Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Apologetics three fifteen podcast with
your hosts Brian Auten and Chad Gross. Join us for
conversations and interviews on the topics of apologetics, evangelism, and
the Christian worldview.
Speaker 2: Serve the public trust, protect the innocent.
Speaker 3: Uphold the law.
Speaker 4: Hello and welcome to the Apologetics three fifteen podcast. I'm
Chad Gross and this is Brian Auten, and we are
super excited to have returning guests Jay Warner Wallace, cold
case homicide detective with his son Believe it or Not,
Jimmy Wallace, who also is involved in police work, talking
about their new graphic novel Case Files, Murder and meeting.
Speaker 1: Let's go to the interview.
Speaker 3: Let's get ready, switch me on.
Speaker 5: Well, Jay Warner Wallace is with us again as well
as Jimmy Wallace. Welcome guys to the podcast.
Speaker 6: Hey, thanks so much for having us. Yeah, looking forward
to this.
Speaker 1: Well, now we've got two.
Speaker 5: Jim Wallace is here, so we've got Jimmy and Jay, Like,
how do we differentiate?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, I was Jimmy until he was born.
I was Jimmy and my whole life because I have
a dad whose name is Jim you know, he's this
is Jimmy's the second to my dad, and so I
lost that name and my wife would call me Jimmy
until we were you know, I was twenty seven years old.
And then for a while, this kid was little Jimmy, Like,
where's there's little Jimmy because I was the Jimmy. But
at some point he just gets the name and now
he won't like go of it, so I'm stuck with jim.
Speaker 7: Well, there's no other variationes, they're all taken. So I
made him drop the first name and go by Warner.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: I have a grandson and Jimmy's got a nephew. His
name is James. So we've got every version of Jim,
James and Jimmy you can do.
Speaker 5: So Now, Jay Warner, you've written a lot of different books.
Everyone really knows you well by Jay Warner Wallace. You've
written all.
Speaker 1: These cold case sort of books.
Speaker 5: History is a police officer and a detective and things,
and that's that's pretty amazing. Now, what some people may
not know is that your son is sort of following
in your footsteps in doing police work detective work. And
now the listener can't see this right now. But behind Jimmy,
I thought these were like case files when there's like
this huge treasure trove apparently boxes of comic books. Now,
why so many comic books? And how does that lead
into this interview today?
Speaker 7: There Jimmy, Oh why there might not be a good
answer for why you know you want to start a
Christian podcast talking about all your material positions.
Speaker 5: There's an investment right to sell those things.
Speaker 7: I yeah, I'd like to think that they're worth something,
but maybe one or two of them. But for the
most part, I don't have that kind of money to
be a collector in that way. But I grew up
reading conic books. I had a lot of people uncles
in my life who liked conic books, and one uncle
in particular left a relatively sized collection of really class
six sixties, seventies and early eighties comics to me. Well
he left in my grandma's house and then I just
discovered it and got really hooked on that. And my
dad was always really good about kind of supporting us
in reading comics. He'd always give us a dollar a
month to go to the comic book store, and we
could go to the quarter bin, which is like where
all the old comics.
Speaker 3: That stores try and get rid of.
Speaker 7: Sit now, I don't even know if there's a quarterbin,
it's probably a dollar each, but at that time there
a quarter, so you get four for that month, you know.
So I just always grew up reading comic books. I
love comic books, and I think I always would have
dreamed to do something in comics, but I didn't really
think that that was a like a realistic goal, So
it wasn't really something I was actively pursuing until relatively recently,
just these last few years, as we worked on Case
Files Excellent.
Speaker 6: Can you guys tell that we were on a police
officer's budget?
Speaker 4: Yes, a dollar yes, yeah, And Jimmy, Jimmy, your spott
on the bin now is about a dollar dollar.
Speaker 2: Twenty five for the comics they're trying to get rid of.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I really have gone. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Before we get to the book, I have to ask
who is your favorite? Do you have a favorite comic
book hero?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 7: That's so hard, like because it's like choosing me to
tree your children. If you pick one, two or three
that you like, tell us one that I do kind
of default too, is I love Spider Man and in particular.
I in that original collection of my uncle's comics were
some of the original stan Lee and John Remita spider
Man's and then a bunch of the reprints they used
to be an old series, Marvel Tales.
Speaker 3: I don't know how big into comics you.
Speaker 7: Guys are, but Marvel Tales was like in the I
think seventies or eighties, they were reprinting the sixties stuff.
So I got grew up kind of reading the stan
Lee Spider Man. I would still probably say it would
be hard for me to pick something over that original
he did like one hundred and ten issues. I would
say it's hard for me to pick something above that.
Speaker 3: But I don't know. Maybe on a particular day, maybe
i'd say something else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally can appreciate that. That's where I'm at.
Speaker 4: I it would depend on the day who I would pick,
and it would be hard to pick one.
Speaker 2: So I understood that.
Speaker 3: So show you.
Speaker 6: Sound like you're actually a pretty big comic book fan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am, indeed. Yes, Yeah, we're talking.
Speaker 5: We're talking he's been a Spider Man before in you know.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's kind of a that's kind of a story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there's there's a branch if you google Marvel
character appearances, there's actually a branch where you know, they
hire people to dresses the comic book heros. So for
like three years I worked for them and portrayed Spider Man, Hulk, Daredevil,
and I did Cap once. But I'm actually not tall
enough so because they actually are kind of particular.
Speaker 1: Now he's doing David Wood.
Speaker 6: You know what? That is so funny because you could
easily do him.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I gotta tell you this. I know we
don't have a lot of time, but I got to
tell you this.
Speaker 4: So, Jim, Jim, when I met you, it was in
Mount Airy, so you know where I'm talking to Steer
or mount Airy? Right, Okay, So I was there when
David Wood was speaking. I had three different people walk
up to me and start talking to me about his
talk because they thought I was him.
Speaker 2: And then I had to.
Speaker 6: Live yeah they had seen him live, yes, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yes, so I had to keep So it got to
the point where they would start talking and I would
just like point like he's over there, and they would
look at me, and they'd look at him and go whoa,
and then they'd walk away.
Speaker 6: Oh, you were very kind. I think I would have
probably faked being David and said some obnoxious things that
he get to pay for later, oh, beause that would
be an awesome opportunity to mess with them.
Speaker 2: Now actually a Muslim, I love the Koran, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, just flipped the whole narrative. Yeah, that would have
been funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So this concept of a graphic novel, I mean you wanted,
you know, you had this desire to kind of go
the root of writing a comic. Didn't think it was
on the table, and then all of a sudden, this
opportunity comes about.
Speaker 2: How did that happen?
Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, we had heard through the grapevine. I'm not
sure exactly how. I mean, it might have just been
through a press release. I can't remember exactly how we first.
Speaker 3: Heard about it. But David C.
Speaker 7: Cook, which is a nonprofit Christian book publisher that published
I'd say the majority of my dad's past books.
Speaker 2: Especially his early books called Case.
Speaker 3: Christianity, came through David C. Cook.
Speaker 7: They had purchased a small comic book company called Corvus Comics.
There's a small independent publisher. They were doing adaptations of
the Chosen They're based out of Colorado and they were
purchased by David C.
Speaker 3: Cook and they had said, hey, we want.
Speaker 7: To use this to get into the graphic novel space. More.
Speaker 3: David C.
Speaker 7: Cook has the Action Bible, which has been absolutely huge
that I read that, and they actually are the publisher
of the longest running Christian comic book. It's been running
essentially without a break. I don't think there's any significant
break since like the forties it's called picks. Nowadays it's
mostly reprint material, but it's still going strong if it's
out there. I'd never even heard of it until in
the last few years, and I'm always looking for Christian comics,
but so.
Speaker 3: They've been a comics for a long time.
Speaker 7: But they were trying to get back into it, creating
the original content, and we were like, hey, my dad
already has a relationship with them. There might be something
we can do with kind of still in the cold
case Christianity lane, but that could get into comic books,
and why not reach out to this. I you know,
it was always a dream, so let's give it a shot.
And luckily they were able to, you know, we were
able to give a pitch that they liked and move
forward with the project.
Speaker 2: That's really cool, like some real providence there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it felt that way. It really did, because I
knew that Jimmy wanted to do something this someday and
we just, you know, I don't even know it's such
a collaborative effort because we're not doing the art on this.
I do all my own art in my own books.
But this is a different genre. You know, this is
very different and if you want it to be kind
of perceived as part of the genre that people are
familiar with, you you've only need to use established comic
book artists, which we used up for this. But because
it requires somebody, you just can't like like submit the
book to a publisher and say we're ready to go.
You have to a publisher that has the bandwidth and
the access, you know, the kind of art directors and
access to artists, because you know there's going to be
the sketcher, the inkor the letterer and the colorist and
so these are like just it's a big team. So
I think we learned from this lesson that that this
is something that we have. If we could get one,
we felt really good about it. Now let's driver too,
you know, it's like one of those things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what was it like working together? Like, what
did that look like a nightmare?
Speaker 3: No, No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 7: I'm just kidding. I think that this was well. I
should I don't need to take up too muchhar time.
I barely give my dad any time to speak. But
for me, it was very sentimental. I grew up, you know,
the son of a pastor and a Christian apologist that
I always dreamed about doing something in apologetics or at
least something in ministry, something for God, something that kind
of followed in his footsteps. And so to be able
to do something not only for God but with him
was a dream come true.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And from my perspective it was. It was not.
It's not hard to work with Jimmy. I mean, he's
got his head in the right place, you know, as
he wants to do something that is going to serve
the kingdom. Well, and if we've kind of grew up
together as Christians, because I got saved when Jimmy was
about eight, and so he saw that process and then
he kind of journeyed with me through all the evidence
and kind of my debates with other young Christians or
Christians who I was meeting for the first time and
sitting down at the coffee table or sitting down at
the dining room table and having those conversations, and so
he got to see that, and so we kind of
came up together. So it was it seemed like an
easy process. Now, I don't know that everyone has a
great relationship with their kids, but part of it for
me is I've always been amazed by my kids, So like,
I just wanted to do something to advance what he
wanted to do. So I really didn't do much other
than just kind of contribute to the over arching story,
like where what can we what part of the Christian
worldview could we most easily kind of a message without
being and also kind of guiding what do we want
this to be the typical, you know, every Pollyannish kind
of world in which sometimes Christian fiction is written in
which everyone at the end is going to get saved
and it's got a beautiful sweet endings. And this is
not the way law enforcement, this is not the way
that criminal cases run. So so we thought, well, you know,
so I kind of helped him shape some of that,
But when it comes down to the conversations, I mean,
this is ninety ten where he's developing, because I don't
even think I've been saying this, it's so to me
the format in which you screenplay, you're basically storyboarding a
screenplay a movie, and you're just storyboarding it, and you
have to think about it in terms of, well, what's
the scene we're in, what are the characters we're in,
what's the narrative that's going to be in the box,
what's the quote bubbles that are going to be in
the quotes? I mean, all these things are lined out
in the story like a screenplay. So if you like
a script for an actor, that's hard. I mean there's
many times I'm trying to read this with Jimmy. I
know that he had a better picture of what it
was going to look like because you got to say, Okay,
page six is going to have six six panels. These
six panels are going to be in this this is
the scenes we're depicting. And he made a good point
of saying, sometimes, hey, you know, you can't like have
this run on too long without a scene change. What
are you going to have five pages where it's just
the same setting. You have to think about like scene
changes to so that that thing moves faster, and it's like,
this is stuff that I don't typically think about in
writing nonfiction. So I just deferred that to him and
made sure that when it was all over that, you know.
And I think also it was a little bit I
think interesting for Jimmy and I because he's in a
different generation of law enforcement, right, so he's working in
a kind of post COVID lockdown, post George Floyd kind
of world, and also in a different generation of millennial
gen zs or in law enforcement now, and the language
is going to be different, the way we approach things,
even the technology we're using is different. You know, like
when I was writing search warrants back in my day,
the most sophisticated thing you might write would be like
phone tolls. Well, you know, now we're you know, Jimmy's
writing stuff for his social media and internet and geolocations
and all this other kind of stuff that we just
didn't have to deal with. So it was kind of
just some of this I wouldn't even I mean, definitely,
the personalities don't change in law enforcement, so characters don't change,
they just re emerge, okay, but the stuff they're doing
does change, and so it was kind of a good
combination for us.
Speaker 7: I won't confirm or deny what I do at work,
but I will say my dad is giving me too
much credit and not enough credit to himself.
Speaker 3: I mean, this was truly like a collaborative effort.
Speaker 7: When we first sat down on this, we actually brought
we split it up. I don't even know if this
is the way we should have done it, but what
did we know about starting a con book. I created
six characters who I thought represented a variety of They
were kind of an amalgamation of a variety of people
we'd worked with. I thought would work good. They each
have different perspectives on life. And then my dad came
up with six plots, and we essentially they started whittling
these plots down and trying to plug the characters in
and going, hey, how would the characters react in these plots?
Speaker 3: How should we change the characters? How should we change
the plots?
Speaker 7: And so I think he's giving me a little bit
maybe too much credit there, But it was fun to
kind of go back and forth. And it's definitely it's
one thing to read a comic book and think I
kind of understand why I enjoy a certain comic and
why I don't enjoy another. But when it comes down
to actually doing it, man.
Speaker 3: It's a lot harder.
Speaker 7: It's giving me a totally different perspective now when I'm
reading comics, a lot more respect for the creators involved,
because it's difficult.
Speaker 5: You kind of mentioned there as being a screenplay running
a screenplay, So I mean, if this is sort of
a movie that you read, how would you describe the movie?
Speaker 1: What would be the pitch that you would give.
Speaker 6: Well, what we're doing here is we're trying to cause
people to examine something that's important in life, how we
ground human value. And this is something that we see
all the time in law enforcement, because you do see
that certain certain crimes are get more attention, more public
attention than others, and often it comes down to who's
the victim and why is it this? Some victims get
all the attention nationally and some victims don't get reported
on at all. And so that's something that we could
easily talk about because it turns out that most of us,
and this is true for probably most cops, ground value
and something you either achieved, something you've earned, something you've
become without grounding it the way that we would ground
it as Christians. So for example, if you're working on
a homicide team and you get some and there's like
a murder in Los Angeles County involving a celebrity, you
don't think that in that five man team, everyone's scrambling
to get that case, like they want to work that case.
Why because they think that that person is somehow or
at least that case is going to get be more
noteworthy if they solve it. They're going to get attention
for solving it. I mean, this is how crazy this is.
So you mean to tell me that somebody else gets
killed and that's not as important. So Jimmy did a
good job of kind of also kind of scratching out
how each character also is struggling with his or her
own value, Like what makes us. It's about identity, where
we place it and how we ground our identity. So
we knew we had an opportunity here to at least
explore those issues. And then of course we'll have one person,
maybe in this story, and he's a minor character who
will end up holding a view that's closer to our
own as a Christian worldview, and then it can occasionally
kind of inform the other characters about where they've gone wrong,
and we want to do it without being preachy, so
we're trying. It's hard to kind of walk that line.
So I think you might be halfway through this book
before you even thought is this Is this a moralistic book?
Is this a book with the moral message? Is this
a book that maybe is a Christian book? I don't
know that it's that obvious in the beginning because our
main character is not a Christian and these and then
the other thing is, you know, when we get done
with this, is everyone going to get saved and baptized?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 6: I mean I'm not. You know, I'd like to see
everyone in life do that. But but we know also
we have a we hope to have one more, at
least of these we have. We start off with the
two book notion with the publisher, so we don't have
to land everything you know in the first thirty pages, right,
and life isn't that way. So this is a book
that is when we first wrote it, we thought, is
this going to be just for adults because of the
gritty nature that you know they're going to be what
you're going to see at least three murders in the book.
But it turns out that if you're like a junior
higher and you're watching anything on Legacy TV and certainly
anything streaming, you've already seen worse than this and the
weekly crime dramas that are out there. So we feel
like this is still open to anybody, probably in junior
high up.
Speaker 2: I was curious.
Speaker 4: That was one of the questions I wanted to ask
you is when when I read it. One of the
things that I did notice was that it it must
be difficult to write something like this and toe that
line between you're thinking about you want your Christian audience
to appreciate it, but you also want your unbelieving audience
to be able to read it and to in it
to feel real to them, right, And a lot of
Christian media is very explicit, right, and it does have
the very neat, tidy ending. And so how did you
guys arrive at the story that you did and kind
of walk that line because it seems like a real,
you know, wire walk if you will, like a balancing act.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was tough.
Speaker 7: I think what we didn't want to do is do
something that would come off as cheat too cheesy, too quickly.
But also I didn't want to create something that was
Christian in name only that you could like adapt it
into a movie and nobody would ever know that it
was ever Christian. Not that somebody's going to adapt our
first work into a movie, but I wanted something that
was at least truly and explicitly Christian, but somehow also
not cheesy. And I love cheesy Christian comics. I love
like the old archie comics that are Christian Archie comics.
I don't know if you ever seen those, extremely.
Speaker 3: Cheesy, but like that's almost like the draw of them.
Speaker 7: So I'm not eve gonna say like criticizing anyone else's stuff,
But for us, we're trying to figure out how can
we do both, And I don't know if we landed it,
but we definitely wanted to try to figure out some way.
We knew for a Christian audience, we can't have them
talking in the way that a lot of cops talk,
with a lot of really extremely foul language. We also,
you know, we don't want to be gratuitous in the violence,
but we also didn't want it to be so tame
that you didn't see any of the murder, and so
really trying to figure out where the line was was difficult,
and I think there's a back and forth with the
publisher about exactly.
Speaker 3: Where the line was.
Speaker 7: We wanted to make sure and even how to market
it as a Christian publisher. Are they going to feel
comfortable marketing a book with murders in it to a
sixth grader? Probably not, So, you know, we really balanced
that back and forth. But we wanted something that at least,
whether or not it is real in terms of the
exact specific things that are happening, we wanted to at
least feel real. And for me, this was one of
the things that I saw. This story about the meaning
and value of life is something that I saw throughout
my career, and I see a lot of my coworkers
struggling with it.
Speaker 3: A lot of cops are great people.
Speaker 7: They're really great at taking identity of their work, and
it's very practical when you're at work, because you just
throw your one hundred and ten percent, your whole self
into your work, and you're probably gonna work harder and
maybe accomplish more at work. But that's like to the
detriment of everything else in their life. And lots of cops,
it's not just said trope in fiction, And lots of
cops have terrible home lives, and the divorce rate amongst
the cops is really high.
Speaker 3: And then I.
Speaker 7: Also saw as people retired out of the career, a
lot of like almost like they felt lost. These people
who now they're not a cop anymore, that's all they
ever were, and what does that mean for them? Where
do they see their value? And so I saw a
lot of people around me in my life struggling with
this sense of identity and where to place it. And
I think it's even a temptation I've felt should how
much identity should I place in the thing that I do?
Speaker 3: And so I wanted to at.
Speaker 7: Least feel real, even if the exact wording or the
way that they solve the crime is with whether that's real,
quote unquote real or not, I want it hopefully it
feels real.
Speaker 4: Well, I thought it especially felt that way, especially through
the kind of looking through mirph size in the graphic novel.
I felt that way of the struggle felt very genuine.
The moments where he's reflecting on his past, the moments
where he's you know, part of him doesn't want I
got the sense that part of him doesn't want to
do it anymore, but then he doesn't know what He
wouldn't know what to do if he didn't have it.
I really felt that struggle in several scenes through the book,
with Murph in particular.
Speaker 6: That's something that we were I was also thinking about too,
because I mean, this is a real struggle. And my wife, Susan,
and I have been doing counseling chaplains with Billy Gram
Association for police officers who are involved in critical incidents,
and so we do twenty four couples this summer over
six weeks, and we see this a lot in terms
of so much of why I even talk about identity
publicly now is because I see it in this counseling.
It's a bigger issue than most of us want to admit.
Even those of us who would call ourselves Christians, we
struggle keeping our identity in christ And so these are
some of the things you can kind of look get
in this kind of a fictional account. But you know,
how do we do it? How do we provide for
a community that loves apologetics. That's what my audience is
going to be. Our people who want to read more
about apologetics, So how do we create a fictional story
that will scratch that itch? But also, you know, we
want to be creative, we want to take it in
a slightly new direction. And for Jimmy, this is at
least a first entry point for him. You know, he's
got his master's degree at Colorado Christian University through the
Lee Strolls program, and it really isn't applied to Poul.
It it's like a very practical apologetics curriculum there that
is trying to get people or young people who are
taking and old people who take the program like to
figure out like what, okay, what are you going to
do with this? Because I see this all the time,
even at IOLA, where people will get a master's degree
in to apologetics and then kind of struggle to figure out
how to press that into service, Like how do I
take that now and do something with it? Or it's
also okay, I think just to do whatever you were
doing before, but do it better. But most of us
who get this kind of a master's degree, we do
it because we think we're going to turn around and
change the world with it. And I think there's two ways.
Speaker 2: To do that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: One is just through like didactic teaching. Let's just teach
you the case for this, the case for that, the
evidence for this, the evidence for that.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 6: The other way though, is just to get you thinking
in a Christian worldview direction and everything that you think about.
So that's what we're trying to do here, Like how
would this look if you're going to create? And I
was just listening to Andrew Claven the other day as
a commentator. He's got a podcast, and you know, he's
an author, and he's always complaining about Christian art. I mean,
he complains about it so much, Christian fiction and Christian
movies that I'm like, Wow, I wouldn't it be nice
if there was nothing to complain about. Not that what
we're doing is all that fantastic, but we wanted to
at least to make an effort, and we want to
make sure we avoid the traps that most common people think,
like the secular world thinks you people are don't see
it clearly, don't see life clearly. It's too simple from
your perspective of the Christianity survives even in the rough
world of murder investigations. So we wanted to be able
to write something that explores it in a creative way
and also as realistic about what it's depicting.
Speaker 5: I really thought the artwork looked great, And I'm wondering
what you guys thought about the process of creating something
where you're not the artist but you're the author. And
then that seems to me like it could be a
big worry to be like, Okay, this is our baby.
Now someone could make it look horrible. What was the
creative process behind that? And did you have feedback and no,
no change that guy? You know, change this?
Speaker 1: How did that go well?
Speaker 4: And then real quick, just to add on to that,
like when you were when you created Murph, right, did
you have an idea of what Murph looked like in
your head and communicate that or did they say this
is what we think Murph looks like and you had
to kind of get your head around that. I mean,
how did that work too?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 7: We when we did the character, so when we submitted
the proposal, we submitted initially very brief, I want to say,
like four or five sentence synopsis of what the story
would be and the apologetic message behind it. Here's the
general plot or the like the case theory beginning be
investigating here's the apologetic argument or point we're going to
try to get across, And then we submitted to them
very brief character descriptions. So we did do descriptions that
were like ethnicity, heightweight, gender, and maybe like a couple sentence,
maybe five or sentences are so description of kind of
like their background, very brief and off of those concept
artists over David C. Cook did start to draw based
on those, and so a lot of them. I think
that I would say we kind of stuck to those
original ideas, but some of the characters look radically different.
Peter Liota was at one point a really massive He
was like the biggest character, a hulk kind of looking character,
massive simoan dude, and Marco Russo.
Speaker 3: Had more of a like.
Speaker 7: Suave, kind of like stereotypical pretty boy kind of look,
and they've comed which I felt like. Hughes was probably
actually the biggest change. He looked totally different than I
think either me or my dad had kind of pictured him.
But I think the greatest part of it was we
would see these new character character designs come in and
they somehow still felt like the same character even though
they looked radically different. I don't know how they were
able to accomplish this, but we're very fortunate and earlier.
So as for comic book people like yourselves, I don't
really need to explain this, but for the audience if
you're not familiar with conic books, I would say that
the writers earlier we described as like writing a screenplay,
as kind of like that we're writing like a page
by page kind of breakdown.
Speaker 3: But the artists are like everything else in a movie.
Speaker 7: They're the directors and their actors and the costume designers
and the set designers and everything else they could possibly
think of in a movie is the on the artists.
And so we were really fortunate in this case to
have Steve Crestponderia for A Massani as our artists. When
we pitched the idea, we did not know who the
artist's attached would be, and so I think there was
like some level of like, oh, okay, it'll be great
when we see these finally come in. And also there's
a lot of creative freedom.
Speaker 3: That's given to the artists.
Speaker 7: If we said, hey, there's seven panels on this page
and they thought they could do it in five, or
we said it was five and they thought it should
be seven. They had the freedom as the artists to
do that because they need to communicate the story in
a visually appealing way, and as writers we are we're
still limited in terms of how we're visualizing this. But
we were so fortunate when we finally saw the pages,
and we did have some ability in some notes, but
I would say most of the notes that we gave
them are relatively minor in terms of changes from the
final pages, and they're mostly to do with dialogue.
Speaker 3: We did some last minute adjustments.
Speaker 7: To our dialogue, but in terms of the art there
was really not much that we had any like voice in.
Speaker 3: That was all on the artists. And I think if
you read the comic and you.
Speaker 7: Feel like, hey, this really was good, it's probably because
the artists were able to convince you that not our.
Speaker 6: Story, which is so a really important truth is that
you know, we get of the screenwriters, but like like
Jimmy said, every other aspect of movie making, every other thing,
every other credit you see at the end of a
movie is the artistic team, right, because they're picking all
the sets and designing the sets and the wardrobes and
designing all the spatial expressions, you know, that are coaching
the actors, they're creating the I mean, it's like it's
everything else. So so yeah, you're at the mercy of
But these guys gave us their first visions of what
the characters were really early, and we did tell them like, okay,
so Murph is going to look kind of like this,
and so he does. To me, he embodies exactly what
I would've thought that character was going to be. And
what are we doing here? Like when we create a
big character who it's because these are types. These are
types that you see in law enforcement. Because law enforcement
is such a rigorous physical job, it's going to be
dominated by a couple of different kind of characters. It's
either going to be dominated by people who are just
big enough that if they make a small tactical error,
they're strong enough and big enough and fast enough to
make up for the air. It's also going to be
dominated by people who maybe aren't as big or fast,
but they learn quickly and they're tactically sound from an
intellectual perspective, like they're not going to put themselves in
that position because they know they're not big enough to
make a mistake. So you get different types of people,
and they come out that even not actually have different
physical types. We hire a lot of ex football players.
I mean, if you came into the you walked in
and you said, I've got a bachelor's degree in X
or you said I just got done playing linebacker at
Arizona State, a good chance the Arizona State guy's getting
hired as long as you can pass, even on a
remedial level, everything else, because the job often is breaking
up a bar fight or walking into situation, and just
by your physical presence, everyone calms down. So it's like,
those are things that you see in law enforcement, and
we wanted to say kind of image those and that's true,
whether because the nature of the job is such that
it is. It's true whether you're working in nineteen eighty
eight when I first got hired, or you're working or
in Jimmy's generation, it's always true.
Speaker 4: I thought you guys did a really good job in
the book there. You know, we talked about walking that
wire of you know, being explicit implicit however you want
to put that. I'm sure there's a better way, but
I thought that you guys did have a couple very
I don't know how I would describe it. Moments where
they left me really pondering or they hit hard of
you know, you talked about the apologetic message, and obviously
and here the idea is what gives life meaning?
Speaker 2: What gives it value? Right? And I think it was Ashley.
Ashley is the one.
Speaker 4: That has the new baby, right, yes, yeah, when she
says this, she's at a dead body scene and she
says new baby at home, dead body at work. It
was hard to reconcile the two. Was life as pointless
as it looked at a murder scene, or as meaning
as it felt in her daughter's nursery, And that just
hit me, like, man, I feel like, even if you've
never been to a dead body scene, which thankfully the
majority of people haven't, we can certainly relate to that
in the sense of our lives.
Speaker 2: And you know, sometimes.
Speaker 4: Life seems much more meaningful than other times that depending
on the moment. And so in thinking about that, what
is your hope and how this will hopefully help an
unbeliever kind of turn their head to the gospel or
maybe consider that what does give all this meaning?
Speaker 6: Well, I want to hear Jimmy's answer to that But first,
let me just say I think that when when you
know you write out of at some point you are
going to end up writing out of your own experiences.
You're going to end up expressing your own thoughts. Me
just are I mean, you can say, well, I've readen
a lot of comic books, and I kind of understand
how the genre works. But look, in the end, they
ask us to write a comic book, what's it going
to be about? Do you think, Gee, I wonder it's
going to be this stuff? Because this is this is
the stuff that we actually think about. And you know,
Jimmy's got two young babies at home, and when when
he was writing this, the first one was you know,
so I can see why these are questions we ask,
These are things worth thinking, and so I think if
you can just kind of confess to that. Look, if
Christianity is true, it has to make sense of the
ugly world we're living in. And I think that sometimes
it's easy for some of us to avoid the ugly.
A lot of us, you know, don't have to think
about these issues, or we just don't pay attention to
these issues. But if you're in law, any kind of
first responder situation. You're going to have to see these
things constantly, over and over again. They were just an
FBI report a couple of weeks ago that said that
the average police officer will see one hundred and one
hundred and seventy three critical incidents in their career, where
the average person sees two or three in their life.
So to see some of the stuff, we're going to
have to see and to see it all the time,
you're either going to go crazy or you're going to
decide in advance that these are not critical incidents. Because
I got to see them so often, I'm going to
treat them like the average person would treat them. I'm
going to go crazy. So I think that I don't
know if that line I've always wanted to ask Jimmy.
I think that line probably comes out of his own thinking.
Speaker 3: Am I right?
Speaker 7: I mean, I think, yeah, there's a lot of self
expression I think from both of us in this. I
don't know if I would say, like one particular character
is me or my dad, or one particular thought is
exactly what we would think. But I think that the
overall message of the book is something that we've felt
or learned through our lives. So these are the these
are the thoughts that are kind of on the forefront
of our minds. And I would hope that this I
you were talking about, like, hey, does this how does
this reach the unbeliever. I would love to think an
unbeliever that will pick up our niche Christian comic book
from this small publisher somehow, and we'll read it and
will be transformed by it. And I hope that Christians
who find this comic will give it to their friends.
But if all this does is reach Christians, I think
that that for me, that would be still a very
edifying experience because me, I'm a comic book reader.
Speaker 3: I read comics every month.
Speaker 7: And I almost I read almost no Christian comic books,
and the old comics I grew up on as a kid,
Stanley's Spider Man we were talking about earlier, There's gonna be.
Speaker 3: Nothing objectionable in there. It's not Christian.
Speaker 7: Stanley's not Christian guy, but he's not writing anything that
is in any in conflict.
Speaker 3: I could have believed that he was.
Speaker 7: A Christian based on what he was including in terms
of his content, But today there's almost no comic book
that as a Christian you can read that you're going
to not have to hold your nose at at some
point or just go this is the price of any
modern media. I'm going to see something that is objectionable
morally or whatever. And so I love crime comics. I
read crime comics constantly, but every crime comic has some
rated R scene that I can't now, you know, probably
recommend on a Christian podcast. So if all I can
do is just give something to a Christian to go, hey,
you're alone.
Speaker 3: You like comics. I like comics.
Speaker 7: We're not the only people out here who enjoy stories,
enjoy the medium, and we're not the only people who
think like this. That alone would be a big deal.
I think in general, when I approach the idea of
using fiction to try to tell story, I just know
how much fiction has affected me. I know we're talking
about Spider Man earlier. I've used various examples in various podcasts,
but I think my dad was like shocked the first
time I said this. I think that sometimes my moral
development has been as impacted by fiction as it has
been from nonfiction or from scripture or from a Bible study.
And it's because I think when you're reading nonfiction, you're
thinking about something, but when you're reading fiction, you're living
it or you're in it. I'm in that world even
for that short amount of time that reading that story,
and so for me, a lot of times, stories caused.
Speaker 3: Me to ask the biggest questions.
Speaker 7: One of the comics I think that I still read
today that's still being produced is Nexus.
Speaker 3: Have you heard of Nexus? It's a pretty small, independent,
little comic. I don't know if I can recommend again.
This is not a Christian comic.
Speaker 7: There's some PG thirteen rated ars scenes probably thrown throughout there,
so I don't know if this is an endorsement. But
what's great about Nexus? This is a comic about a
guy who he's got this affliction where he has these
nightmares of mass murderers and the only way to get
the nightmares to go away and for him to feel
well again is to go and kill the mass murderer.
And he doesn't want to kill them, he's not a killer,
but he says, I got to go kill them for
self preservation. And he's going to do something good because
he's going to take out a mass murderer. But he's
going to do something that he finds morally objectionable, which
is killing, and so he's just got this constant conflict
in him.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: It's one of my favorite superhero sci fi comics. I
highly recommend it if you're willing to look at some
potentially objectional material thrown out threat there. But that's always
anytime I read a story of Nexus, I'm always thinking
about these moral questions.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: It's not a Christian story, and there's not necessarily it's
going to point me to a Christian answer, but it's
going to make me ask really good questions.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 7: I know, because I have an apologetics background and because
I grew up in the Church, that Christianity has the
best answers. But as a Christian creator, I want to
hopefully ask the same questions that these secular writers are
asking and then hopefully point you at some point to
the better answer.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So, as we're kind of coming down to the end
of our time, you kind of left me on a
cliffhanger here at the end of Case Files. I mean,
there's so many stories that I'm wondering what's going to
where these characters are going to end up. So you
mentioned that you're hoping for volume two right, can I
get a tease, maybe a preview, hint something, throw me
a butt?
Speaker 6: Come on, Okay, I think I would love to do
as many of these as the Christian community wants. Now
you can sometimes think, well, this is I think this
is worth doing, blah blah blah, and then you find out,
you know, two years in, that you know no one
really cares about it and it's not having the impact
you want. So I think this is probably what most
publishers are doing also, especially as something serial right, if
you've got something. I know when I wrote Cold Case Christianity,
the next publisher I went to was like, well, do
you have another one of those? You know, like they
want to say it's see you've done something they kind
of want the and that was what Zonovan said to me.
They said, hey, do you we want something else? Like
I did have one more piece, what's probably two more
I could have unpacked, but I didn't think there was
any need for it, and it brightened person of interest
to kind of satisfy that desire on the part of Zonovan.
I think that if this is successful and people like
the world we've created, the team, we've created, the characters
we've created, well, then I'm going to try really hard
to keep on producing these graphic novels. If it's not
with with Cook, it'll be with whoever is interested in produce.
Because this is such a weird I don't I feel
like super blessed. I'm not kidding when I say that
the stars seem to align so we could actually do
this book with David C.
Speaker 2: Cook.
Speaker 6: I don't know how. That's just amazing to me that
we got this book out because I know how many
moving parts there are, and it took us over two
years to get from zero to fifty on this. It's
just a really hard collaborative effort, and not many Christian
publishers have the bandwidth and the team available, and trying
to hold creative teams together is super hard. I'm just
telling you. It's just you start with one creative director
in with another. It's just a lot of stuff going on.
So I think this next book we're looking at is
just an extension of this in which we're going to
examine the grounding for moral truth. How do we know
something as good or bad? It's this very simple question.
And whereas this book talks about grounding human value, the
next book's going to really explore the idea of what
is good and bad and who gets to decide, because
if you think about most of the culture, you really
realize this when you work in gang cultures because any
kind of I'm sure the people who work at the
MOB back in New York probably also experienced it. There's
a whole separate code of conduct conduct for these groups,
and the things that we would typically say are vile
are just part of the standard operating procedure for these groups.
And so they could say there's a wise way to
do this horrific crime, and there's a like they actually
have an entire set of values that is grounded differently
than ours, And the question that becomes who gets to
decide what values are really the true values we should
follow or are there any objective truths about moral behavior.
So that's the kind of thing we could probably explore
in the next one, But again, we want to do
it in a way that's not too preachy. So that's
why I think this book it will move fast. I mean,
it's one hundred and sixty page graphic novel and it'll move.
I think it moves pretty fast, just because of the
nature of comic books. Yeah, so that's my hope, is
that we can explore some of these and given this
character set we've developed, and the end is everyone going
to end up. Now, This is why I'm taking an
approach where we have a longer hopefully a longer run
than just one or two books. But it also wouldn't
surprise me if the way comic books are that we
only get one or two books. So we're just trying
to keep hold the entire project with an open hand.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we're working on the script for number two. Now,
that's probably what I should be doing when I got
off this call, but I've got a three week old baby,
so I'll be doing some parents stuff but maybe later
tonight or something. But yeah, we've been going back and forth.
We actually have a script. We've been going back and
forth making some tweaks because we realize we've got a
little bit of time and we're so we're trying to
do as much as we possibly can before we move
on to the art and stuff. But I do think
that there is a question, you know, as we're recording this,
this volume one is just out. We want to see,
you know, hopefully there is a market out there, and
I think that as a as a Christian love comics.
I always have this perception that there's just no Christian comics,
so there's so few, and most of them are from
years past. I think what I've realized just in the
last couple of years trying to really seek out Christian
comics is that there's more out there than I think.
But there's still not a lot, and especially not a
lot in comparison to the vast majority of secular comics
that are out there. And so you'll see there's actually
some really great creators who are trying to create a
space for Christian comics a corner of the comics world.
But I think what we now need to do is
get the message out to Christians any church. I've ever
been part of any Bible study, any just I went
over to a Christians house and had some friends over,
I always have found at least one other person there
who's a big, hardcore, hardcore comic book fan like I am.
There's tons of Christians who love comics, but we just
got to find them and then alert them to the
idea that hey, there's stuff out here, and I hope
that it's you know, we're doing our best to make
it good, worth your while, and so hopefully the right
audience finds this and we've got lots of stories to tell,
so hopefully we can keep this thing going.
Speaker 6: I think to what you just said to me is
something that we also think. Look, this is a gateway book.
Our hope is if you like Christian comics or like
comics at all, that this is a book that you
can give somebody who likes comics and we'll open a conversation.
So to that extent, what we want to do is
provide you with the follow up material. So all of
our books we always have a bonus package, and for
this book, the bonus package is pretty robust. On the
back inside cover of the book is the QR code.
So if you wanted to know, like, how is this
one minor character grounding his worldview? Because that's the character
that is probably going to speak about Christianity a little bit, Well,
how does he ground it? Well, we've got a digital
copy of our Case Closed book, which is a short
version of the Case for the Resurrection, So that's free
to anyone who buys the book. They can download that.
But also this is part of our bonus package. Also
along with a like a conversation guide that will address
some of the issues from both secular and Christian world
views that's available with this And what I thought of
it was because Jimmy said, like, do you know how
many other Christian He's got a like a Christian comic
book directory that was digital that we have as part
of this also, so if you buy the book and
download that, then at least you can look at it
and say, oh, yeah, I didn't know about these other
Christian comic books, and you can look them up and
find other Christian comic books. So also, by the way,
our thirty session Casemaker's course is now available through this book,
So that's something that if you wanted to be able
to communicate a Christian worldview better, that's the case that
we that that course we created for h a seminary
gateway seminary. So it's a it's a free course. It's
got all the written material as part of it. You know,
just take a look at it and see if it's
something that will be a value to you. But it's free.
Speaker 2: If you buy the book.
Speaker 4: Jim you did, God's not dead too, so you're pretty
much a movie star, right. So I am looking forward
to Kate. I'm looking forward to Case Files, the movie
starring Jimmy Wallace with Jay Warner Wallace in a supporting role.
I can't wait to see it.
Speaker 2: I can only imagine is Murphy as Murphy.
Speaker 6: I was just going to say, I knew you were
going to say that. You're going to say that, Yeah, exactly, No,
I'd say, what's funny about that too? Is we we
definitely think that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I I we still those people are still in my life,
those producers and people are still in my life. But
I don't know that this will ever go past this
first day. But I know this, Yeah, I get residual
Did you know that I get a residual check. I
get a residual check from from Hollywood, the Screen Actors Guild.
I mean twice a year. No, I got dollar twelve.
I made a dollar t Yeah, seriously, they said a
check for one dollar and twelve cents for my role.
And guy's not dead too.
Speaker 4: I like, I like how you said fifty five cents
and he was like, oh no, it's not twelve.
Speaker 3: Don't twice that much.
Speaker 2: Don't rip me off, man, It was more than twice
that much.
Speaker 1: It probably like us more to mail it into like.
Speaker 6: That's what I said, That's what I thought. I thought,
Why would you even I get those? I get about
every six months, I get a dollar or a fifty
five cents. I think it probably was fifty five cents
once I told Jimmy, I laughed about it. But somewhere
between fifty cents and a dollar I get every six months.
Speaker 2: Pretty well.
Speaker 4: If anything, you need to write another book just so
we can have you guys on again, because this has
been super fun.
Speaker 6: Well, thanks for having us. I really appreciate you guys
so much. You know how much I appreciate your work.
And by the way, Brian, you were one of the
first people who ever had tipped me at all when
I first I started it back in the day, so
I still owe you one. Thanks.
Speaker 1: We love you guys.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for writing another great book and
we can't wait to just see where this goes. So Jimmy,
Jay Warner, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Blessings to you, Thank you and you too, Thanks so much.
Speaker 5: Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you have a
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Speaker 1: This has been Brian
Speaker 5: Aughton and Chad Gross for the Apologetics three fifteen podcast
and thanks for listening.