I dream of a world where we encourage biblical literacy by doing a nativity pageant each year based exclusively on only one of the four Gospels, instead of a mishmash.
Mark: 15 minutes of complete silence in the dark. Everyone is given a tiny scroll that reads, “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way—a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’” Suddenly, a very hairy man with bugs on his face jumps down from the rafters screaming, “REPENTTTTTTT!”
Matthew: full scale retellings of each person in the genealogy, including Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. (This is the longest one. Parents are upset by their children being assigned any of the women.) Mary is then “found” to be pregnant, Joseph tells the audience that he’s going to divorce her, he falls asleep. An angel harangues him in his dreams. He doesn’t divorce her, and takes her home kind of crankily. They have a baby. Some Magi come ask the despot ruler about a powerful baby just born. Herod freaks out and consults all his spies. The Magi head out again, find the baby, worship him, and avoid Herod on the way home. An angel comes back to harass Joseph while he sleeps, telling him to run for his life, because Herod is *pissed.* They make it to Egypt.
All boy children under 2 are graphically murdered (blood packets everywhere), lay all over the space, spattered with red.
Women scream for a long time.
An angel tells Joseph in a dream that it’s safe again, and they go back – but only to Nazareth, because it still isn’t safe everywhere. The end.
Luke: The living embodiment of the “Well, actually…” guy comes to the front to tell you that you may have heard about Jesus, but it was all pretty wrong, and HE is here to set you right, and aren’t you grateful he’s so good at it? Then an old priest starts presiding at the altar, as you do, with pots of incense burning. An angel – covered in wings and eyes – pops out beside him. The old priest freaks out. The angel drones, “Your…wife…will…become…pregnant…your…wife…willl.become…pregnant…” The priest looks blank and says, “Yeah, I don’t think that can happen. We’re old.” The angel rolls their many eyes, places eight hands over the priest’s mouth, and says, “You. You’re not allowed to talk anymore.” The priest walks out of the sanctuary and everyone is worried about him, but he can’t tell them what happened.
His wife gets pregnant and hides in the church closet for the play-version of five months.
Following that, pretty much every Nativity play we already do, minus the Magi and the star. The old priest gets to talk again once his kid gets circumcised, and then he sings a long song about how it was good he was wrong.
John: The room is dark. Tiny children wear black capes. They whoosh around the room whispering, “in the beginning…in the beginning…in the beginning.” One of them whirls around to display a glow in the dark WORD, and they dance over to another child, whose belly reads GOD, and then they link and become one unit, together, dancing, dancing. They keep pulling out glow in the dark scarves that say light light light, and they dance around lighting all the candles scattered throughout the room.
They chant, “the darkness did not overcome us! Ha!”
A haggard man enters the room and says, “I am a witness to all this light.”
The children whisper, “the true light is coming, the true light is coming, the true light is coming.”
[from the loudspeaker: “The true light is coming! To the world! Even though he came to the world, and made the world, the world didn’t like him much! He came to his own people, who rejected him, probably like some of you! But those who did recognize him, and you sitting here, if you’re ready, will become children of God yourselves! Not some halfway “actually children of people who feel slightly more divine because of church” nonsense! Actual! Children! Of! God!“]
The child bearing the word WORD tears off their cape and runs around in their underwear, in the flesh, like a wild thing.
________
Note: none of these sets contain stables.
Tag: OOH
Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth on the set of ‘Men in Black’
anyone else chomping at the bit for this
Happy Hanukkah, everyone, from these two jerks! I’m posting this a little early this year. Line art by the amazing Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, and colour art by @deecunniffe.
I want to point out what a technical achievement this story is on the art side. There’s a real joy to creating a whole story in eight panels, but this? This is some magic. We introduce four new characters. In panel 5, SIX PEOPLE are talking. SIX. In the world of comics, that’s almost un-doable.
Yet Ro and Ted arranged everything so the conversations flow and are sensibly grouped, all the “acting” is fantastic, and then Dee laid on top these beautiful, almost fairytale colours – look at the subtle work, the blush in Henry’s cheeks, Frank’s five o-clock shadow, the shine of the wine bottle’s glass surface, the light texturing in the backgrounds… and of course the snow! This is some first-class illustration work on an incredibly hard script. (I fear Ro and Ted always get me at my worst – my very formalist script for them in the 24 Panels anthology was no cakewalk either. (The problem is, they’re just so damn good at it… check out their work on the Image comic Crowded!)
As always, if you like what we do in Hells Kitchen Movie Club, consider donating a little to a veteran’s charity.
(I also have a thriller novel I’m crowdfunding, please check it out, we are more than halfway there. The book is all written…)
Previously in Hell: cover image // 01 // 02 // 03 // Xmas // 04 // 05 // 06 // 07 // Hanukkah // That time the Punisher’s creator gave us a thumbs-up // twitter // insta
Warming
if you are able and willing, please do this. a lot of babies w/o parents suffer their entire lives because of the lack of human contact from ages 0-3. it helps to hold them, rock them, and sing to them (even if badly). it’s vital.
I HAVE FOUND MY CALLING
YOU CAN WHAT
my favorite moment from Frankenstein book: Victor hates the face of his creature, so monster covers Victors eyes :3
If you ever wanted a visual to explain how binary in works. (I didn’t make this but found on the Internet)
hey so I’m not giving JKR any credit whatsoever for accidentally writing a nonbinary icon (bc if she’d meant to do it she’d never have shut up about it) but Tonks refuses to use even shortened forms of her heavily feminine given name with anyone except close family members and has The Classic Genderweird Dream Power of at-will minor shapeshifting and uses it to look punkishly androgynous with Cool Hair thank you for coming to my TED talk
Arthur Rackham’s The True Sweetheart // Florence Welch in Luisa Beccaria.
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