. Nathan is now an animator out on the West Coast who was working media at Greenbay that summer. He was a strong motivator for me, and spurred me on to create better jokes as well. Accordingly, I'm dedicating Chapter Four to Nathan.

This page is definitely inspired by Dave Sim of Cerebus fame yet again. I loved the use of many quasi-anonymous speech balloons in his crowd shots during the Church and State issues of Cerebus, and loved using that technique with the wandering Israelites, whose bitching and moaning during the journey to Canaan takes on comedic proportions even in the Pentateuch.

I can't recall why I decided this all had to happen at night, but it turned out to be a very smart choice in the next chapter, as the night provided the perfect contrast to what invades the night. It certainly wasn't intentional, and by the time I was done the summer, I was pretty sick of my smurfy Israelites.