Neal Romanek – words/worlds

And I think that does it for our Obnoxious Jesus Cartoon series. I hope you found it obnoxious. I certainly felt obnoxious while creating them. I hope it comes through. I’m still feeling obnoxious. Hopefully, I’ll be able to turn that feeling to some other useful purpose. Don’t want to let it go to waste.

I guess what I’ve learned is that it’s easier to make odd little illustrations and graphics about various religious figures than it is to utterly surrender yourself to loving every human being as if they were your own mother or your own child. I don’t know why such a thing should be so hard. But I spose that’s just the way it is.

As for me, I’m going to put a fucking brick through that fucking windshield if that fucker’s car alarm goes off one more time.

There has been much ruckus over the solicitation and subsequent printing of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by right-wing Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten.

In Islam – as has also been traditionally the case in Judaism – pictorial depictions of the Divine are sacrilege. The taboo against depicting the sacred and holy is rooted in a concern that a worshipper will begin to turn his or her contemplation toward the finite image presented and away from the inexpressible and eternal Divine.

However in Christianity, greatly influenced by Roman culture, no such taboo exists and the representation of Jesus in art – like those of the great icons of Hinduism – provides an essential arm of Christian meditation – for the image of Jesus crucified is itself a study on the galling marriage of the material and the eternal, to which we must all surrender.

With this in mind, I have set myself to producing a set of obnoxious Jesus cartoons, which I hope many people will find offensive.

Let’s begin…