New comic book about Blessed Carlo Acutis and the Eucharist

Carlo is a boy whom I have immense respect for, my best friend at school had a nephew who died from leukemia - he was in immense pain near the end and it was distressing to my friend to visit him because they were close. I can recall my friend visiting him with me. It was distressing enough for me as I knew the boy since he was a toddler and we got on well because we were both natural nerds who like computer games and books etc. By the end, this boy was in constant extreme pain. My friend Philip came out of the hospital and he was so angry and upset he punched the wall and made his hands bleed. He was only in his twenties and he'd never seen anyone die before. Unfortunately, I had by that point several times so his father had asked me to go with him as a sounding board because he knew my friend would bottle his anger and grief up and then it would all come flooding out.

Although my mother nursed terminally ill patients the kids normally went to other hospitals - occasionally they would have a terminally ill kid on the ward and this was a huge stressor on the nurses. It's bad enough caring for the terminally ill in a hospice anyway. Doing it with dying kids is an extra challenge yet again.

The comic you are thinking of may be Treasure Chest:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Chest_(comics) - this was also run in inserts in the USA regionally as well. If so that was actually made by Catholics, if it is not that I'm searching my brain to think what comic it might be.

It wasn't Treasure Chest. I think I researched it online once and may have bookmarked so I will check.

Thanks!

One of his websites

www.miracolieucaristici.org/en/Liste/list.html

Association page, with links to his other exhibitions:

www.carloacutis.com/

That art style wouldn't impress me either. I used to get given books like this as a kid by my aunt Mary, my mother's half-sister. I preferred more realistic and dramatic art. By the stage my aunt was giving me these books I was already reading comics and this sort of cutesy art never appealed to me too much.

I can just imagine the publisher steering clear of the racism issues in the late 1960's. The text below is from the opening pages of the author I'm still writing about (Cordwainer Smith) and he apparently had to fight for this to be included in 1965, it was dedicated to his housekeeper Eleanor who had died shortly before a collection of his stories was published. He apparently according to his daughter Rosana whom I contacted got very annoyed when the publisher noticed this would annoy some readers in the Deep South and noted, 'Let it annoy them - that will be good for them.' Smith was himself a very sick man by this point and Rosana noted the family were aware he was terminally ill as he had suffered from very poor health for most of his adult life.

You were a Negro Eleanor and I have been called white. For seventeen years you shared my home, cooking, cleaning, and tending my things in America. You were a woman and I am a man. In seventeen years, we were thousands of times just the two of us in the house, and there was never an indecent gesture or an unchaste word from one of us to the other. I was kind, generous, courteous, and thoughtful towards you, and you were kind, generous, courteous and thoughtful toward me.

That's not all of it and the end of it probably would have wound racists up for days as it concludes:- ‘while I was called master and you were called servant. I’ll see the real you again, Eleanor, in a friendly place in which both believe.'

I think the comic book artist from the Philippines like Nestor Redondo and Rudy Nebres would likely have been more your thing but 1969 was a little bit before they published work in the US. Many of them published adaptations of Biblical stories back home though -sometimes reworked to fit a more modern setting to show the universal nature of the story. John Lehti worked for DC comics for a fairly long period of time. However, he is far from their best-known artist. He's one of many, many now mostly forgotten comic-book artists. DC comics had a habit of utilizing Nestor Redondo for stuff like this in the 1970's and he also worked on a comic called, 'Rima, The Jungle Girl' which I wish someone would reprint. The stories are not especially great but the art is fantastic. It's based on a very old novel en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Mansions - there's a very odd and strange adaptation of this book into a movie starring a young Audrey Hepburn.

www.lambiek.net/artists/l/lehti_john.htm

It's just common stuff for the comic-book genre. There are several fairly devout Christians who are comic-book artists who are well-known for art of this style.

If you want a graphic novel of the Bible - well DC did a compressed edition of it but it honestly really only covers major points and although it is a decent enough product it is dated in some regards. It has a farming sequence of a bunch of nippers straight out of the Brady Bunch and an older gent explaining the Bible to them. But DC try and fit the whole Bible into under one hundred pages which is obviously ludicrous. For what there is in there it has great art but it is not a particularly deep approach to it. You can read a bit of it here and it is quite easy to find the whole thing to read online:-

pinoykomiksausa.blogspot.com/2009/01/nestor-redondos-bible.html


Here are some other possible artists that might interest you, although I offer a strong word of caution with R.Crumb. He is divisive and I've seen people physically throw books by him across rooms in real life. My English teacher at school who lived through the hippy era loved him and was also a devout Catholic but he certainly is not to everyone's taste. Basil Wolverton illustrating Bible passages sounds interesting - this is another 60's cultural icon in the world of comic books and imagining him illustrating the Bible is a bit mind-bending. It is like trying to imagine Granny Takes a Trip doing it:

lukearnott.weebly.com/culturenautica-blog/comic-book-adaptations-of-the-bible#:~:text=Comic-book%20adaptations%20of%20the%20Old%20Testament%20and%20New,and%20Robert%20Crumb%20are%20also%20appearing.%20Manga%20Bibles

Thanks - Wolverton's Christian work is too weird and apocalyptic for me, reminds me of the "Church of the Risen Christ" cult that was enslaving people back in Ohio when I was a kid.

I will admit I have seen that Crumb Genesis book advertised and am curious, but given the type of material that Genesis sometimes contains, I am not sure if I want to look at Crumb illustrations of such activities.

Crumb is from around where I live now and lived for a long time in the city of my birth, where he was friends with the well-known Harvey Pekar (as dramatized in "American Splendor").
I mostly know him via his album cover art but have in the past read some of his stuff. I'm not the type who gets all wound up over how he draws women, but I find some of his work to be an occasion of sin for me.

He is also a lapsed Catholic and I understand his take on Genesis is very true to the source, as in, not satirical or making fun of it, however his portrayal of God is as an angry old dictator because apparently that's how he actually views God.

I will probably eventually read it, but not right now. I will of course also pray for him.