Fundamentalists might balk at Lauren Weinstein’s depiction of Moses as a googly-eyed, bulbous-nosed being descending from the heavens in a swirl of multicolored crayon to deliver the Ten Commandments unto the Israelites with a cry of “Hey, buddies!” But such interpretative liberties are central to the mission of the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible. The year-old collaborative project, spearheaded by members of the Brooklyn-based band Flaming Fire, intends to illustrate all 36,665 verses of the King James Bible plus sundry Catholic Apocrypha. They’ve got 35,076 more to go.
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Weinstein, who’s 28, studied painting at Washington University in Saint Louis but says she turned to comics because painting “wasn’t narrative enough.” She says it took her a while to get good at it, but for the last five years her work–which features sweetly manic-depressive dogs, melancholy senior citizens, and an onanistic robot looking for love–has appeared regularly in the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger and on the Web site gURL.com, where a goofy strip titled “Am I Fat?” drew e-mail from thousands of body-conscious teenage girls. Last year Weinstein won a Xeric grant to self-publish a collection of her work, Inside Vineyland, which came out last month.
Currently a sextet, Flaming Fire is identified on its Web site as “a metaphysical collective dedicated to making music and electronic/print art that comments on the universal ache to know meaning and/or a higher power through religion, belief and myth.” Weinstein offers more concrete reference points. “Somebody once described us as the B-52’s with an anger management problem–sort of new-wavey, but there’s also a metal side,” she says. “But it’s all under Patrick’s ever-shifting theology.” The son of a Cooperative Baptist preacher, Patrick Hambrecht is the guiding spirit of both the band and the Bible project. “He combines a lot of different influences to create his own personal mythology,” says Weinstein. “He decided that this would be a way for people to read the Bible for themselves and do whatever they wanted in terms of illustrating it.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
