From the Perry Bible Fellowship website, presented without comment:
Thanks to James McGrath for alerting us to PBF‘s return!
Tag Archives: christianity
Asher J. Klassen Discusses Comics, Semiotics, and Islam – Draws Superhero Afterlife
One of S&S’s founding members Asher J. Klassen gave the following lecture this week at Durham University’s Theology and Religion Department.
In this lecture I tackle first and foremost the matter of censorship, both in the lecture hall and as it pertains to depictions of Muhammad in modern media. I look at the prophet in animation and then in comics, before moving on to discuss some of the visual functions of the comics medium and connecting visual abstraction as presented by McCloud to identity as defined by religious symbols. After a brief comparison of the idea of bodily representation in Christianity and Islam I close with some thoughts on the human drive as meaning-making, cultural animals and the role of censorship as we create our history.
(The audio for the recording is a little quiet, so turn up your speakers if need be; it begins around 1:30.)
Klassen also collaborated with another S&S founding member, A. David Lewis, on an eight-page comics version of Lewis’s book American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife as “The Superhero Afterlife (Abridged)” for the Sacred Matters web magazine of public scholarship.
Read the full comic here.
Review of HOLY F*CK #1: “Small chuckles” but “already done”
Hitting the stands on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck #1 (Action Lab: Danger Zone) seemed to confirm what it says in Ecclesiastes; there is nothing new under the sun. A heaven-hell team-up? Garth Ennis’ Chronicles of Wormwood gave us that. A hedonistic bad-ass champion of God? Robert Kirkman’s Battle Pope. A heavily armed – Rambo-style – Jesus? Warren Ellis’ Bad World. The one thing that seems novel in Holy F*ck is its alliance of forgotten deities bent on destruction in order to once again get people to believe in them. But this, too, has some precedents, even if not as directly comparable – Marvel Comic’s Council of Godheads immediately comes to mind for the gathering, and the worship-hungry old gods are reminiscent in some ways of the old gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the alien Goa’uld of Stargate SG-1, for example. And Jesus long ago came off the cross to duke it out with Zeus in Godyssey, because the Greek god was fed up with having lost worshippers to the new monotheism.
Holy F*ck #1 is the first of four issues of what the advance material calls “an edgy satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” The plot so far is pretty straight-forward: a nun, as yet unnamed, seeks out – literally finds – Jesus so he can help her save the world from Polydynamis, Inc., a multinational company bent on worldwide destruction. Led by Zeus and Isis, and with a board consisting of a handful of other old, no longer worshipped gods, the group wants to plunge the world into chaos so that people will pray for help; by responding to those prayers, the thinking goes, the Polydynamis board will once again be worshipped by humanity. The issue ends with Jesus and the nun traveling to New Jersey (complete with parodied Jersey Shore beach bums) to enlist some backup from hell.
Continue reading Review of HOLY F*CK #1: “Small chuckles” but “already done”
Knights Templar + Prince of Persia = Heist Comic
First, Jordan Mechner gave us Prince of Persia, the highly successful video game (and less successful movie, at least domestically). Then, in 2013, Mechner resumed completing his 2010 graphic novel with LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland. The result was First Second Books’ Templar — what Boing Boing writer (and fellow graphic novelist of In Real Life) Cory Doctorow described as
…a conspiracy thriller about the treasure of the Knights Templar, an order of Crusaders who were persecuted by the King of France in the early 1300s…
Karin L. Kross at Tor.com evaluated Templar as “a heist in the best tradition of Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job.” Read Mechner’s own account of the completed hardcover here.
Jesus, Comics, and the Gospels from Scott S. Elliott
One of S&S’s newest members, Scott S. Elliott, shared his terrific Postscripts paper on “Jesus in the Gutter: Comics and Graphic Novels Reimagining the Gospels” on his Academia.edu page. It’s free to read, even without a membership! Read more about it here.