Cartoonist Charlie Baber grew up drawing comic strips. In divinity school, he began imagining what John and Charles Wesley might look like in the funny papers. Today, the Rev. Charlie Baber serves the North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church and publishes a new Wesley Bros comic weekly. Baber talks about how his version of the founding brothers of Methodism got their look.
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Transcript:
The Rev. Charlie Baber, Creator of the Wesley Bros Comics: "I had all of these ideas in divinity school that I never had time to work on. They both had their look almost from the first time I drew them. Somebody told me that John needed to have glasses, after they saw my first drawings of him. I did a little research and found one portrait where he's holding reading glasses and I was like, 'Okay, this is legit.' I can put glasses on my John Wesley.
The problem with Charles Wesley is you don't see any pictures of him without that white wig from pre-Victorian era. I found a picture of Beethoven who had like all this crazy hair. And, I wanted that to be Charles Wesley's hair.
And John and Charles Wesley were the people I knew the most, from church history and because I was going into The United Methodist Church as an ordained person it seemed like a way to teach who we have been in a context of who we are now and kind of blending the past and the present all at once."
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The Rev. Charlie Baber is a Youth Minister at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Baber has a new book of Wesley Bros comics that will be published in 2019 by Abingdon Press. To purchase Wesley Bros merchandise, visit the Wesley Bros Comics store on Etsy.
See The Wesleys Take the Web animated series.
This video was produced by United Methodist Communications in Nashville, TN.
Media contact is Fran Walsh, 615-742-5458.
This video was first posted on November 28, 2018.
