James Turnbull is a short, red-haired, gray-eyed Scottish Lowlander and a devout but naive atheist. In the introduction Martin Gardner notes that it is a 'mixture of fantasy, farce and theology.' Gardner continues: 'Evan MacIan is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed Scottish Highlander and a devout Roman Catholic. Both of those things are fun to draw.The Ball and the Cross is G. The book also features a fair number of sword fights, and a lot of fat Victorian police running around with helmets and billy clubs. But as a novel-with-pictures I think it works! At that time I had briefly held the opinion that this book would make a good graphic novel. In fact, I already had character designs, dating back to 2006, for the two leads (the humorless Catholic-born Evan MacIan and the scrappy, lovable atheist Turnbull). The book, thanks in no small part to the wonderful friendship that develops between the two main characters, remains my favorite of Chesterton's novels.

I was hooked.Īnd so last year when my friends over at Chesterton Press approached me about drawing a set of illustrations for The Ball and the Cross, well, I wasn't too hard to convince.

I returned to the same spot over the course of a couple days to finish the book. The book was The Man Who Was Thursday and I didn't even take it to a table I just sat there on the floor in the aisle and read this weird nightmare story about anarchists and spies. I found my first Chesterton novel in the quiet basement of the college library. Probably because, as Gaiman points out, Chesterton is an artist's writer. Chesterton, his wit and his works and his larger-than-life figure, until I was in college, but I had much the same reaction as Gaiman. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. In a 2004 speech, Neil Gaiman gives a wonderful account of his first discoveries, when he was still quite young, of the works of C.S. Chesterton's crazy odd-couple fantasy novel The Ball and the Cross, illustrated by me! It looks like this:

The ball and the cross by gk chesterton