Notable Christian Comics Series
Win Mumma's "COSMICS"
T
he "COSMICS" got their start in 1978 when the editors of
Back to the Bible
's youth magazine, Young Ambassador, decided to run a double spread each month featuring Old Testament Bible stories in comic book form.
The comic was written and illustrated by staff artist
Win Mumma
and called "O.T.," as a takeoff on Johnny Hart's "B.C." which was a popular strip at that time.
Through the magazine, the "O.T." strip reached more than 80,000 homes around the world and 200,000 children and young people each month. Some of these strips were also published in book form by Back to the Bible.
In the 1980's,
Tyndale House Publishers
asked Mumma to adapt the existing "O.T." art into comic books about Moses, Joseph, and Samson and to develop a fourth book on the life of Jesus Christ.
Moses - The Man Who Talked to Bushes, Jesus - The Man With the Miracle Touch, Joseph - The Kid Whose Dreams Came True, and Samson - The Kid Who Never Got a Haircut
were published as the
"COSMICS"
Series in 1987. They were each
32 pages, plus cover, in full mechanical color
.
Tyndale sold just under 30,000 copies of the series and stopped handling them after several years. Mumma continued to sell the comics up until a few years before his death in 2003.
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The "COSMICS" series covers:
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Moses - The Man Who Talked to Bushes
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Joseph - The Kid Whose Dreams Came True
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Samson - The Kid Who Never Got a Haircut
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Jesus - The Man With the Miracle Touch
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Additional Information
Individual title sales (through Tyndale):
Moses, The Man Who Talked to Bushes
- 7,131;
Jesus, The Man With the Miracle Touch
- 7,374;
Joseph, The Kid Whose Dreams Came True
- 3,489;
Samson, The Kid Who Never Got a Haircut
- 6,511; Total= 27,998
Approximately 200 additional copies (of all 4 titles, total) were sold through the
original Christian Comics Catalog
.
(Tyndale numbers from
Win Mumma
, CCCatalog numbers from Nate Butler, March 2001)
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