The Manga Bible

The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation is an original English-language manga adaptation of the Bible created by Ajinbayo "Siku" Akinsiku, who was responsible for the concept and the art and the script writer Akin Akinsiku. It was released in July 2007 by Galilee Trade. They summarize the narrative of the Bible in a 200-page graphic novel including the Old Testament and the New Testament. With their work, they combine the Western and the Japanese culture to tell the Bible in a new way. The book is especially aimed at readers between the ages of 15 to 25. Church representatives were praising the graphic novel, as opening up the ideas of the Bible to a new target group. Ajinbayo Akinsiku was born in England and grew up in Nigeria; he now lives again in England. He thus represents different cultures in his artistic work, which becomes also apparent in The Manga Bible. He became known for his work on 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.

The text and quotes in The Manga Bible are from The Holy Bible, Today's New International Version that was first published in 2004. For those people who want to read further in the Bible, the artists have included “Want to know more?” links indicating the references that help to find the passage in the original scripture. Those links are also a good indicator for the reader to know which passages from the original Bible are included in The Manga Bible and which passages were left out. At the end of the book commentaries about key scenes are included. They give away some of the ideas that inspired Siku and Akin to write The Manga Bible, as well as the influences they had during the process. There are also sketches included that show the development of the art process.

Siku is one of many artists living in the West who has been open to the manga style in his work and he uses it in his own way. He is influenced by his own cultural background, thereby creating a manga in English based on a book commonly associated with Western culture, namely the Bible.

By using manga, Siku is not just influenced by the Japanese comic style, but also by its aesthetics and culture, with which manga is closely connected. One of those aesthetic concepts is a three-part development called shin-gyo-so. It comes from the Japanese calligraphy, where the formal alphabet of kanji is represented by shin. The semi-formal characters are called kana and stands for the gyo. Finally, the least formal script is the cursive and is represented by the so. This formula is also applied in other aspects of the Japanese culture, for example in gardens or tea ceremonies. Applying this concept to The Manga Bible, the book can be seen as an informal Bible, whereas the Bible in the church would be the formal one and the Bible people read at home would be seen as semi-formal. Within the manga itself, Siku also uses different levels of formality; there are pages, where he stays within the panels and other times where no panels at all exist. To illustrate the disorder of a war or the prophecies of the revelation, he also uses the technique of bleeding, which means that the drawing appears to continue over the edge of the page.

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