That’s right friends! It’s time to get your 2023 Year A Wesley Bros Comics Liturgical Calendars! It’s hard to believe this is the 8th year I’ve been making these, and they always sell out quickly! In many Christian traditions, the liturgical calendar is used to keep track of sacred time through the use of common visuals and scripture readings. Holy days and seasons are marked by symbolic colors used in paraments, candles and banners. The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) is used the world over to guide churches in their reading of Holy scripture, guiding us through the Gospel narrative and incorporating our lived time experience into the story of the people of the Bible.
Wesley Bros Liturgical Calendars come as a set of four 11×17″ posters that you can display all at once, or if you’re like me, rotate through them as the calendar changes. Here are some of the images from the calendars.
The first image is from my favorite Christmas movie, A Muppet Christmas Carol. John and Charles Wesley were always heckling the Calvinists, so I just had to draw them as Statler and Waldorf, the grumpy old men in the rafters who always trolled the Muppets. In the movie, they play Marley and Marley, Scrooge’s business partners in life, but in the afterlife, they haunt him with warnings of doom. If you’re not aware of how hard the Wesleys trolled the Calvinists, they were forever calling them names like “Horrible Decreers.” I really think we should bring that one back.
The final image for next year’s Liturgical calendars is a montage of mostly Wesleyan heroes of the faith, as well as other important Protestant Reformers who were highly influential on Wesleyanism. When you get the calendar, the names of each character are there on the poster so you know exactly who you’re looking at. I occasionally feature my characters in side quest series called Soul Check, which of course is a Star Trek parody. The Star Trek universe is a great place to explore the adventurous quest for holiness and inclusion, not to mention is just really fun to draw outer space comics. I always try to wrap up my liturgical calendars with montage illustrations, as the calendar year ends around All Saints and Christ the King. I love that we conclude our Christian calendar year with a call to honor the saints who have gone before us, and remind ourselves that we too are wrapped up in this grand narrative. It is so easy to elevate our faith heroes to legend status, and separate ourselves from them because we could never achieve such greatness. But Wesleyan Christianity begs to differ. God’s holiness of heart and life can be fully realized by each and every one of us. We are not less than our forebears. We are the next step in their journey.
Please do visit my Etsy store, https://www.etsy.com/shop/wesleybroscomics, where you can order these calendars, as well as Snarky Advent cards, decks of playing cards, the UMC Historical Timeline poster, and more! Become a Patreon supporter of Wesley Bros Comics to receive discount codes to the store, or even a free liturgical calendar for $10+ patrons! Visit www.patreon.com/wesleybros to learn more!