Over at Sequart, Ian Dawe threads an intriguing connection between Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s milestone Superman story “For the Man Who Has Everything” and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Though Superman is frequently posited as a Christ figure, Dawe raises a number of thoughtful points on “Christian overtones” that likely hadn’t previously been applied to this work by the Watchmen team. Read more here.
Tag Archives: christianity
Wednesday Theology: Daring to Address God
Mitch Alfson of Wednesday Theology shared his 2012 paper from Dordt College’s The Christian Evasion of Popular Culture Conference. In it, he encourages his audience to look beyond the superhero genre for (the lack of) engagement with God, featuring Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon’s Preacher in particular. Read more here.
Millar (vs. Morrison’s) Christian Use for Swamp Thing
In their ongoing analysis of comic book writer Mark Millar’s body of superhero works, Sequart recently featured a piece written by Colin Smith on Millar’s Christian undertones for the Swamp Thing series, as compared to his collaborator Grant Morrison’s more universalist streak. Read here.
Deseret News Covers Comics and Faith
In November of 2013, Deseret News spoke with ComicBookReligion.com‘s Preston Hunter and S&S’s own A. David Lewis about the role of religion in comics, from Ms. Marvel to Kingstone Comics. Read here.
Sequart on Comics’ Christian Adaptations
In August, Sequart featured an essay by the University of Calgary’s Tom Miller writing on the “transformation project” of Christian comics. Though he admits to a “small sample,” Miller focuses the essay’s attention on a particular category of Christian comics, namely “the holy works adaption” and its “two sub-categories: the tribute and the telling.”
He differentiates between the two by noting that ‘tellings’…
…eschew the poetry of the source material. Spiritual matter aside, the Bible is a work of beautiful poetry. So perhaps another answer to the question of what these texts bring to the original is a negative answer: they bring a removal of the poetry of the Bible. This removal of poetry is one of the most significant differences between the telling and the tribute adaptations, as we will see.
Miller alludes to two other categories of Christian comics beyond holy works adaptations, so perhaps Sequart will have Miller produce two sequel essays in the not-too-distant-future.