Latter-day Saints might be surprised at the beginning of “Joseph Smith and the Mormons.”

Not with the “First Vision”, in which a 14-year-old Smith reported that God and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a New York wood in the spring of 1820. Not with an account of various preachers in and around Palmyra, trying to convert the adolescent truth seeker. Not even looking at his family and his childhood, like the pre-anesthesia surgery he had when he was 7 years old that removed part of his leg bone.

Instead, Noah Van Sciver’s soon-to-be-released graphic novel opens with a young Joseph and his father leading a group of men on a treasure hunt, with Joseph peering into a hat for directions.

In the end, the search proves fruitless as the men dig deeper and deeper but find nothing. When Joseph looks into the hat again, he says the riches have gone away from them. However, he and his father still accept compensation for their services.

This episode, which Latter-day Saints may not have heard before in Sunday school, gives context to accusations by Joseph’s neighbors that he is a trickster when he states that an angel has shown the burial place of the golden plates from which the Book of Mormon emerge.

It also casts an unbending look at the origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its founder, and its beginnings.

Latter-day Saints will recognize major names and events in “Joseph Smith and the Mormons,” available July 26 via Abrams Books.

Since the graphic novel is not produced by the Utah-based faith, it does not assume that all of Smith’s accounts are true. On the contrary, Van Sciver wanted readers to learn in the same way as the contemporaries of the religious leader: during conversations at the table, during dances, during travels.

Readers learn about the First Vision as Smith dictates his personal story, available on the church’s website. They discover stories of angels, golden plates and divine communications, told by Smith himself or by his followers.

Whenever Van Sciver illustrates Smith’s mystical experiences, they are drawn in blue dotted lines, to differentiate from non-spiritual events in color.

The acclaimed cartoonist said his aim was to present the church’s history accurately and let people decide for themselves what they think. “I felt like I needed to tell a fuller story about Joseph Smith.

Find your roots

Van Sciver was born in New Jersey to a family of nine and grew up as a Latter-day Saint until he was about 12, when his parents divorced.

His mother spent the next few years separating her children from the church and he lost his affiliation with her.

However, he never forgot the religious roots that shaped his early years. It was also his legacy; Van Sciver said his family descended from early Latter Day Saints, and his brother joked that they were “ethnically Mormon.”

As Van Sciver grew up and began a career in comics — working on projects like the graphic novel “One Dirty Tree” and the Eisner-nominated “Blammo” series (think Oscars for comics) — he wondered if he had missed something by being taken out of the church as a child.

He wanted to decide for himself. So he researched and studied, and he dealt with it all the best way he knew how – by drawing.

The project proved difficult, however. Van Sciver had several failed starts, some of which even made it into Sunstone, a magazine about Mormonism.

Part of the difficulty was the mountains of information available. Van Sciver said he read biographies and visited several church history sites while a member of the Vermont Center for Cartoon Studies.

He also met librarians at church-owned Brigham Young University who have been collecting his work for several years. The original work of “Joseph Smith and the Mormons” is now available for on-campus study.

The project was planned for 250 pages, then it needed 200 more. He missed several deadlines.

But he wrote in the book’s acknowledgments that his publisher “encouraged me not to worry about the number of pages and to let the story breathe as it should, with as many pages as it needed”.

Now his study is complete and he has his answers, although Van Sciver says he “really tried not to tell anyone what to think”.

Tackling tricky topics

Another challenge, Van Sciver said, was “the extremely difficult tightrope” of navigating topics like polygamy and racism.

On one page, Emma Smith discovers her husband in bed with another woman. The scene is not explicit, but the message is clear. (This particular story is from a letter written to Joseph Smith III by excommunicated Latter-day Saint Apostle William E. McLellin in 1872.)

Another page, Joseph reads Emma a revelation in which God says she will be “destroyed” if she does not accept polygamy. For a panel, she just sits and watches. In the next, cracks appear all over his body.

Racial controversies in the faith’s foundational scripture, the Book of Mormon, are also addressed when missionaries preach to Native Americans about the “white and delightful” people in the text. Native Americans, too, can only stare into space.

Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, said it’s better for Latter-day Saints to wrestle with a difficult history than to be held in darkness.

He also said the church has in recent years recognized the importance of transparency. For example, Smith’s treasure hunts using a “seer stone” are discussed on the church’s website. The church has also published essays on a range of thorny historical and doctrinal issues, from polygamy and race to its belief in the Heavenly Mother and the divine potential of mankind.

Mason noted the faith’s most recent official narrative history, a multi-volume series titled “Saints,” also deals with many events that most members didn’t hear about as children.

“A lot of people are going to say, ‘Well, [the church] still hasn’t said it all. … Sure. It certainly is,” he said. “But … I give the church pretty high marks, especially compared to other religious institutions or other private corporations, in terms of their historic shift to transparency over the past decade and half.”

And for anyone who wants to do their own research into church history, Mason recommends sticking to primary sources and the work of professional historians.

“Go watch the original stuff and make your own judgements,” he advised. “Don’t just trust what anyone on the internet has said about it.”

Van Sciver added that while he hopes Latter-day Saints and others can connect with “Joseph Smith and the Mormons,” he isn’t afraid to offend current members.

“There are things,” he said, “that are uncomfortable about the story that I don’t really know how to make comfortable.”