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W. Maxwell Prince Takes Us Into The Life Of An Immortal With “Judas: The Last Days” [Interview]

By | December 12th, 2014
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

The story of Judas Iscariot is well-known to most anyone living in the Western world. The most beloved of Jesus’s disciples, and also the one that betrayed him, Judas is infamous as one of the great betrayers in history, even earning a special spot in Dante’s “Inferno”. But what sort of life does he lead after the crucifixion of Jesus, when he’s cursed to walk the world as an immortal and to live with his betrayal? That’s just the beginning of where W. Maxwell Prince and John Amor take their new graphic novel “Judas: The Last Days”.

Read on as we chat with W. Maxwell Prince about an immortal and suicidal Judas, the touchy subject of religion, where some of our favorite Apostles are in this story, and more. “Judas: The Last Days” hits stores 1/21/15 and the final-order cutoff is 12/15/14. 

Judas: The Last Days” is coming to IDW next month and centers on the infamous Judas Iscariot, arguably one of the best known figures in Western culture. What exactly is it all about?

W. Maxwell Prince: Judas Iscariot is immortal and wants to kill himself.  But he’s not doing a great job at it.

Now, religion is generally a touchy subject and comic fans are not often known for their rationality. For the most part I think you handled the material well and there shouldn’t be too many objections, with maybe the exception of a scene where Jesus engages in same-sex coitus. How do you think people will react to the various religious aspects of the book, especially the more non-traditional?

Page from Judas: The Last Days

WMP: You know, I wish I had a better gauge on the prevailing sensibilities of comics readers.  I tend to view the world as very secularized, but that’s probably because I live in New York.

I’ll say that I don’t think this is a book for fundamentalists.  But it’s still maybe a book for someone with a basic Judeo-Christian template of belief.  For all the things in the story that might chafe a person of faith (especially the scene you mention), I think there winds up being an air of extreme reverence to it—something almost like piety.

And comic fans should be pretty inured to retconning, right?  So this is just a retcon on a different order.  Crisis on Infinite Gospels or some such.

One of the more interesting aspects of Judas’s character in “The Last Days” is that he’s immortal and is walking the Earth until Jesus comes back, as are the other disciples. It touches, I think, on the “Wandering Jew” myth a bit, and also the early belief in the Beloved Disciple who was said to live until Jesus’s second coming. Did either of these ideas play into the immortality of Judas and his companions?

WMP: I actually didn’t know much about the Wandering Jew or the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved until I started to unpack the New Testament as part research for this book. (My worldview tends to skew Darwinian, so there were some major lacunae where my knowledge of biblical lore was concerned.) If anything, this story started as a play on Borges’s “Three Versions of Judas”—my favorite (and for my money the best) of his so-convincing-you-think-it’s-real faux scholarly articles from “Labyrinths and Ficciones”.  In that short, a wonky theorist posits that maybe Judas was an extension of Jesus, or even God incarnate; he took the burden of “betrayer” on his shoulders in order to enact the story of Salvation and Second Coming.  It’s just so rich and dense, one of those magical Borgesian things.  So at some point I decided to write the fourth version of Judas–though I had no idea it would turn out to be so weird and full of monsters and goblins.

Page from Judas: The Last Days

In addition to Judas and, of course, a bit of Jesus, we’re treated to your takes on the various early followers of Jesus, mainly Matthew, James the Lesser, and Paul. Each, just as Judas, is immortal. How all they all handling the long wait until their Messiah’s return?

WMP: I don’t want to spoil too much, but the breakdown is:  Matthew is an occasionally crossdressing proprietor of a harem-cum-brothel whose employees are all demons/monsters; James the Less spends his time roasting away in a flophouse called The Rapture Closet, keeping company with the likes of flying monkeys and art-addicted madmen; and Paul (not one of the original twelve apostles, mind you) is doing something, somewhere in a circular room.  It all looks a bit cooky on paper, seeing it laid out like that, but I think the story holds at the center—the world itself has permitted myriad fictions to come true (from stories about saviors who walk on water, to yarns about winged chimpanzees), and an eternity in that world has made Jesus’s disciples totally strange.   Judas might actually be the only halfway sane guy of the lot.

Continued below

You say you’re not a very religious person, so what sort of research did you do into the New Testament and the subjects within it

WMP: Golly, a ton.

Yes, my orientation towards the world doesn’t allow a lot of room for religious worship.  (I worship plenty of stuff, though:  music, coffee, language.). But I’d also be willing to say that faith or “belief” and all the stories wrapped up with those virtues—especially where Christianity is concerned—have for a long time been really interesting to me. (Imagine a novel/book so powerful that everyone who read it became unswervingly convinced that it’s real, and then proceeded to let the content of that book inform almost every aspect of their lives….imagine the church of Moby Dick, or Seventh Day Hemingwaysians.)  So I started reading the gospels, and eventually found myself in a NT class at a local university, presided over by a pretty well-known theologian.  (Side note:  most of the students in the class were 30-40 years my senior, and all Jewish.  I think they were maybe hedging their bets vis-á-vis the afterlife and trying to get some New Testament on their spiritual resumés.)  Anyhow, that’s all to say that I read and read—and I’ve still got a long way to go if I’m ever gonna wrap my head around this stuff.

Page from Judas: The Last Days

Some publishers may have shied away from a book like this, such as it is with the previously discussed scene with Jesus. How was it pitching to IDW and getting them on board for the book?

WMP: This book’s publication owes everything to Tom Waltz (editor and senior staff writer at IDW).  It took me and John (Amor, the artist on the book, who is a genius and deserves to walk away from this with offers from the Big 2 and the Small Many) over four years to make the thing, and from about the tenth page Tom was showing it to the brass at IDW, evangelizing its merits and infecting it with his inexhaustible positivity.

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to add?

WMP: Just that I hope everyone enjoys and is challenged by the book when they read it.


Leo Johnson

Leo is a biology/secondary education major and one day may just be teaching your children. In the meantime, he’s podcasting, reading comics, working retail, and rarely sleeping. He can be found tweeting about all these things as @LFLJ..

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