That's because it's based on one of the most epic stories one can tell. I mean, how many are there? The Mahabharata? The Iliad? I mean, we can call Tolkien epic, but he wrote it over the course of decades - not centuries.

But the beauty of using the Bible is that, however "epic" it gets, it always stays on the level of real people. It's really the story of humanity's relationship with deity, told on the level of personal interactions. Even matters of state are told through the tales of competing brothers, star-crossed gay lovers, or guys who find out their wives are pagan sorceresses. The source material I'm working with scales better than anything I've ever read, working on both a human character level and a highly metaphorical level at the same time. It's a great lesson for those of us who might otherwise get lost in the "meta" stories of our series. Keep to the people.

I've got the first four years of the story planned, but that only takes me through the first two books of the Bible. And even then, I'm barely skimming the surface. You have to remember, almost every sentence of the Bible can be pulled out and turned into a story richer than most of what passes for a 22-page comic book nowadays. For instance, in Exodus, God says, "I will harden Pharaoh's heart." What the heck does he mean? He's saying that Pharaoh isn't a good enough enemy for him, so he's going to strengthen Pharaoh's evil will – make a better adversary. And, at the same time, he's taking Pharaoh's free will away from him. Think of the story possibilities there... I know I'll be using it.

Yeah - Liam says he was born to do this project, so my guess is he's in it for life. When he got tapped for the project it all became kind of a fate thing, if you know what I mean. More than anything, Liam brings heart to this project. I do the plot, the intentions of the characters, the historicity and the allegory. Liam brings the personhood of both the characters and the gods.

He's drawn a few of them way, way different than I imagined them. But that's given me the opportunity to redesign the story arcs around who he came up with. Some of the characters are playing *different* Bible people than I had originally cast them for. But it turns out that it's going to be much better - and more Biblically accurate - the way Liam has forced my hand.

What I'm saying is that by working from an emotional center, Liam has forced another kind of truth. And that truth has led me to do things that are actually more faithful to Bible. That's how good the Bible is when you really click into its logic. Everything in there makes total sense, but you've got to approach it both intellectually and emotionally.

Well, if I may be candid, the biggest disadvantage is financial. If you got a decent name and track record, book publishers will still throw a ton of cash at you upfront to write a book for them. I mean, nice money. Comics get you paid by the page. And doing just one of them won't pay the rent. So you can't just dig into one project and make that your life - which is the way I'm used to working.

But the advantages far outweigh that petty complaint. Sequential narrative lets you tell story from within and outside time, simultaneously. I'm amazed how few comics storytellers take advantage of the medium - but maybe that's because they were never saddled by the extraordinarily linear limitations of regular book writing. Having spent ten or fifteen years writing text from left to write, I had accumulated a long list of narrative dynamics that I wanted to explore in a more dimensional medium. Just putting gods outside panels, for instance, is something I'd wanted to do since seeing the [Sergio] Aragones sketches in the margins of Mad. I kept asking myself why people hadn't played with the convention before - created worlds around the very premise of sequential art.

The other difference between the literary world and the comics world is that the writers in comics aren't assholes. Really - they're just as smart, just as well read, and just as articulate as any of the New Yorker Magazine worshipped literary heroes on the "scene," but they're nice people. You tell them something you're working on, and comics people voluntarily offer substantive suggestions for making it better. I mean, they share their actual ideas with you, for you to use. The people I had gotten used to in the book world simply nod and then steal the idea you'd asked for help on.

I think it's because sequential art works more on an abundance model than a scarcity model. Everybody is happy on some level, so there's a bounty of ideas. More ideas than any of us possibly has time to get on paper. So we all share with each other and - of course - end up with a much more fertile culture with yet more great stuff to share. It's not a zero-sum game.

No way. They say in the movies that you can never go wrong underestimating your audience's intelligence. In comics, I think you can never go wrong overestimating your audience's intelligence.

Sequential narrative is a cool medium, not a hot one. That means it's participatory. Readers should be engaged, not immersed. They need to be comparing panels to one another, making sense out of sequence, finding patterns in the chaos.

Instead of fighting the alienating elements of comics, we need to be embracing them. Comics readers are both within the story and outside of the story watching the storytelling itself. That's how this medium works. It's why almost everyone who reads comics on some level knows they can write them. Why? Because they are already participating in the story making through their collaboration as interpreting readers.

That's the only aspect that's academic about it: me explaining how comics work as a medium. Hell, don't trust me - read Scott McCLoud [author of Understanding Comics]. He's totally right. It's just that not enough of us are taking advantage of all that he told us about this medium.

So, no. I think readers appreciate a book that gives them more than just 22 pages of plot. Far too little happens in most comic books for the - what is it - $2.99 we charge for them.

I think we should pack these pamphlets with as much as they'll hold. Give a straightforward experience for the kids who just want to flip through and find out who is screwing who or who got blown up and how - but then communicate on an entirely allegorical level, as well, for readers who want to experience the real possibilities for sequential narrative to wrestle with the themes of our age.

Yeah, well, what I learned with Nothing Sacred was that the people who claim to be most interested in Torah or Bible are actually more interested in avoiding it. Nothing Sacred - a book that looks at the true core values of Judaism - was only controversial with the self-proclaimed protectors of the Jewish "race." And they're so committed to understanding the Bible in terms of race and nation state that they have lost all access to the stories and what they tell us about the illusion of race and the fiction of nation state! It's all pretty sad and ironic.

But as I did the book tour for Nothing Sacred, I found very eager audiences everywhere I went that wasn't a synagogue or church. People in bookstores were very ready to engage with these myths on a level much closer to the one in which they were intended. And that's when I realized that a comic book might just give me both the ability to share these stories in the camouflage of a "non-serious" medium – and the storytelling tools I'd need to do it in a way faithful to the multi-dimensional tale I was telling.

Moreover, comics were a way to take the ideas and apply them to two storylines at once - the one that's actually in the Bible, and the one we are living as a civilization, today.

That's just me. I mean, I'm one person so the things I'm concerned about tend to show up in everything I do. I'm talking to Vertigo about doing another book, though, and that one is more consciously attacking the problems facing young people living within a corporate-controlled mediaspace.

In Testament, these themes are part of a bigger picture. You have to remember, though, corporate advertising is the modern equivalent of religious proselytizing. Both are about spreading a particular set of memes, by any means necessary.

Sometimes I fear that my story is shaping current events. I wrote about those riots in France just a few weeks before they started happening. And the showdown with Iran, as well as the new Mid East conflict are prefigured in there, too. If anything, I've been going back and changing things to make them *less* like what's happening in the world around us.

But that's the problem you always face when you write about a future taking place basically the day after tomorrow. If you're really in the groove about it, you end up predicting a whole lot. It's the kind of thing that would earn me a lot of money if I were a stock market type. But it's unnerving as a writer, because in the six months between the time I write something and the comic actually gets published, stuff that would have seemed so "prescient" just looks ripped from the headlines.

Still, the object of the game for me is not to prove my own ability to prophesize, but to demonstrate the Bible's ability to so accurately reflect what's going on right now. And to the extent I can do that, I'll be proving its writers pretty damn prophetic, at that.