Religion as Apart and a Part of Comics
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on March 11, 2008 Sign up now!
By A. David Lewis -- Publishers Weekly, 3/10/2008 4:55:00 PM
According to its FAQ, Preston Hunter’s Adherents.com aims to “see a more complete picture of religious/faith adherent statistics” by providing data “for thousands of religions, churches and belief systems.” Included is a subsection, “The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters,” a genuinely impressive resource for the secular and faithful comic reader alike. It details roughly four dozen faiths and sects spread across the publishing landscape, taking care in its language not to make one more important than the others.
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| DC's recent mini-series The Death of the New Gods. |
Of course not; no two personal faiths are exactly the same. People, factual or fictional, share their beliefs rather than copy them. Religion—or even its absence —affects each person individually. Yet too often in American comics religion is depicted as unexceptional. Heroes galore have squared off against Mephisto or Neron, alternate rulers of Hell and incarnations of Evil, yet they emerge spiritually unmoved. They get literally brought back from the dead—returning to the mortal plane from heaven, hell or elsewhere—and return to business as usual. They’ve seen realities where religion has united all in peace and galaxies where it has ripped apart whole societies: all to no effect on our heroes.
This spiritual paralysis seems most acute in the Marvel universe. Religion is rather unseemly there. It has borne many ugly faces, from Magus's Universal Church of Truth in Jim Starlin's Adam Warlock series and the Scientologyesque Triune Understanding in Kurt Busiek's Avengers, to Thanos's worship by the Acherons in Ultimate Fantastic Four and the recent Purifiers of the "Messiah Complex" X story line. Killing-machine the Punisher was briefly a mercenary for Heaven, and Moon Knight serves as the violent arm of his deity, Egyptian god Khonshu. Penance—formerly the fun-loving Speedball before his part in the Stamford massacre crippled him with guilt—makes a fetish of atonement, and Dust, that rare positive Muslim character, just as rarely comes to the fore in any of the major plot lines in the X-Men.
Whereas Marvel stands at some distance from religion, DC’s spandex set is somewhat more incorporative, if still rather simplistically. For instance, it was the Spear of Destiny, the lance that supposedly pierced Christ’s side, that kept the contemporaneous superteam, the Justice Society, out of World War II Europe. Not only has the Justice League had an angel on its roster, but it has fought the armed host of Heaven. Green Arrow has returned from his time in the afterlife; Green Lantern has served as God’s spirit of vengeance; and the late Superboy has inspired his own church.
Yet religiosity functions here as just another form of magic: a super science accessible to anyone with the proper tools and ability, not on the basis of faith. This does allow for Hindu and Shinto powers, for example, to operate on the same stage as other faiths’, but the end result is a form of excess egalitarianism—a playing field so level that it is rendered useless and, therefore, meaningless. Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman series was able to skirt this narrowly, suggesting religions’ connections to even higher systems, but that sense has dissipated in its ensuing Lucifer spinoff series. Many of the independent superhero titles likewise collapse all religion into an amorphous supernature, to greater (e.g., Hellboy) and lesser (e.g., Spawn, Savage Dragon) success.
It is outside the superhero genre and, usually, the more mainstream publishers that religion finds some traction in comics. A case in point is Virgin Comics, dabbling in some pseudo-superheroics, but also delivering the powerful and undiluted India Authentic, which recounts the lore and legend of Hindu tradition. Flipping the script entirely, irreverence (bordering on sacrilege) abounds in several of Image’s titles, from Robert Kickman's Battle Pope to Tim Seeley's Loaded Bible; as humorously heretical as they may be, these stories at least engage religion rather than shying away from it or homogenizing it. Of course, they also ask little of the reader (save his or her pardon), whereas Doug Tennapel’s Black Cherry sneaks actual devotion and spiritual growth into its noir-comedy adventure of mobsters, strippers, aliens and demons. Unlike Superman wrestling an angel and then moving on to other derring-do, here religion matters.
In fact, Black Cherry’s multigenre hybridity is a typical hallmark of religion in comics. Rex Mundi splices religion with alternative history and politics. American Virgin does the same with religion and sex. The Light Brigade miniseries combined World War II with Christian lore, while the just concluded Testament blended several ingredients including politics, media and economics in its storytelling. (Would one less have maintained its audience?) Cairoinjects Middle East intrigue with Muslim teachings and worldly corruption. In each of these titles, both the issues and difficulties of faith are allowed to freely interact with these other topics rather than be subsumed by them. Characters are changed by their encounters with the spiritual, either concretely or metaphorically, and not always for the better.
Interestingly, a number of works that directly employ religion arrive at a curiously similar conclusion: we are better off without God. The seminal Preacher series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon aggressively pursued this idea, supplanting the Almighty with an immortal gunslinger. The more recent Strange Girl by Rick Remender recalls the apocalypse in a world without God. Last year’s Chronicles of Wormwood by Ennis went a further step, having both Christ and the titular Antichrist ally themselves against God and Satan (i.e., their fathers), arguing that humanity should be left to itself. This bears some vague similarity to 2004’s Chosen by Mark Millar and Peter Gross, where distinguishing between a deliverer of evil and of good is difficult and, therefore, revealing. Religion without God, faith without the divine, may well be a zeitgeist sentiment that comics are participating in.
Not all comics dealing with religion need to challenge it. Many of the most lauded incorporate it, examine it, respect it and remain inconclusive yet affected by it. Some examples are Blankets, Persepolis, Maus, The Rabbi’s Cat, Invisibles. Even as they represent some of the most select comics work, they also represent the medium’s scarceengagements with religion as well. It isn’t hard to find religion within American mainstream comics, but finding it addressed meaningfully is. For all of the innovative exceptions named above, it remains the third rail of the adventurous, dominant genre, only temporarily shocking its characters. Thus, religion in comics can be likened to several concepts of God: it is everywhere and nowhere all at once.
(A. David Lewis is the cocreator of The Lone and Level Sands and Some New Kind of Slaughter with mpMann. Currently, he is working on his Ph.D. in Religion and Literature at Boston University and will be hosting the first "Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books & Graphic Novels" conference, April 11-13. More information on the conference is available here.)
