To paraphrase The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like Habibi?
Collected here, S&S’s own Jeff Brackett, Dave McConeghy, and A. David Lewis take to Twitter to examine the issues with bringing Craig Thompson’s 2011 graphic novel into the college classroom. (And Nick Sousanis and Chris Dowdy each make a special appearance!)
Johanna Draper Carlson, the long-time driving force behind Comics Worth Reading, recently issued her review of The Tithe #1 from Image Comics, and it was too fitting not to reprint here (with her permission):
The Tithe is a heist story set in a megachurch carried out by a bunch of hackers.
I have no idea what’s going to happen next, and that’s a good thing when it comes to adventure comics these days. Launching the book with a quote by Jim Bakker while pointing out his time in jail sets a certain mood as well.
Matt Hawkins writes and Rahsan Ekedal draws the tale. A heavily armed crew wearing Jesus masks breaks into the cash room of a church that’s raking in the dough. Meanwhile, the many screens surrounding the gesticulating preacher are hacked by “Samaritan” to show what the leader is really up to with all that money.
Two FBI agents, a church-going family man and a reformed hacker, are sent to find out who’s behind the theft, but along the way, they wonder why the pastor is lying about how much money was taken. This is one in a series of thefts, and all the churches hit turn out to be committing fraud, which makes the agents less than sympathetic to the case they’re investigating.
Religion is an important motivator for a lot of people, but most comics stay away from it. I’m intrigued to see a book with a distinct point of view (against greed and hypocrisy) that’s taking a more nuanced approach.
The dialogue tilts a bit too much toward the expository, with characters telling each other their histories and motivations, but the art is solid without being as exaggerated as one fears from a Top Cow title. The text pages tell Hawkins’ history as a former Christian, which helps put the material in perspective, as well as showing character sketches for the two agents. (The publisher provided a digital review copy.)
Image’s page for The Tithe calls the FBI agents’ quarry a “modern day Robin Hood,” but the religious overtones (and imagery) seem too strong to overlook. (Or, alternatively, it may make one rethink the religious themes of the Robin Hood myth itself.)
Virginia Commonwealth University is featuring a new gallery exhibition entitled, “Gods and Prophets, Sages and Saints: Religious Imagination in Popular Culture.” Their James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections feature a variety of comics works that,
while the temptation is to assume that religious expression in popular media must be kitsch–or at least bad art–and probably bad theology, a closer look reveals a more complex reality. While many examples of those stereotypes exist, there are also examples of deep spirituality and fine storytelling resulting in works of great power and beauty.
No reviews of the exhibit have been made known yet to Sacred and Sequential, however:
Something a little offensive saying, "Superman is Jewish," then featuring this picture? https://t.co/2oQfESgE6n pic.twitter.com/1D9AVvahuQ
— A. David Lewis 🍉 (@adlewis) April 10, 2015
The following announcement has been released and authorized for republishing and redistribution. Please feel free to copy the content below, link to this posting, or share this PDF of the Call for Papers:
Call for Papers
Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation
Editors: A. David Lewis and Martin Lund
Now accepting chapter proposals for new collection with established publisher interest!
Despite turning a rather blind eye to them through much of the twentieth century, major American comic book publishers like Marvel Comics and DC Comics have featured, in the twenty-first century, numerous Muslim superhero characters, with the seeming intention to diversify their fictional universes and to provide corrective representations of Muslims in a cultural moment when stereotype and vilification of Muslims and Islam is particularly rife. The most recent example is Marvel’s Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel, Feb. 2014). Although it might be easy to dismiss Ms. Marvel as something peripheral, she was discussed in various mainstream media long before her first appearance. High praise was expressed by Muslims and non-Muslims who thought the character could help “normalize” Muslims in American eyes while vehement opposition was voiced by critics who regarded her as “appeasement” of Muslims. As recently as January 2015, the character was plastered on anti-Muslim ads in San Francisco, illustrating the cultural power such characters can attain. It seems clear that, today, Muslim superheroes and Islam in comic books, more generally matter greatly to a large number of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Of course, Muslim superheroes are not restricted to the post-9/11 years, to the major superhero publishers, nor to the United States. There have been limited examples of Muslim superheroes in American superhero comics since their so-called “Golden Age.” And, smaller American publishers have created characters like Buraaq and the Silver Scorpion. More importantly, in recent years a steady stream of successful Muslim superhero comics has been emerging from Islamic contexts, ranging from the now multinational The 99 to the activist webcomic Qahera, much of which has also met with both approval and condemnation at home and abroad.
However, neither the historical precedents for the most recent American characters nor the contemporary diversity among Muslim superheroes is widely known. Although the Muslim superhero is becoming an increasingly important cultural phenomenon, it is still understudied and ill-understood, as is the representation of Islam in comics generally. Therefore, we are now looking for chapter proposals for the edited volume Muslim Superheroes. Through a series of close readings, this collection will study how Muslim and non-Muslim comics creators and critics have produced, reproduced, and represented different conceptions of Islam and Muslimness, embodied in superhero comics characters specifically and comic book protagonists more generally.
The purpose of the collection is threefold. First, it will assemble studies of a variety of comics characters and, thus, begin to outline the long history and diversity of Muslim superheroes. Second, it will attempt to answer some basic questions about these characters: why do Muslim superheroes keep being created?; what purposes do they serve?; how do they succeed (and how do they fail) in performing their assigned duties as signifiers of one conception of Islam or another? Third, it sets out to consider the extent of the impact Muslim superheroes have and will continue to have on both the genre and its audiences today. Possible topics for proposals include, but are not limited to:
Please send a short synopsis (no more than 150 words) of your chapter, a full abstract (no more than 800 words), as well as contact information, affiliation, and a short CV with publication list to a.lewis@mcphs.edu by April 30, 2015. Feel free to direct any questions to Martin Lund at p.martin.lund@gmail.com.
***
About the Editors
A. David Lewis is the co-editor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels (Bloomsbury) and Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age (Praeger). He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Boston University and is both an Executive Board Member of the Comics Studies Society and a founding member of Sacred & Sequential.
Martin Lund is a Swedish Research Council International Postdoc at Linnaeus University and Visiting Research Scholar at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Lund University and is an editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art and a contributing member of Sacred & Sequential.
One of Sacred & Sequential’s founding members Asher J. Klassen has written an impressive and notable response to the controversy over Rafael Albuquerque’s Batgirl cover currently occurring the superhero industry and fandom.
Asher comments, regarding the controversial cover’s relationship to the 1998 Alan Moore and Brian Bolland one-shot comic The Killing Joke:
The Killing Joke is a brilliant story. It is also absolutely, fundamentally, a problematic story. For those of you who haven’t read it, a brief synopsis: this is the tale of Oracle’s origin, in which Barbara Gordon is attacked at home by the Joker, who shoots her through the spine and strips her, leaving her naked and paralyzed on the floor while he takes pictures…pictures he later uses to psychologically torment her father, Jim. It’s a classic example within the comics canon of a woman being victimized simply to provide a point of pathos for a male hero. Barbara suffers greatly, and is left paralyzed for life, but her ordeal is inconsequential to the story; the focus is on Jim as he bears witness to his daughter’s trauma. People are upset because this story bothers them. It should. It needs to bother us; we need to to be bothered by it; it is brilliant because it bothers us.
Stories that don’t bother us are not worth writing.
In addition to featuring this post by an S&S member, we are also inclined to ask what relationship, if any, this issue may have to religious imagery and iconography. Do some religious similarly feature/exploit women in threatening situations? Should “trigger warnings” be part of religious discourse, particularly with faiths’ visuals? Or is censorship overextending itself in some way that religious liberties might oppose? To what degree are even religious audiences willing to be “bothered” — willing to tolerate some level of being disturbed — for the sake of a story and its meaning?
Read entirety of Asher’s post here.
