Category Archives: from the Internet

contributors, from the Internet, reviews

Jane Foster: Valkyrie – Glimpsing Transcendence in Death

[This column by Michael J. Miller originally appeared on his site My Comic Relief. It is copied here with the permission of the author.]

The centerpiece of Jason Aaron’s epic seven year run writing Thor: God of Thunder/The Mighty Thor/Thor was Jane Foster lifting Mjölnir when the Odinson found himself unworthy to do so.  She became Thor, the Goddess of Thunder, and the stories that followed were the best Thor comics I’ve ever read.  It may be the best executed single story arc I’ve ever ready in any comic ever.  When the Odinson eventually reclaimed his title as the God of Thunder, Jane returned her focus to her civilian life, medical career, and – most importantly – fighting the cancer raging inside her.  However, her superhero career was far from over and the stories Jane Foster now finds herself in (written first by Jason Aaron and Al Ewing and now by Jason Aaron and Torunn Grønbekk) dance along the mysterious, wonderous, frightening, sacred threshold that is the dividing line between life and death.

When the Dark Elf Maliketh’s War of the Realms invaded Earth, Jane – mortal and powerless but with her cancer now in remission – once more stood alongside gods and heroes to fight his evil army.  Maliketh’s forces were ultimately vanquished, but not without great sacrifice.  Among those fallen in battle were all the Valkyrie.  In Norse mythology (and similarly in the Marvel Universe) the Valkyrie are a race of warrior women who decide who lives and who dies in battle.  The Valkyrie then had the sacred duty of transporting the souls of those who died to the realm they’d reside in for their afterlife.  At the end of the War of the Realms, Jane Foster was given the responsibility and the gift of being the last Valkyrie.

Valkyrie 4

Jane bonds with Undrjarn at the end of the War of the Realms. / Photo Credit – Marvel Comics

Continue reading Jane Foster: Valkyrie – Glimpsing Transcendence in Death →

controversy, from the Internet, interviews, online

Bosch Fawstin and “Evil”

2 Comments

Generally speaking, Sacred and Sequential does not republish anything that could be construed as hate speech, bigotry, or prejudice. Amplifying these voices tends to work against our interfaith/multicultural efforts and encourage their further ugliness.

At the same time, there is also the responsibility not to look away, to engage the world as it is and not how we would like it to be. To that end, we’re sharing this January interview from the Randian Objective Standard with “tireless ex-Muslim cartoonist” Bosch Fawstin, an ‘update’ of sorts from earlier profiles on him and his work. In it, Fawstin elaborates on his view that “Islam is an evil ideology.”

https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/2020/01/bosch-fawstin-on-combating-the-evil-of-islam/

In May of 2018, Fawstin was suspended from Twitter due to “hateful conduct,” to which he responded with this piece.

Again, please note that sharing this interview should be in no way understood as an endorsement of Fawstin or The Objective Standard. Even so, if there is any area at all in which our site agrees with Fawstin, it is in terms of the right to free speech. It is good to know, out loud, where he and his supporters stand.

from the Internet

CBR’s Superhero Jewishness (emphasis on the -ishness)

Earlier this year, CBR took a stab at showcasing the influence of Jewish culture on the superhero genre in comics. After noting Stan Lee’s faith (though not Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, nor even Larry Lieber), the article did a countdown of eight characters “who celebrate their heritage.”

Harley Quinn’s as Jewish(-Catholic)

Of course, there are several problems to such coverage. First and foremost, there appears to be no range to Jewish identity necessarily; Moon Knight, the son of a rabbi, has equivalent Judaic identity as, say, Batwoman who long discounted that aspect of her history. Likewise, while Kitty Pryde has been recognized as Jewish from her earliest appearance, Magneto, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch have been retconned from Roma to Jews, and the Thing gave no evidence of his faith until recent years. In all, there’s something curiously flat and artificial to the Judaism they depict.

Even putting aside Harley Quinn and Magneto’s villainy or Scarlet Witch and Moon Knight’s mental instability, there seems little value assigned to the characters’ ethics or morals arising out of their Jewish identities and leading to heroic action. Is Judaism just a hereditary label, an ethnicity, or the lighting of a menorah?

cultural, from the Internet

Religion in the MCU Diegesis

In a fun but intriguing bit of a mental exercise, Fandom’s Lon Harris asks, if the events of Marvel Cinetmatic Universe films happened in real life, how might they affect faith and religion? It’s a question we at Sacred and Sequential have asked many times of the comics’ diegeses and storyworlds, so it’s a worthwhile scenario to consider for the film characters.

Harris speaks with Marvel Editor Tom Breevort “specifically, in a 2005 interview with the “:

Breevort explained that, in his mind, characters in the Marvel universe have a separate mental category for superheroes, independent from regular mortals or gods.

“For the average person in the Marvel universe,” Breevort explained, “they look at Thor and they say he is a superhero. He is no different than a Mr. Fantastic or Spider-Man or Cyclops; his get-up, his shtick, his whatever, is based on the mythological god of thunder. But I do not believe that most people in the Marvel universe actually believe he is the bona fide article.”

So denial — or, at least, lack of awareness — keep influence of religious institutions at bay. Eventually, though, “[e]very expert I spoke with — Christian or otherwise — felt that American evangelical Christianity would face the toughest challenges from the events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

from the Internet

Next Up for Superheroes: Religion?

Photo by RedZero44 on DeviantArt
Outside the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con

South Asia’s Madras Courier offered a novel op-ed this January from multi-hyphenate Tejaswy Nandury, which argues that the next evolution of comic book superheroes is into religion.

This thought may seem absurd to short term thinkers. If you, like me, are a long term strategist, you will instantly grasp this notion. Marvel already has the mythology, and the mass following, required to scale it up as a global religious operation. It just needs to add some necessary elements to give the MCU a religious gravitas.

Nandury seems to be thinking of the global and multicultural reach of Marvel Entertainment’s films, but he does acknowledge that the leap from page to screen was already the first step in this trajectory. More specifically, he feels that this “source material” that prizes science and liberal philosophy, not to mention capitalism, in its main ethos. This “scientific religion” can base its home and rituals in San Diego’s Comic-Con International, “just as Christmas evolved out of a pagan Roman festival.”

As quirky as Nandury’s idea might be, the only part of it that is actually erroneous is his thinking on its soteriology: Marvel’s comics and films already has a mess of options concerning “salvation” (some of which were explored in this episode of the Vox Populorum podcast, incidentally). However outlandish Nandury’s proposal might be, it’s only this element of it that would need of revision, serious or otherwise.