Steven Bové's Rock Opera, featured here last February and now its 18th installment, has developed very nicely over this last year and Steven has made significant leaps in the visual and literary sensitivities he's applying to the project. His latest, featuring a commentary on Andrew Lloyd Webber and Time Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, is extremely insightful regarding the cultural impact and thrust of the classic rock opera that shook the foundations of Christian perception in the early 1970's.

The art is elegant and powerful, showing an accomplished upward curve since the first installments began to appear, some 18 months ago:

For a time, a generation of us lived in doubt about the existence of God. We were taught science and evolution in public schools. The idea of what we now call intelligent design seemed more like wishful thinking than something tangible.

Then something strange happened.

Jesus Christ Superstar came out as the last of the flower power movement died away (1970) and suddenly a disillusioned generation embraced Christ not as divine but as a man. That was really the key factor of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's rock opera and that made the idea of Christ acceptable to so many of us questioning souls.

Various religious communities voiced outrage over the album and that outrage sparked even more curiosity to hear it. What many people failed to see at the time was that curiosity would lead to expression of faith and devotion, not for the album but for Christ himself! Superstar made its way into radio, Broadway and eventually a motion picture and the message spread to the masses in a way that would make even the Vatican proud. Webber and Rice's story was simply stated and told with great passion and that would click for a very conflicted group of people that watched their leaders sacrifice their loved ones to a senseless war and an economy that was based more on greed than charity. Wait a moment...we are talking about 1970, right?

Jesus Christ and his teachings were once again relevant and cool.

Whether Webber or Rice meant to create the piece as controversial or as a reminder doesn't matter much. That the album sounds dated and rather theatrical matters even less.

Artistic expression was always born of faith and faith is eternal.

This strip owes a debt to all the musicians, writers, photographers & artists of rock & roll.

For my pal in Israel who may or may not be...

There has been little in the way of commentary or exposition on the story of Jesus which moves me as this work does. Webber and Rice succeeded here, as they did with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, to strip the scriptural text of its supernatural trappings and reveal the very human story it alludes to.

The significance of these works, as Steven points out, is in this very human treatment of the characters and stories which are held in supernatural regard by religious theologists and their respective institutions. It is precisely this factor which distances good and perceptive people from an intimation to ceremonial worship communities. And rightly so.

It certainly isn't clear that the thrust of Biblical scriptures is in the founding of religious institutes. Oh yes, it's very likely that the prophets who wrote them understood this would be a prevalent result of their work. Yet Webber and Rice's musical productions noted here, are proof positive that the human mind is able to transcend the superficial interpretation of scripture and draw from it the far more realistic, educational, informative and passionately charged human saga it tells of.

This two-pronged influence of the Bible in our culture is far more powerful than meets the eye. It has something in it for everyone and in that lies the key to its potency. While the more opportunistic forces run with it in order to beef up a socio-economic-political force as a religion, the more astute and understanding people who perceive its true intent are able to point to the same scriptures, in order to remove the mask of hypocrisy and abuse which institutionalized religions traditionally don.

If religion is said to be of the most powerful social forces in civilization, then the power of the prophets' allegorical pen is even greater, and one which the world can embrace and rely on, in order to thwart the social abuse which religious coalitions attempt to enforce in our culture.

Thank you Steven for the dedication, the work itself is quite marvelous and a tribute to your development as an artist and writer of the comics form.

www.geocities.com/ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

* copy and paste above URL into browser address bar. Remove space after the word *COM/* and press ENTER. Follow the Rock Opera link on homepage to view Year One and Year Two of Rock Opera. Note: The email link in above URL, automatically parsed by this site's software, is NOT a functional email address.