In God We Trust by Winshluss

In God We Trust by Winshluss
Buy In God We Trust by Winshluss at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Graphic Novels
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: As colourfully ribald as you could expect – this has the feel of a real high (or perhaps low) point in religious parody.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 104	Date: December 2014
Publisher: Knockabout
ISBN: 9780861662357
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To start with, a rhetorical test. How about God and Adam playing badminton day in and day out, until one gets bored and decides to create Eve? Or the defeater of Goliath and the saviour of the Israelites being one Conan the Barbarian? Or this as a test – Jesus Himself failing to have a successful session of tequila slammers with Gabriel due to the holes through His hands? I barely need mention that in these pages God does battle with Superman, for you to have answered the test and put yourself firmly in one of two camps for this book – one very much opposed to buying it, and one very much in favour.

With such simplicity I can define the book, but that's not to pretend it’s been crafted with such equal lack of care. There are a wide variety of fonts here, and presentational styles, including adverts (Vatican Lubricant, especially for use with altar boys) for the gags and parodies to be portrayed in. Some of the strips are very much in the style of R Crumb (of whom more later), while others – such as that showing the truth behind the resurrection – are much more delicate and small scale.

If anything it skips through things in far too short an order, so doesn't feel like the most substantial read, but it fully serves its purpose. There is of course a caveat to mention as well in these days of us all being Charlie Hebdo, in that this is a French graphic designer (and his friends who helped out) ripping into Christianity and giving but one image that could possibly be anything newer. But the purchaser will be much more interested in what it does cover, which is a lot of ribald absurdity discussing something patently absurd and, of course, at times no less ribald. It's fully coloured and colourful, it's bluntly blasphemous (walking on water? No, surfing), and in the spirit of the more well-known religious satirisers France has given us, it feels like a watershed moment. I doubt something will be religiously ruder than this, without being far more crude and much less intelligent with it.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

This book took me back to Dante's Inferno by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson as well as the much more straight, literary and faithful Crumb Genesis. The author's previous hit with us was his adults-only Pinocchio.

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