Looking for something new to add to your bookshelf? Yoni Glatt, director of JTEEN (a division of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ) and creator of crossword puzzles for numerous publications including The Jewish Link, has just published a graphic novel of the “origin story” of King David, titled “The Anointed: Rise of The Shepherd King.” The book is historical fiction, a mixture of textual truths and hyperbole used to create a more cohesive story of the origins of David’s rise to kingship. This book, which Glatt hopes will be the first of a longer saga based on King David and other characters from Navi, takes the reader until just after David’s battle with Goliath, following David’s journey from “zero to hero.”
From a young age, Glatt has loved comic books and superheroes, a passion that led him to intern at Marvel in graduate school. While interning there, he pitched his idea of biblical superheroes to the chief creative officer who, in the nicest way possible, declined. Glatt could not shake the idea, however, and went forward with his dream of writing a graphic novel about King David. After meeting illustrator Mark Strauss, whose artwork was a mix of Marvel and anime, the two spent three years working together to create “The Anointed.”
The story of King David is one that lent itself well to graphic-novel adaptation because of the many similarities between David’s life and the common superhero tropes seen repeatedly in comics today. Glatt even teaches a class about King David as the first superhero as part of JTEEN programming. David is mentioned more throughout Tanach than any other person, including Moshe. Just like Captain America, David starts out as a scrawny young man, picked on and excluded, until he is given special strength, not from a super serum but directly from Hashem. When David is anointed as future king of Israel, he is imbued with the strength of Hashem’s presence and becomes an almost entirely different person, a transformation that is seen towards the end of this book and will be highlighted further in the sequel, “The Anointed: Power and Rage,” which has already been written and is currently in the process of being edited and illustrated. It is David’s faith in Hashem, his emunah, that grants him the ability to perform acts beyond our understanding, and this is what inspired Glatt to characterize him as a superhero.
The book is based heavily on the texts of Samuel I and various mefarshim, midrashim and gemaras about the Navi and King David. Glatt explained that while he endeavored to stay as close to the story from the Navi as possible, there were some areas where things needed to be added or hyperbolized to create better narrative flow and make the story more exciting for the modern reader. Theoretical details are added, things that could have happened but are not mentioned anywhere in the Navi or related texts. That is why the graphic novel falls into the genre of historical fiction; it is not a recreation of the Navi, rather an adaptation of it, bringing the midrashim to life to encourage readers to look into the source material themselves. Glatt feels that the study of Navi is something that is often overlooked in our education system and hopes that his book will inspire people to begin studying it more.
With his graphic novel, Glatt hopes that people will “get into” the historical fiction and want to learn more about this time period in Jewish history and the great men who lived then. His goal is to encourage readers to open a Navi themselves, to look into the source materials and learn more. Since it is based on true stories from the text, “The Anointed: Rise of The Shepherd King” is a book with strong Torah values that promotes the greatness of Hashem, the type of book that Glatt would want his own kids reading, he said. This book is not intended to be controversial, Glatt explained, and he hopes that no one will be upset by it as it is coming from a good place and is all around a “kosher” book, although slightly violent by necessity, since the stories in the Navi are themselves violent.
“The Anointed: Rise of The Shepherd King” can be purchased as an ebook on Kindle and in softcover from Amazon. Any questions or comments can be sent to [email protected].
By Shira Kosowsky
�
