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Earlier this week, I got notification from Kickstarter that a filmmaker friend of mine had supported a musician’s project. I clicked over to check it out and, while I was there, Kickstarter recommended to me a new comics adaptation of the Book of Mormon. Such a project launching without me knowing about it is professionally embarrassing, so I immediately reached out to Michael W Stewart whose project it is. This is our conversation.
Theric Jepson: The first thing I want to ask you about is your process. I don’t know of a Book of Mormon comic (except those made by the Church itself) that are done through a studio model. That is—you’re acting like a studio head, rather than being a one- or two-person operation, writing and drawing and marketing all by yourself. You, on the other hand, have hired artists and editors and a whole squad. How did you choose to go down this route?
Michael W Stewart: I don’t have any of the requisite skills. I am a poor and slow artists, I don’t know how to market, my editing skills are atrocious. I had the idea a couple years ago and then I saw an ad for Fiverr.com, so I checked it out, and I found WM Art Studio, based out of Malta. They did great work at a reasonable price, so I went through Fiverr and hired them to do a test run of pages. That worked out, so I stuck with them. Elisa, came on early for some other project I had in mind. She knows her way around photoshop, and I needed someone to re-letter, so I asked her to do it. So that is how she joined the team. She also has become a great motivator. Several times I would get overwhelmed and just want to walk away, and she would call or send an email and check up on the project. I only hired Heather and Moana recently, because I want to keep this going and I don’t have the time to do everything that they do. They are really great!
Theric: What’s your professional background? Were you already familiar with wrangling a cadre of artistic types?
Michael: Oh, snap, Heck no!! I read a lot of comics, and online Manga, and was always amazed by the credits at the beginning. I was like, “Why does there need to be 7 names on this translation + 10 names on the original.” My professional background is as an Army Engineer, it has nothing to do with artistic creation. I do have a certificate in project management and took classes in international projects, which helped me with the concepts needed to form a dispersed team, but I was totally unfamiliar with what a comic book requires. In many ways I still am an amateur, only having one project under my belt, and not even being 100% completed with that one.
Theric: One major difference of between the studio and the solo methods is sunk costs. Solo artists are out time. You, as studio head, are out money. How did you measure the risks of this project?
Michael: Honestly when I started this, I had no intention of making my money back, it was going to me my gift to God and the world, and I was fine with that. I did this because it is something that I wanted to do, something I felt called to do. It was my wife and Elisa who thought about it making money. I like the idea of making some money because it takes money to go through the creative process, and so the more money that we make the more comics we can produce. It would cost like half a million dollars, just for the art, to get most of the Book of Mormon done. I don’t have that kind of cash laying about, so I need to start bringing some in somehow, and why not try to sell what we are making.
Theric: One thing I’ve noticed in new comics covering Latter-day Saints’ sacred stories is what I call the “accuracy trend.” You, for instance, are doing every single word of the Book of Mormon, full stop. Andrew Knaupp and Sal Velluto’s Pillar of Light did a deep dive into every historical account of the First Vision to get their visuals and chronology as accurate as possible. What do you think is behind this accuracy trend?
Michael: I can’t speak for Andrew and Sal, but I am glad they did that. As for myself I wanted my kids to read The Book of Mormon, and not some rehash of a scripture story. I think there is power in being accurate. I think that there is power in the scriptures. I wanted this to be able to help kids quote the scriptures the way my kids will spend hours quoting Calvin and Hobbes. Even with the Church’s latest videos my kids will quote something someone said from the video, that isn’t in the scriptures, and it always confuses me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new videos, but there is artistic license, which is fine, but that artistic license isn’t always recognized by young kids. I wanted to avoid that in the text. It is impossible to not have artistic license in comic book art, but the words are all there, and there are very few changes.
When I describe the comics I use the term ‘high-fidelity’ because there are two or three places where we repeat the words with a minor change to give someone a dialog bubble. When Lehi has a dream to leave Jerusalem, we couldn’t give The Lord a speech bubble unless we changed ‘take his (Lehi’s) family’ with Nephi as the narrator speaker to ‘take your family’ with The Lord as the Speaker. I wanted to have every word, just as it is, and some early feedback indicated that kids liked dialog bubbles. The only solution that I could see was to repeat the idea in a speech bubble. We did the same thing for Zoram asking about the elders of the Jews.
There are other reasons for staying super-true to the text, international marketing being one of the big ones. If the Church gives us permission, we don’t have to translate anything, because it is already done. We just have to find the right place to put in the breaks and put the right text in the right box. Elisa is from Brazil and so she has already worked a lot of issue one in Portuguese, which is super cool. We don’t have the church’s permission yet, and I don’t know if that is in the public domain or not, so we aren’t selling it in Portuguese, but she has shared it with friends.
Theric: Incidentally, which edition of the Book of Mormon are you using? Did you get permission to use the Church’s copyrighted (and most accurate) 2013 edition or did you go back to, I don’t know, the 1921 version or something?
Michael: That is a great question. The real substance of The Book of Mormon is in the public domain. The copyright that exists is for art, chapter headings, footnotes, and study-aids in the front and back of the book. The minor changes in punctuation, and word choice, that have occurred over the last 190 years don’t allow for new editions to be copyrighted in their entirety. I believe for this first issue we used the online version of the text found on lds.org. We sent several other chapters to professional script writers using the first edition text found either on the Gutenberg project or the Joseph Smith papers. Now, I can’t even tell the difference, because I have no editorial skills, but Heather can, and she spotted missing comas and all sorts of stuff in one of the scripts, I think it was 3 Nephi 11, and she asked the same question. We decided to use the most up to date words and use the punctuation if it makes sense.
Theric: I’m glad you brought up the license taken with the images. Even if kids know the exact words of the scriptures, a comic will still influence their understanding in other ways. For instance, how do you decide to show a vision? which of the many layers of Isaiah will the art represent? where in America will your Book of Mormon take place? will the Gentile inspired to cross the waters be a specific person? how do you deal with skin color? I like your plan to give Ishmael’s family a variety of colors and am interested to see how that plays out, but all of these are heavy questions. We all know stories of people whose testimonies have been damaged by new research into geography or by crass interpretations of the Lamanite curse.
Michael: All really good points, and there is a lot to answer in that one. I scripted the first 60 pages myself, then I sent them to William, he is my contact at WM Art Studios, and he linked in Daniele, who is the actual artist. I had some ideas of what things were going to be, lets say, for the visions, and Daniele had some other ideas. I think that in the first issue Lehi has three major visions. Each is depicted differently, but each makes sense when it is read. At least they all make sense to me, so I hope they make sense to everyone else. I really liked Daniele’s take on that, because is shows that God speaks to each of us differently, and maybe he speaks to you differently from one day to the next, but they will all make sense.
About Isaiah, I haven’t gotten to those chapters, and I am kind of putting them off until the end. We have scripts for Jacob 5, which is really cool, Enos, which is being penciled right now, 3 Nephi 8-11 which we hope to get out in some form or fashion in time to be part of the Come Follow Me, and be useful to parents, and we are going to try to get a short of the Jaredites and possibly the last battles with Mormon and Moroni by the end of the year (wish us luck). But, I just don’t know how to put Isaiah into comic books, I hope that will come with time.
I kind of did the same thing for 1 Nephi 11-14, when Nephi and the Spirit of the Lord have such an in depth conversation. The absolute original idea was to just do one book of 1 Nephi 1-18, make it about 200 pages and call it good. But that super vision covers so much and I don’t want to get any of it wrong. Do I pick Christopher Columbus as the Gentile? I might, but I don’t know, I am going to knock out Enos, Christ’s visit to the Americas, and the Jaredites coming to the promised land before I have to worry about that.
Where is this comic going to take place? Lucky for me this first issue was easy enough. Lehi and crew are still somewhere near the Red Sea. Once they get to the new world I want to make it middle-of-the-road, kind of non-committal, and maybe even have some differences from one issue to the next. Mostly I want people to focus on the message of God being able to bless you. I have gotten a little help from Jay Fullmer, great guy who has done some cool art for books and games and other stuff, he’s also been involved with church education for a long time. He does something that feels meso-ish, but also has some heartland threads woven in. I like that. But I think that 1 Nephi 6:4 really needs to be our focus, this is about pointing people to God, helping them relate to the scriptures and apply them in day to day living.
You already mentioned my take on diversity, and I am going to give another shout-out to Jay on this one as well. He has a couple of youtube videos that talk about race/ethnicity in the Book of Mormon. I loved watching those, even though my choices for issue one were made prior to that, because he makes some great points.
Theric: It’s always been an important consideration, but I think we all see that importance now.
Back when the Allreds started The Golden Plates, fifteen years ago, their comic was the first Book of Mormon comic to really put all the words in. The books were largely a success (although sales then still largely depended on LDS bookstores who could have been more cooperative). The recent digital rerelease of those books swaps in simplified language. Then we also have a more fun and loose adaptation in iPlates and the Disneyfied From the Dust. This is a new golden age in Book of Mormon comics! How do you see the different interpretations fitting together in the marketplace?
Michael: Well I hope they do all fit. The Living Scripture animated stories was a vote of confidence to me that this kind of project might be successful, and they have story books that cover all their videos. That isn’t comics exactly, but picture books are pretty close. There is also a book out there, Bom-Com, where each chapter of the Book of Mormon is simplified to one page, it has real simple art, and is arguably a comic book. I really like that idea for super young kids, like nursery and maybe sunbeams. My boys have most of the Who’s Your Hero books, which is more focused on the lessons and uses the stories more than telling the story.
I like what I have seen from From the Dust, it gives some background, and a whole lot of artistic license, but I actually learned some historical things from reading that one, I guess I looked stuff up after I read From the Dust. I actually reached out to Michael Mercer to see if he would be willing to collaborate with future endeavors. No response yet, but that wasn’t too long ago either. He owns the domain bookofmormoncomic and I own bookofmormoncomics, so we will likely get some of each other’s traffic. I hope he keeps up his stuff.
I almost wish that the Allreds had just kept going, then I could have just bought these instead of having to create them, but I know that they only got to about Words of Mormon, and as you said they made adjustments to simplify the text. Andrew Knaupp actually helped them with that, and he reached out to me a while back more or less warning me to avoid the word density problems that Golden Plates originally faced, which I think we have done, by putting a lot more comic pages to one page of original text.
Theric: I think that may be your most important innovation–just spreading things out. As soon as my copy arrives I’ll put it in the hands of my daughter when the family sits down to read scriptures (the fact that it’s the wrong stories might not matter too much since she can’t read yet anyway). It sounds like you’ve done some beta-testing already with kids and I’m wondering if they’re just settling in with it on their own for some self-directed reading or if it’s mostly supplementing family time?
Michael: Thanks for making sure you get a copy, and now I am curious how old your daughter is?
Theric: My daughter will be four in December and lately she’s been losing patience with family scripture study. I don’t blame her! We could try harder to reinvent it for ourselves, but that gets back to what you are doing. Directing the imagination, trying to be new and truthful at the same time. When I imagine using your comics as part of scripture study, verse numbers will be useful. Putting them in the captions or bubbles probably draws too much attention though; sticking them at the top of the page seems like a good compromise.
Michael: I guess I didn’t really think of it being anything more than a comic book that kids, teens, and adults would read on their own. I did share some of the first pages on facebook in a geek-member page and one of the comments was asking if we could label the verses for easier reference and use during scripture study. I like that idea, but it wasn’t part of the original plan. We are currently deciding if we want to go back and adjust the lettering to put in some super-script verse numbers. I would love your thoughts on that, and the readers thoughts on that. We have a couple of weeks, before we have to commit to one way or the other.
Theric: Honestly, it just makes me so happy to hear about how you’re grappling with these complicated problems. The mere process of weighing impossible options is valuable (and may I add my vote to no on Christopher Columbus). Any time we engage creatively with scripture, we’re providing another angle for others to see it anew themselves. I hope your project succeeds and that its success grows the entire market, helping all the reimaginings out there sell copies.
What I think is most innovative about your attempt is how you’ve slowed down the telling—all the words, but never an overwhelming number of words per page. I’m excited to see how this actually works.
Back to family scripture study, I’m also glad you’re skipping ahead to catch up with Come, Follow Me. First because that’s more immediately useful to me, the consumer, but also because that immediate utility increases the odds of you breaking even. And history suggests that will matter for you to go forward. That half-million number you quoted suggests to me you’re doing this ethically but, you know, that is a lot of money.
To close, what are your next steps? What do you hope people will do after reading this interview?
Michael: Next steps? Wow there is a lot that we want to do. Like I said earlier, we want to get some other issues done, and offer them digitally as soon as we can, hopefully in sync with Come, Follow Me. We are working with Book of Mormon Central on some things, to have them double check our work for anything crazy. We are setting up a Patreon page. That is what Heather is working on right now, and she is doing a great job. Hopefully all those ideas that I mentioned earlier will be on Patreon, maybe 10-15 pages a month, hopefully more. We have talked about doing a podcast, and have a cool idea. There is so much to do and so little time. I hope that people will show their support for our kickstarter campaign. We really want to get this one book published, to see how hard copy sales do, and any excess funds will go back into creating future issues and other content. Support can look like a lot of things, for sure we want them all to follow your lead and pre-order a copy, but they can also tell their friends, share this interview with their friends, support us with likes and shout outs and follows on social media (Kickstarter, Facebook).
There is one little thing that I want to mention, and maybe this isn’t for me to plug in here, but the whole point of this is to bring people to Christ. So if you want to support us in any way, do it in such a way that Christ would be pleased. Tell your friends, and tell them lovingly. If you get some negative fuzz back about it, I would rather you love your neighbor (and your enemy) rather than breed the spirit of contention. It is amazing how fast contention can grow, and how fast it can be put down if we choose to love.
Theric: You have my money! Let’s see if we can drum up some more.
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