Presented without comment — how the Comic Vine site profiles “God” in comics. (Warning: May be NSFW.)
Category Archives: from the Internet
Review – The Goddamned #3: The Mark of Cain (Sequart.org)
(The following article by Ian Dawe first appeared at Sequart.org on 4/7/2016. It is presented here with his permission.)
Jason Aaron’s The Goddamned is best described as a cross between the Bible and Mad Max, with all the brutality and wit that implies. But somehow it goes so far into the depths of inhumanity that it crosses over into being funny, and even joyful. There’s the spirit of a dare about the whole book, as if the creators are just pushing their imaginations as far as they can be pushed, well beyond the realm of bad taste. For example , an early scene in issue #3 features a flashback to just after Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, and Eve spits out the charming line, “Fuck you. The snake was more man than you are, you dickless coward.” Adam, serene and buff, simply cradles Cain in his hands and points out that the whole world is his for the taking. And what a world it is.
Continue reading Review – The Goddamned #3: The Mark of Cain (Sequart.org)
Superpowered, Mormon, and Gay: Brian Anderson’s STRIPLING WARRIOR
Last week, The Advocate provided coverage on the third in the Stripling Warrior comic book series, a superhero title featuring gay Mormon protagonists. As Advocate writers Neil Broverman and Jase Peeples note, Elders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints generally do not recognize the existence of homosexuals in their membership; while the attraction may be acknowledged, a committed relationship based on such impulses constitutes apostasy. QED: no homosexuals. As the lyrics to the Broadway stage show Book of Mormon quip, “It’s a cool little Mormon trick.”
Stripling Warrior creator Brian Anderson, on the other hand, feels that being gay and being Mormon (as well as being partnered, as he , “are not mutually exclusive.” And, his Kickstarter-supported series, with art by Jame Neish, “steeped within the mythology of the Mormon Church, depicted with healthy, queer sex lives” is intended to “be provocative and impactful.”
More information on the reception and future of the series can be found at Anderson’s So SuperDuper site.
Third Time’s the Charm: Steve Bergson on Barry Deutsch
Over at his Jewish Comics blog, S&S’s own Steve Bergson interviews Barry Deutsch on his latest installment of the Hereville series as well as the recent honor of once again winning the Sydney Taylor Award. The Hereville graphic novels feature, as quoted on the latest cover, “yet another 11-year-old time-traveling Orthodox Jewish babysitter” Mirka Hirschberg.
In their third interview together, Bergson asks Deutsch about his inspiration for Hereville: How Mika Caught a Fish:
When I first started writing this story, the villain was originally a magic chicken. But then I was inspired to use a magical fish character by a 2003 news story in New York, in which some Hasidic Jews reported hearing a carp in a fish market yell in Hebrew. This eventually got mixed up with the old fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife,” about a wish-granting Fish – the Brothers Grimm collected that fairy tale, among others.
More on this last of the 11-year-old Mirka books (not to rule out a 12-year-old Mirka’s set of adventures) and its link to Menachem Luchins in the interview!
DHQ Features “Graphic Images of YHWH,” Adapting Ezekiel to Comics
In their final issue of 2015, Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) dedicated nearly the entirety of its content to the theme “Comics as Scholarship.” Included among the sensational pieces there was B.J. Parker’s daring imagining and annotation of Ezekiel 16, a text “early Jewish communities were wary of including […and] Christian communities have likewise wrestled with.” Parker not only fashioned his own comics version of the scripture but also some of his own exegesis. Such an approach, says Parker, “requires the scholar/artist to engage in fascinating and novel means of reflection.”
See Parker’s graduate student profile at Baylor University. His full adaptation can be downloaded as a .PDF file or .CBZ file for viewing (sans annotations).