Adam and Eve discussing women’s liberation, Methuselah happily listening to Golden Oldies, metal detectors for animals entering Noah’s ark, Moses with the tablets of the law being questioned by civil libertarians, King David increasingly exaggerating Goliath’s proportions with each re-telling of the story. The names are familiar, but their activities are not. At least not to those who know them only from the Bible. But for the millions who daily read the comic pages, biblical personages are among the many characters that populate what has been called “the preeminent form of popular humor in America in the twentieth century.”¹