By Michael Arthur Soares
de Groot, Kees, editor. Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
The chapters of Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined cover diverse concepts while addressing three questions put forward by Editor Kees de Groot: “How do comics appear and function in the context of religion,” “How do religions appear and function in comics,” and “How does the social role of comics relate to the social role of religion?” (7). de Groot promises that “comics” is defined generally throughout the chapters and that “religion” is understood as “the cultural construction of what counts as religion,” referring to what other scholars have designated “liquid religion, implicit religion, or invested religion when tracing the sacred in the context of the secular” (4). Perhaps the reader’s progression through the concepts set forth in this volume can therefore best be described as a “pilgrimage”—the focus of Chapter 9, “Manga Pilgrimages: Visualizing the Sacred/Sacralizing the Visual in Japanese Junrei” by Mark MacWilliams. In this essay, MacWilliams discusses pilgrimages as not necessarily religious, but as a religion-esque exploration of powerful meanings and locations derived from works like TV series Raki*Suta (“Lucky Star” 2007) and comics like Nagatani Kunio’s Manga Saikoku sanjûsan fudasho Kannon junrei. A “secular pilgrimage,” a concept MacWilliams credits to Takeshi Okamoto, describes “religious-like,” as opposed to religious, activities (157). In each chapter of Comics, Culture, and Religion, the reader is accordingly taken on a secular pilgrimage of comics and image-based texts that is “guided by an interest in society, culture and media” (de Groot 8).
The question “sacred for whom?” binds these chapters together. In Chapter 6, “What Would Preacher Do? Tactics of Blasphemy in the Strategies of Satire and Parody,” Michael J. Prince, using Preacher as example, claims the series “calls to it an audience who may not have a strong notion of the sacred on any level, religious, nationalist, or consumerist. Rather, religion for this audience can be seen as a marker for those outside of their ingroup affinity” (92). Contrastingly, Evelina Lundmark, in Chapter 3, “Cancelling the Second Coming: Manufactured Christian Outrage Online,” documents how a contingency of Christian nationalists mobilized to combat perceived blasphemy and successfully blocked a satirical account of the return of Christ to be published by Vertigo Comics, an imprint of DC Comics. On the whole, Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined maintains a versatile perspective free from dogma.
The collection of essays is presented in four sections bookended with introduction and conclusion chapters by de Groot. Part 1 examines functions of “Comics in Religion” with topics as diverse as Christian magazines for youth in Norway, Zoroastrianism, and the aforementioned satirical take on the second coming of Christ. Irene Trysnes’ Chapter 2, “From Subordinates to Superheroes? Comics in Christian Magazines for Children and Youth in Norway,” picks up on de Groot’s interpretation of “liquid religion” as it investigates the complicated trajectories of comics associated with terms such as “moral,” “mission” and “Bible.” One particularly liquid comic lesson illustrates children in a swimming pool retelling the biblical account of the man healed at the Pool of Bethesda. Trysnes argues that the comic “functions as the medium for telling an old Bible story” but the “context is western and modern” (24). Paulina Niechcial writes in Chapter 4, “The Reception of Comics on Zoroastrianism,” that comics serve an important role for a sect of believers because they “may be a way to share knowledge of Zoroastrianism with others and legitimize the identity of the followers of this largely unknown religion” (59). As illustrated media increasingly introduces Zoroastrianism “outside the realm traditionally associated with religion” (51), Niechcial’s research demonstrates how followers appreciate the positive exposure afforded by projects such as Richard Marzanno’s Zarathustra while rejecting a Charlie Hebdo-style “insult” reaction (59).
Part 2: “Religion in Comics,” tackles comics on Krishna, parody in the Preacher series, and Islam. Several chapters in this section are concerned with humor, addressing a tension between dogma and entertainment in their cited texts. Chapter 5, “Drawn into Krishna: Autobiography and Lived Religion in the Comics of Kaisa and Christoffer Leka” by Andreas Häger and Ralf Kauranen, investigates the role of humor in the texts as mitigating potential offence. Correspondingly, Prince’s “Preacher” essay describes a “double-coding” that “lampoons the text it inhabits, playing off of genre expectations” (98). Chapter 7, “Islam and Anxieties of Liberalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi,” is a particularly powerful piece by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri. In addition to chronicling Habibi’s problematic portrayal of Arabs, particularly in context of post-9/11 sensibilities, it considers the stories of the text that GhaneaBassiri argues express “anxiety associated with liberalism” that approaches the “level of personal relations,” “intercultural and interreligious relations within American society” and “international relations within the context of global capitalism” (109). In one example, GhaneaBassiri demonstrates how a scene depicting a middle-aged man consummating a marriage with his nine-year old slave bride encapsulates these anxieties, callously conflating the commercial and the carnal with the divine.
Part 3: “Comics as Religion?” examines relatively mainstream graphic novels in Chapter 8, “Implicit Religion and Trauma Narratives in Maus and Watchmen” by Ilaria Biano. In this chapter, these popular texts “bearing identity and meaning” are placed in “unconventional contexts” including “implicit religion” in which “texts combine explicit and implicit forms of religion, oftentimes overlapping them, and building the religious/secular ‘divide’ more as a continuum” (131-132). From there, MacWilliams’s Chapter 9 facilitates a secular pilgrimage through the Japanese Junrei that can “liberate people from their humdrum existence by traveling to sacred centers” (147). The author highlights how Lucky Star, a manga series and anime adaptation, has stirred fans to make pilgrimages to real life locations that inspired the anime. MacWilliams also questions whether the “amusing stories” of texts like Lucky Star, while fictional and not considered sacred, “still do the job of work of religion?” likening the “religious-like” activities of anime readers to fans of science fiction films like Star Wars that have inspired “invented religions” like “Jediism.” The chapter explores how many fans of Lucky Star, like many in Star Wars fandom, have embraced the “meanings and values” in fictional worlds in ways more profound than traditional religions (158-159). The appreciation of invented religions is illuminated by the final chapter in the section that presents Sofia Sjö’s research on the what, why and how of comic book reading habits for adults. Sjö’s study, that included selecting participants who are academics or active in “science fiction and /or fantasy fandom” for interviews, investigates how comics inform “what we do and what gives us pleasure, peace, or the energy to live our lives to the best of our abilities” in relation to “contemporary meaning making and lived religion” (182).
Part 4: “Learning from Comics,” adds a fourth question: “What and how do comics teach about culture, about religion, and about the intertwinement of the religious and the social?” (de Groot 8). In Chapter 11, “The Magic of the Multiverse: Easter Eggs, Superhuman Beings, and Metamodernism in Marvel’s Story Worlds,” Sissel Undeim highlights how the Scarlet Witch, Loki and Moon Knight, protagonists of three Marvel television shows, are never situated as “either good or bad characters,” their allure ensconced “by the fact that the audience never quite knows where they stand, or what their next move will be” (195). The complicated and ambiguous natures of these characters represent a “destabilizing” force against the “set narrative of heroes and villains.” While religion, particularly in its most didactic forms, can act as a stabilizing force in many ways, Undeim demonstrates how the Marvel multiverse subverts this force by eliciting “the audience’s sympathy as they emotionally invest and engage with” traumas that “are also the cause of flawed, and even immoral, behavior” (195). Chapter 13, “A Contract with God or a Social Contract?” is Christophe Monnot’s examination of Will Eisner’s 1978 A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, a graphic novel that mines Eisner’s Jewish heritage and impoverished Brooklyn upbringing for thematically intertwined narratives. Monnot probes the convictions of the main character of A Contract with God, a young man who leaves his Jewish community in Russia for a new, pious life in New York City. His contract with God is broken by the death of his adopted daughter, and he transitions from his Hasidic life to one of corruption. Monnot observes that “Eisner’s narrative of contract discussions reminds sociologists that a negotiation, even a highly religious one, is always deeply embedded in a social background and context” (235), in turn reminding readers of Comics, Culture, and Religion that each interaction of comics, religion and culture in the collection negotiates with social backgrounds and contexts as forces shaping interpretation of the texts and, ultimately, our responses to the authors’ analyses.
One drawback to the collection is the dearth of imagery, punctuating the need for a book fundamentally about illustrations to include adequate and useful illustrations. Publishing and printing pictures in a book can be a prohibitive expense, and unfortunately the List of Illustrations shows that there are only twenty pictures spread among six, or less than half, of the chapters. Without question, the analyses that include illustrations have the greatest impact throughout this collection. Instantly recognizable characters with broad appeal such as Loki and Donald Duck make for easily accessible analysis, but when the subject of an essay is more obscure, and illustrations are not provided, it is more challenging to approach the “comic” aspect of the text. As with many contemporary books that present scholarship relying heavily on comic books and other visual arts but lack comprehensive illustrations, a more complete understanding of the readings requires one to go online. Therefore, examining and fully comprehending the varied text examples in this anthology requires a commitment to tracking down, and sometimes translating, a variety of graphic texts from across the globe. However, most of the texts referenced in this volume have imagery online, and in some cases entire texts are available to purchase or even free to download. For example, many issues of the Amar Chitra Katha educational comics series discussed in Chapter 12 have been scanned and are downloadable, gratis, from the Internet Archive.
To borrow MacWilliam’s concept of secular pilgrimage as a lens in which to view the book, Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined navigates a variety of religions, cultures and comic forms, but achieves the cohesive goal of demonstrating “the manifold ways in which life and religion are intermingled in the comics” (Häger and Kauranen 67). In his concluding chapter, “Comics as a Way of Doing, Encountering, and Making Religion,” de Groot ruminates, “How does the study of comics contribute to our understanding of religion in contemporary societies, which are sometimes characterized as liquid, that is, having floating boundaries between the institutional spheres, including the religious?” (239). Clearly, a simple response to this complex question is not provided in this volume, nor does one even exist elsewhere. Nevertheless, a secular pilgrimage through this collection offers compelling possibilities, ranging from the personal to the globalized, with a rich mix of specifically institutional, broadly popular and even uniquely localized comic texts offered to bear the scrutiny. Ultimately, a progression through the chapters reveals the fluidity of sacred and secular in the liquid religion realms of comics in religion and, conversely, religion in comics. The unique intersections of text and tenets presented in the collection invariably point to a dilution of traditional theoretical boundaries that both informs and broadens the fields of comic and religious studies.
