Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
My Coloring Book of Old Testament Bible Stories
Author/Artist: None listed
Date: 1994
Publisher: Landoll, Ashland, Ohio
Discovered at: Savers, Overland Park
Perfect if you have ever: Wanted to see Jonah star in Madonna's "Cherish" video.
As a former Sunday school boy, your Crap Archivist can assure you that the raw and horrifying stories of the Old Testament -- say, Abraham prepping his son-gutting knife -- are best introduced to children via the medium of felt on flannel board. 
Coloring books are easier, though. But unlike felt, which is cheerfully abstract, the thickly inked pages of a coloring book demand detail that is often beyond the capabilities of the artists.
That means that during the story of Joseph five year-olds might get distracted with questions like, "Where's that other camel's head?"
A perilous desert crossing is no time to attempt a Camel Centipede!
While artists behind My Coloring Book of Old Testament Bible Stories botch hands, faces, composition, basic perspectives, and any suggestion of divine majesty, it's animals that most confound them.
Meet Joseph's Ass of Many Heads:
The other kids were jealous until they saw him milking its back teats.
A New Testament volume from the same publisher exhibits all the same problems.
Did you know that the donkey Jesus rode through Jerusalem had been smuggled inside a disciple's robe?
Sometimes, the artists give up. Here, Jam Band Jesus is touched by the grace of God ...
... WHICH NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO DRAW.
Yes, Jesus has been imagined in countless forms over the centuries, but something about this guy is just off.
Calmed an angry sea or jazz-handed at his high school's track?
Here, his holy pupa parts, and Christ emerges as a beautiful butterfly.
Or maybe it's an avocado throne. Or a Slanket. Or Duchamp's Fountain.
But I'm getting ahead of the story! We may never know who drew this travesty, but this page offers an important clue about the author:
Story credit goes to Mel Gibson!
BONUS CRAP!
Who could be satisfied with just one terrible coloring book? Fortunately, Junior Crap Archivist Matteo sent this doozy along to me a couple weeks back, just after SiC sold out and covered some A-Team ephemera. (Look for your JSiC badge any day now!)
Two quick highlights.
First, here's the Crap Archive's second laziest dot-to-dot:
(The first laziest, of course, can be found in The Rambo Coloring Book.)
And here's yet another awkward T. moment.
As long as they keep turning up, I am duty-bound to keep archiving 'em.
But, really, wouldn't our culture be greatly improved if more masculine role models dared to project feelings beyond hardness? To paraphrase Ray Charles, that Ultimate Fighting aggro-bot in the movie ain't fit to carry the original T's shit bucket.
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I remember colouring in rubbish like this at Sunday School when I was five years old and cringing my head off. Even then, I had a visceral feeling that something was seriously off. I was right. On top of that, we had to kneel on knobbly nylon carpeting to do the colouring in and I got painful knobbly indents in my kneecaps. It was altogether horrible. The end-result, despite any artistic efforts I made, was just diabolical. Now I see why. The drawings themselves were disastrous, hideous and a kind of blasphemy, all of their own. Death to propagandistic Sunday schools for children. I hope those hypocritical Sunday School propagandists are now mortified at the crap they taught us.
I think the "Jesus calmed an angry sea" sketch could also be used for "Moses parted the Red Sea" and probably something about Noah.
And maybe it's just where my mind has been lately but the sketch below that looks like a very literal "rebirth" of Jesus to me.
Could have used a color-by-numbers:
1: tan
2: light tan
3: light brown
4: brown
5: pale brown
6: sand
7: beige
8: drab
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