madeleinejubileesaito: I drew a set of Stations of the Cross for my community. You can find all of t

I drew a set of Stations of the Cross for my community. You can find all of them at thestations.net This is the first one, Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane.⁣
I’ve been obsessed with the Stations for a while—I love constraints in comics, and the Stations of the Cross are a comic that has been drawn and redrawn by cartoonists in the Christian tradition for at least a millennium and a half. (I’m using the word “comic” broadly—I define a comic as any series of images designed to be read sequentially.)⁣
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The last month has been a hard, strange time, and I’ve spent most of it indoors, drawing these hard, strange pictures. I have found a paradoxical comfort in sitting with the violence and horror of Jesus’ humiliation and death. I think they mean that God is intimately aware of our fragility: he knows what it is to live in a soft, fragile body and anticipate painful death; he knows physical pain; he knows unjust political systems that bring death to the innocent. He is not a stranger to all our fear and pain and sorrow. He has held all that and more in his own soft body.