2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 2: "The Next Ten Commandments"

I liked the detail of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

I grew up Catholic and spent many hours of my life (through no choice of my own) at a church called St. Robert Bellarmine in Flushing, Michigan. It was a very plain, almost barn-like structure when my family started going there in the early 1980s, but the parishioners raised money and made improvements to it over the years. Eventually, it became a pretty impressive place of worship. I mean, it won't put any cathedrals to shame, but for a church in a smallish Midwestern town, it's not bad.

One of the most prominent additions to the main sacristy was a series of stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible. I generally didn't have much interest in what the priest was saying, so I'd stare at those windows, one of which depicted Moses reading the Ten Commandments. I suppose that memory stayed with me and eventually inspired today's comic.

The last time I ever set foot in St. Robert Bellarmine was in August 2018 for my father's funeral. The place looked better than ever.

Meanwhile, at a drive-in theater in Utah...

Charlton Heston airs out his armpits in The Ten Commandments.

Yesterday, the Twitter account Historical Images tweeted a rather remarkable -- and seasonally-appropriate -- image which caught my attention. It shows a drive-in movie theater at twilight. Above a blueish-looking sea of mid-20th-century automobiles looms a huge screen aglow with the image of Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical super-epic, The Ten Commandments (1956). The caption reads: "Charlton Heston, as Moses in the The Ten Commandments, on screen at a drive-in theater in Utah, 1958." I don't know if that's true or not; Twitter accounts of supposedly "historical" vintage photographs are notoriously inaccurate. I grew up well after the heyday of drive-in movie theaters, so I've only been to such an establishment once in my life. (For the record, I saw The Crow that way.) I know that they were controversial back in the 1950s, though, since they were considered (by frustrated prudes) to be hotbeds of teenage sexuality and juvenile delinquency. Some people even derisively called them "passion pits," because the horny adolescent customers were presumably having sex in the relative seclusion of their vehicles, totally ignoring the actual movies. So how odd to see a morally-upright film like The Ten Commandments playing in a drive-in. And in Utah, no less! This is the very epicenter of Mormonism and, by far, the most uptight of all the 50 states! It figures that this is what would be playing in a Utah drive-in in the '50s, rather than a cheesy horror or biker flick. Anyway, here's the pic:

The Ten Commandments plays to an attentive Mormon audience.

Pretty cool, right? But something seemed off about it to me. The image on the movie screen, of course, comes from the film's most famous scene: the parting of the Red Sea. But it doesn't look like Moses is getting great results at that particular drive-in theater in Utah. That "sea" of cars I described earlier doesn't seem to be parting one bit. What's the deal? Is God taking a snack break? If so, He's making His buddy Moses look like a real chump out there, like a comedian who's bombing. That didn't seem right. Moses can part a sea, but he can't clear a path through Mormon traffic? So I crudely "fixed" the image in Microsoft Paint. Here's that:

Now Moses can get to the snack bar unimpeded.

Ahhhh.... that's much better.