Original Cover
Revised Edition Cover
The T&T Super Agents. What a fun world to build and forever grateful to God and Awana for allowing me to work on this incredible project.
In the T&T Trading Card game we needed to have a spirit of competition in the story, so we borrowed ideas from major card games. Instead of warring factions or kids with magical powers, we leaned hard into extraordinary kids with extraordinary skills and talents.
This concept was relatively new to Awana, so we didn’t want to push the boundaries too far as to alienate long-time users of the curriculum, but enough to feel current for the kids. All the while trying to avoid the dangerous pit of “cheesy Christian media”. Perhaps I’ll write a post someday about cheesy kids media and what I think that actually means.
The Process:
Writing a graphic novel for the T&T books wasn’t easy. We had to fit the comic art into specific areas of the page layout since the story was interrupted by curriculum content in-between scenes. The thought was that kids wouldn’t see this book as just “school work”, but a story to be engaged with from start to finish. The curriculum was 32 weeks long and split up into 4 units. In the previous curriculum some kids would never get past the first 10% of the book. For this book, they would at least want to open up the story and read it, thus forcing them to at least flip through the book thus exposing them to it. That might sound like we’re setting the bar low, but we were on a mission to enhance the fun factor of the hardest part of Awana … memorizing bible verses.
The benefit to crafting a story in a set amount of pages is that I could be strategic in where the plot points needed to be in the story. I could literally put a pinch point or plot reveal on specific pages and write to that. It was like an outline set up for me.
After I locked myself in the library for a couple weeks and emerged with a story outline, I pitched it to the team and had the first draft approved. After that, it was go time and the rest is history.
Writing was the fun part. After building the factions and world setting in the trading card game, we could now craft a story around it. The setting took place in a fictitious city called Rader City. A nod to Paul Rader, a huge influence in the founding of the Awana ministry. Rader City is home to the Super Agents, which is a group of kids with extraordinary intellect, bravery, and skill that was always on call to help Rader City with its problems. They were formally trained in Super Agent Facilities in Rader City and remote locations. Similar to Pokemon trainers, they were supervised by adults, but had personal agency to solve problems. Hopefully this communicated to kids that they had extraordinary gifts granted to them from God that they can be using now to help other people.
The Characters:
Red, blue, green and yellow was a time honored color tradition in Awana. It was used heavily for seven decades in the specially made Awana games circle, which is a highly organized way to have kids play games.
The Yellow team consists of scientists and inventors, the Blue team are the elite leaders who leap into danger, the red team are the fast transport messenger team, and the green team are the detectives.
Eric
Jayne
Leah
Maria
Thomas
Streamwood
Arthur
Designing the characters was a challenge, but highly rewarding. My goal was to have a diverse set of characters that had their own flair and style. They were all about the same age, so I used a similar body type for most of them. I was careful to have 50% girls and 50% boys and a mixture of skin tones to represent as many ethnicities as I could.
The Story:
In the story Grace in Action, there is a mystery that will put all of the Super Agent’s abilities to the test before Rader City is destroyed by an overactive computer program.
The story begins at the Rader City Bible museum. An old museum that that has been rehabilitated with new programs and displays by the yellow team super agents. The whole team is at the ribbon cutting when S.A.M, the super computer that was installed to run the new exhibits, goes haywire. When the Super Agents spring into action to investigate, they find that S.A.M (the super computer) was sabotaged and call the green team to search for clues. S.A.M is unable to be shut down without the correct passcode and they don’t have any power to begin with.
The green team follow footprints down an old elevator shaft underneath Rader City and find an elaborate obstacle course constructed by the original builders of the Bible Museum. They navigate the challenges and discover the possible saboteur at the end.
Meanwhile, the red team is hovering over the city on their hover scooters when they get word that one of their mentors is accused of sabotaging the computer system. While on patrol, they get word the professor is going around town stealing power sources. After searching in the sewer, they see the “professor” in the act of stealing. He steals one of their scooters and they chase him out and over the city and crash-land in pursuit.
Arthur, the leader of the blue team picks up the chase with his dog Streamwood. The “professor” crash lands as well and they set on a foot chase that ends in an abandoned transport station. Arthur suspects that the “professor” isn’t who he says he is and almost uncovers the truth when the “professor” escapes. Arthur latches on to the hover transport and discovers the professor is actually his little sister Annie.
We find out she wanted to prove she could fix a dangerous computer program and installed it into S.A.M to prove it. Just in case it didn’t work, she planted fake evidence to pin the blame on their professor and mentor. She felt remorseful over her decision so she tried to cover up her mistake, but ended up making things worse and damaging the professor’s reputation and betraying her friends.
The scooter crashes and Arthur saves her life except for a broken arm. Annie tries to run again, but her arm hurts too bad and she has a moment of discussion with Arthur. She feels like she messed up her relationships beyond repair and can’t show her face to the super agents again. Arthur shows her Grace and extends her love and forgiveness in the form of bringing to the feet of Jesus.
After her returning, Arthur presents her to the Super Agents still trying to fix S.A.M from blowing up the city. The green team agents that were underground find an old generator underneath the city that brings power back to the museum, which enables the passcode to be entered. Eric, the leader of the yellow team wasn’t ready to forgive Annie for what she did, but couldn’t remember the password. Annie tells him the password and the computer system was shut down. The password was “grace” and was based on a commitment the super agents made with each other in case things went bad.
In the epilogue, we see Annie’s consequences for her actions and she and Eric both repair their friendship and he gives her the opportunity she was looking for in the beginning.
Integration of Storytelling and Curriculum:
We tried something we never did before and attempted to integrate the lesson concepts into various parts of the story. That way, whenever the small group engaged in conversation, they could use the comic as a tool to discuss the content. We even integrated the titles of each unit into the art itself. It worked for Grace in Action, but needed to change that for future stories. We heard stories of Awana Clubs doing this and was successful overall.
Credits:
Thank you to Awana and all the amazing people that made this happen.
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