On Saturday, November 18, 2017, the American Academy of Religion annual conference hosted the panel “Responses to Muslim Superheroes,” including presentations by Elizabeth Coody, Mohamed Hassan, Constance Kassor, and Aaron Ricker, with Scott Gardner as presider and A. David Lewis as respondent. Here are their presentations in their entirety from that morning session.
In a recent e-mail to Sacred and Sequential founder A. David Lewis, Eisner Award-winning comics creator Mike Baron wrote the following:
I am no longer involved with this project.
Baron was writing in reference to the Based Stick Man Graphic Novel, whose Facebook site, at the time of this writing, still features his name prominently as its writer and has made no further announcement. Sacred and Sequential spoke with Baron in August for his views on the project at that time.
Offering no additional explanation, Baron steps away from this alt-right project both as its Indiegogo fundraising page has disappeared and as provocateur Vox Day’s Alt★Hero series (discussed previously by guest columnist Sean Kleefeld) has apparently raised over ten times its campaign goal on the new “free speech” crowdfunding platform FreeStartr. Whether the BSM project could resurface on FreeStartr is unknown at this time.
As of last month, comics writer Chuck Dixon remains attached to the Alt★Hero volumes. Vox Day (aka Theodore Robert Beale) continues to tweet publicly about the project:
https://twitter.com/voxday/status/914164822119473152
https://twitter.com/voxday/status/914112394749730818
[The following piece was originally published at KleedfeldOnComics.com and it is reposted here with the author’s permission.]
On Business: Dixon on Alt-Hero
A couple of weeks back, Vox Day launched a crowd-funding campaign for his brand new comic called Alt-Hero which Day describes as “A new alternative comic series intended to challenge and eventually replace the SJW-converged comics of DC and Marvel.” It garnered a bit of news because Day is a right-wing petty asshole who’s an active racist. He led the 2015 and 2016 “rabid puppies” campaigns to deny any people of color from the Hugo Awards, mostly out of spite for not actually winning an award himself in 2014. He later described his actions as, “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were. All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.”
Now first off, it’s absolutely laughable that he thinks he can replace Marvel and DC. Politics aside, Marvel and DC have each been making superhero comics for the better part of a century; they do superhero comics very, very well. No one in the past fifty years has come close to even touching their sales on superhero comics. They’re not invulnerable, certainly, but any and every problem they have had and will have is of their own making, not because of a competitor. If someone else is able to usurp their place as premier superhero comic publisher, it will be because they got out of publishing comics.
Second, “SJW-converged comics of DC and Marvel”? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Seriously, no definition of “converged” makes sense in this context. If that’s the level of writing he’s bringing to Alt-Hero, Marvel and DC have nothing to be worried about. Hell, anyone making mini-comics out of their parents’ basement has nothing to be worried about. If I had to guess, I suppose he’s trying to say that Marvel and DC have been taken over by social justice warriors and that they have been pushing a decidedly leftist agenda. Which clearly is not the case if you actually look at any of their books. But Day is doing what he does — whipping up conspiracies to make it look like white men are being oppressed. Because his mediocre work isn’t celebrated enough.
OK, all of that is old news. I only mention it to make sure you’re up to speed on who this asswipe is. (And why I’m not linking to any of it!)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Any links have been provided by Sacred and Sequential.]
For the largest collection of Indian comics in the U.S., including those about Hindu myth, lore, and religion, one would want to travel to the University of Illinois where Mara Thacker, librarian and professor in South Asian studies, has curated a collection along with reference services librarian David Ward.
“The uniqueness is one of the things we first thought about,” Ward said. “It’s an area that’s not being collected heavily elsewhere in the United States, which provides the opportunity to have this unique collection.”
In addition to compiling the collection, cataloguing it has been its own “beast,” reports Nicole Ream-Sotomayor, foreign language cataloging specialist. “The comics proved to be the hardest material she has ever had to catalog,” reports Stephanie Kim of The Daily Illini.
The inspiration for such a collection, reports Jodi Heckel of The Illinois News Bureau, came from the library’s initial collection of comics and graphic novels as well as its push for foreign-language material. Spinning out of a workshop of he Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation, Thacker engaged in the task.
Along with the comics themselves, the library offers useful online LibGuide for research and popular resources on the topic, along with a go-to bibliography.
Tacker can be followed on Twitter as @marathacker.
[The following piece was originally published at Women Write About Comics in two parts; and it is reposted here with the author’s permission, for the first time in its entirety.]
My cocktail party introduction of myself is basically, “I’m a religion scholar working on a dissertation that uses a comics to interpret religious text.” Maybe it’s not the smoothest handshake, but it’s a place to start. When I tell people this, I occasionally get quizzical looks from strangers who wonder how comics relate to religion at all. Either that or they are wondering if they are going to need another cocktail before we get into a conversation. The comics/religion relationship is a fantastic tangle that needs to be sorted out when we get into deep discussions. If we talk about religion and comics without sorting this out, we risk all kinds of misunderstandings and hurt feelings, not to mention frustrating cocktail parties.
Religion and comics have been in some sort of relationship for millennia. Stained glass church windows are a familiar Christian example; they tell the stories that are important to the builders of particular churches in different styles. Ancient peoples used comics-type language in cave paintings and Egyptian tombs to express their relationship to the supernatural. Although my own work centers mostly on Christian relationships to comics, I want to stress that there is much more out there to be discovered in comics from all the world’s religions. Comics are a medium that can deliver a particular message where text and images interact to create narrative and emotional results—something that religions of all stripes often strive to do and that comics can do with religious effect.
I conceive of the relationship between comics and religion in four categories: comics as religion, comics in religion, religion in comics, and religion and comics in dialogue. In this month’s installation, I’ll give you the first two categories (comics AS religion and comics IN religion), but be sure to follow along for the exciting conclusion soon. These categories are modeled on the four relationships between religion and popular culture more broadly as outlined in by Bruce David Forbes in his introduction to this great popular culture book with Jeffrey Mahan. They are solid tools for tackling a very messy relationship.
Continue reading The Tangled Relationship Between Religion and Comics
