Preview: By Water: The Felix Manz Story

Plough Publishing House’s new graphic novel By Water: The Felix Manz Story evokes a little-known chapter in the history of Europe’s Reformation.

Written by Jason Landsel and featuring art by Sankha Banerjee, By Water tells the story of a small group of people standing against the political and religious leaders of their day.

Felix Manz was the son of a Catholic priest who became an unlikely leader and ultimately the very first martyr of the Radical Reformation.

By Water chronicles the real life conflict between Felix Manz and his mentor, the establishment reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Manz revered Zwingli as a father figure, but ended up being drowned on Zwingli’s orders for insisting that only believers should be baptised.

It is the first in a trilogy that tells the story of radicals from the Reformation period who tried to build an alternative society inspired by Gutenberg’s Bible and Thomas More’s Utopia.

Below is an excerpt from By Water, which is now available online.

By Water: The Felix Manz Story is published by Plough Publishing House and available online here. The graphic novel will be followed by subsequent volumes, By Fire and By Sword.