I’ve read a fair number of books that Julie has recommended, but she’s just put a new spin on it.

Paul: Tarsus to Redemption, Vol. 1 (story by Matthew Salisbury, Art by Sean Lam) is a fictional take on the life of St. Paul…presented as a manga-style comic. Julie mentioned on her blog that she’d gotten a review copy from the publisher, and that it looked interesting. A few days later, I got an e-mail from the publisher saying that Julie had mentioned to them that I might like it, and would I like a copy? I said, “Sure”, and it arrived yesterday. So now, not only has Julie recommended it to me, she’s arranged to have the publisher supply me with it. How cool is that?

As I say, the book is a manga re-telling of the life of Saul of Tarsus. The very notion kind of filled me with dread. It gave me visions of something painfully earnest, with characters who smile too much and are filled with warmth and growfulness—sort of like a Japanese version of the old “Davy and Goliath” TV show. I feared it would be both tedious and didactic.

In fact, it’s nothing of the kind. As the book begins, Saul, with help from his buddy Septus and some others, kills a pair of Christians and burns their home to the ground. He has dedicated his life to rooting out this pernicious “sect”. Septus, his helper, is a Roman centurion, a convert to Judaism; he’s even more zealous than Saul. He’s exactly the sort of person Jesus talks about when he says,

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Then, of course, Saul has his encounter on the road to Damascus. He changes in ways that Septus cannot accept. And he learns the heroism to stand up for the Lord when it isn’t safe to do so: to stand up when it might mean your life, rather than seeking to take the lives of others. The authors have done something interesting here. They make Saul’s conversion realistic; they make his repentance real, and gripping; and they show how much he has given up.

So the story works for me. On the other hand, I thought the book was a little too long on purely visual story-telling; I’d have like a few more words. And there were a few places where I was honestly puzzled by the words that were there; places where the dialog didn’t seem to flow quite right. Of course, I’m not usually a manga reader; there are probably some conventions that I’m unaware of that would make it clearer.

Also, it’s rather short. I got through it in about half-an-hour, and my son David raced through it over breakfast this morning. But all that said, I liked it well enough, and David’s eager to read Volume 2, which is supposed to be out this summer. As Paul is intended for readers of age 12 and up, I’d say the authors have accomplished what they set out to accomplish. ‘Nuff said.