It’s fun! It’s visionary! It features Donald Trump as Yama Raja, the Lord of Death. It’s “The Comic Bardo Thodol” (aka The Tibetan Book of the Dead), as created and executed by writer/artist Thomas Scoville.
How nice to see it making the rounds online again, since it’s now been posted on UltraCulture.org. It first surfaced in 2008, and I reached out to Scoville, who explained how it came to be:
“I’m kind of amazed by how much coverage it’s gotten. It was just some background research I’m doing for a novel — I’m trying to use the BT as a guide text for a pop culture novel. Though I’d read bits and pieces of the BT for years, I realized I’d never gotten my mind around the whole thing — it’s not very ‘sticky’ to a western mind like mine, I guess. So I had the idea of dumbing it down: if I were a teen, how would I explain it to me? — comic book form, with pop culture figures and images to make it stickier and less threatening. So I tried that. An hour a day for about a week. I’m just tickled that so many people found it entertaining and/or informative.”
See The Comic Bardo Thodol for yourself, here.
Can you help us at a critical time?
COVID-19 has brought tremendous suffering, uncertainty, fear, and strain to the world.
Our sincere wish is that these Buddhist teachings, guided practices, and stories can be a balm in these difficult times. Over the past month, over 400,000 readers like you have visited our site, reading almost a million pages and streaming over 120,000 hours of video teachings. We want to provide even more Buddhist wisdom but our resources are strained. Can you help us?
No one is free from the pandemic’s impact, including Lion’s Roar. We rely significantly on advertising and newsstand sales to support our work — both of which have dropped precipitously this year. Can you lend your support to Lion’s Roar at this critical time?
