In the first panel of the very first issue you see Him striding across the desert with maybe nothing in the landscape around Him but sand and the ruins of a shattered village in the distance. He’s not wearing a robe and sandals but bike shorts and black lace-up combat boots and a tight black tee, and He’s not the skinny hippie all the paintings make Him out to be, but buff, as if He’s been doing weight training, but of course, like Wolverine or the Hulk, He doesn’t really have to sweat anything to be built like that. He just is. And His hair—it isn’t that long, actually, just long enough to give Him a topknot like a samurai, and His beard isn’t shaggy like some biker’s beard, but trimmed close to His rock-hard jawline. His eyes—at first—are calm, and they’re not blue like in the paintings either, but green like Asia’s (she’s my girlfriend). What you see, right off, is that this isn’t the sort of hero who’ll turn the other cheek or out of some misguided notion of fairness or love or whatever won’t use His powers to the very fullest degree. No, just the opposite. Warrior Jesus is the scourge and the whip—the Cleanser—and He’s come to wipe up all the slime of the world, the al-Qaedas and Boko Harams, ISIS, the Mexican Mafia, and all the rapists and slavers and drug dealers out there, dog abusers, wife beaters, anybody evil who seeks to inflict pain on the weak—they’re going to be dust. All of them. Just like what He’s walking over in that first panel, the sand grains symbolic of what He’s going to reduce them to. No hell, no trial, no punishment: just dust. Or sand. Or whatever.
