(RNS) — When he was a teenager in the 1990s, Jordan Morris was always up for a bit of mischief — as long as it didn’t involve sex or drugs, two things he was sure would kill him.
So he went to a megachurch youth group, which promised teenage shenanigans without much danger. The “sanitized mischief,” as he describes it, was perfect for Morris, who grew up as a nerdy, nervous kid.
“Youth group was great for me,” Morris said. “We can put on a show, we can sing little songs, we can do little skits. We can toilet paper the pastor’s house and clean it up later. And I just don’t have to worry that someone is going to try and pressure me into something that I’m scared of.”
Now a Los Angeles-based comedy writer and podcaster, Morris has fond memories of his time in youth group. Those memories — and his love for horror movies like “The Exorcist” — inspired him to write “Youth Group,” a graphic novel about church teens who fight demons while singing silly songs about Jesus.
Jordan Morris. (Photo © Steve Agee)
Think “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — the 1990s hit movie and later television series — goes to church.
“I thought it would be a fun challenge,” Morris, whose previous graphic novel, “Bubble,” was nominated for an Eisner Award, told Religion News Service in an interview earlier this year. “Can we do one of those religious horror stories, but make it kind of funny?”
Morris also said he’d rarely seen stories set in the kind of youth group he’d grown up in.
“I’ve just never seen that little world written about in a way that I thought was like, accurate or, like, that got what it was about,” he said.
Published last year by New York-based First Second Books, “Youth Group” tells the story of Kay Radford, a theater kid who winds up joining the Stone Mission megachurch youth group after her parents split up. Her mom is a true believer but lonely. Kay is more skeptical but lonely as well and angry at her dad.
“Church might help with all this,” Kay’s mom tells her early on. “I think we both could use some community.”
At the youth group, Kay is met by youth leader Meg Parks, a kind but sometimes over-the-top youth leader in pink; a bearded, hippy pastor who turns the “Pina Colada song” — the Rupert Holmes hit “Escape” — into a metaphor for spiritu …