Philly EDGE Correspondent Tara Nurin wrote this week's cover story on Montgomery County artist JT Waldman, whose work "Megillat Esther" is a modern take on a book of the Old Testament. An excerpt follows.
-ED

Graphic content
Megillat Esther is not your parents’ Bible story

by Tara Nurin
Philly EDGE Correspondent

Virgins bathe in oils and primp for a year before they have sex with the King, who then enslaves them as concubines the morning after. This same monarch throws a debauchery-soaked party that lasts six months. Characters cajole, manipulate and deceive to get what they want. Jews slaughter 75,000 people in one day in self-defense.
Who knew The Bible could be this hot?
It’s all right there, inscribed in the lascivious Book of Esther, a book of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament.
And now, there are pictures in a comic book.
JT Waldman can’t believe he’s finally a free man.
The suburban Philadelphia native spent his entire adulthood – all eight years of it – spawning Megillat Esther. The journey to write and illustrate the 194- page graphic novel has led him to three continents and damn near bankruptcy. He looks around his Philadelphia apartment and wanly smiles.
“I’m just taking a deep breath,” he says. “I’m able to exhale right now…. I’m just so happy it’s done.”
Waldman had no idea it would lead to this. What started as an idea for a 22-page illustrated interpretation of Esther, as a way for him to explore his Jewish identity while cutting his chops as a comic book writer, grew into a life-defining mission that quickly got of out control.
“When I started doing my research, I fell into the whole, ‘Damn, there are so many different translations of it. I don’t want to base my opinions on someone else’s. I want to come up with my own interpretation,’” Waldman remembers. “At that time I realized, ‘If I’m going to do this the right way, I’m going to have to learn Hebrew.’ That made the project a minimum of three years.”
So, in 2000, two years out of college, the non-religious Jew who spent his lonely childhood obsessively drawing comics in Lafayette Hill, Montgomery County took his University of Michigan art degree and moved to Israel.
There, he taught himself Hebrew, studied every imaginable observation on the Book of Esther, and translated the text. Keeping with the tradition of Jewish scholarship, he filtered his translation through his own newly educated perspective.
“I never understood how the story of Esther from my childhood was so different than what the actual text said. And that kind of pissed me off. I felt the American Hebrew school system was a failure because they gave me this muddled down, sanitized version of the story that really wasn’t what the story was. The actual story was pretty freaking racy and interesting. The Book of Esther was perfect because there’s no (mention of) God, saying, ‘You should do this, or you should do that.’”