Let's Bible

[ArtistXero]

The mexican devil is the best part.."Let's Bible" indeed!

[jaems-kun]

zomg, aweosome!  Now I want to read all religion stories with gender twists!

If anybody wants download link pm me, the story is short, rushed, and underdeveloped, but if those random preview pages got your curiosity up...

[Spike]

I have to ask whether the whole Jesus/Satan thing is in the original translation.  I mean, you could change the wording to something else entirely, and it would make more sense.  The female character, possibly having arisen from the sea, rather makes me think of a mermaid or of Boticelli's Venus.  If the Mexican character is supposed to be Satan, perhaps either the writer or the English translator had a serious bout of Montezuma's revenge after purchasing a burrito from an unliscensed street vendor.    (As for Vulcan, the protagonist, are we supposed to empathise with a total letch?)

In my school days it was trendy for English teachers to try to find a Christ figure in classic stories.  Maybe that was the translator's intent.  Or maybe the original writer came up with the Bible reference just to make the story more appealing to some non-Christian readership.  Too many writers in our culture make up stories involving the military, prisons, hospitals, police and detective work, martial arts, and a variety of industries, occupations and pasttimes without knowing what the heck they are talking about.  Religion is no different.

"I had this Virginian locket for 16 months!"
ROFL!  I thought he was Croatian!!!

Regarding gender twists, I had a youth pastor once who didn't want to address God in male terms.  When she led prayers, she would begin with, "Creator God... "  Made me think of a person credited for creating copyrighted material.  Also made me wonder what kind of relationship she must have had with her earthly father.

For Christian women, the reality of a male Christ loving us enough to die for our sins, then defying death and coming back to us, is very romantic.  Conversely, I am not sure many Christian men would get the same romantic vibes from a female characterization of Jesus.  Am I wrong?

[Johji]

'Let's Bible' didn't offend me as much as it just made me think. Except for the blasphemy of calling the girl Iesus, the story seems to have absolutely no connection to the Lord Jesus at all, so it doesn't really make a comment about Him. But the usual 'boy in lust/breast groping/magical girl' concepts look sick when I'm thinking it's Jesus involved. But maybe I should always be looking at the female characters in manga that way? As people made in the image of God? Suddenly Ranma 1/2 doesn't seem like good innocent fun anymore...

[jaems-kun]

Spike, though I don't know for sure in this case, manga scanlators usually only change the translation of a manga when they want to make a ridiculous joke of it.  However the japanese title to this piece really is "lets bible" (no translation needed) so I doubt the translators felt need to change any of the content to make it more of a joke.  Also, the group which translated this story is etc.  I'm pretty sure their viewers would get mad if they started adding unnecessary contents to the story without telling anyone.

[PsychoAnn]

Too stupid to be blasphemous. (The comments at the lj are priceless. )

Lol, the writer-artist duo must have been sick of doing 15+ volumes of dark-and-tragic with Eastern religion in Shin Angyo Onshi, so they decided to try at weird-and-stupid with Western religion.

Jaems makes a good point. Manga scanlators would usually only change the content freely in joke scans and would also make it clear it's a joke.

I'm too lazy to confirm myself, but apparently it's in Young Gangan which makes this unsurprising. From the few manga I've read that's published in YG, most of them have some kind of religious theme--Eastern, Western, "Huh, Wut?"--or at least a mention of it.