Tag Archives: comic-con

events, from the Internet

Pilgrimage to Nerd Prom in Esquire

In 2009, novelist Raven Leilani left her Seventh Day Adventist church. A year later, she attended the New York Comic-Con — and she found faith again.  As she wrote for Esquire last month:

When fandom is good, it is earnest, generative. I felt it then, how the event had been loved into existence, how it was particular and communal. But for women, it is complicated. By the time I was in college, my fandom had quieted. The decision to go to Comic Con was a hail Mary of sorts

EVAN DAVIS / GETTY IMAGES

The convention became an “accidental manifestation” to her and a testimony to the power people put into their fictions, “proof that the fantastic can be made real.”

Leilani’s new book Luster debuts this month.

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.

contributors, cultural, events

Sacred & Sequential Report from the San Diego Comic-Con, Part 1

Dr. Samantha LangsdaleSacred & Sequential has its own special correspondent Samantha Langsdale reporting exclusively for us from the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) – known more formally as the International Comic-Con San Diego. She has been sending us short blasts from on site concerning relevant events and products she has spotted:

A MINYEN YIDN coverToday [Thursday] there is a comics panel at 12:30 in 24abc called “A Bunch of Jews (A Minyen Yidn)”

With Hope Nicholson, Trina Robbins, and artists Jen Vaughn, Elizabeth Watasin, Miriam Libicki, and Willy Mendes.

As for the panel’s subtitle, A Minyen Yidn:

The title of the panel refers to an anthology they are creating.

Continue reading Sacred & Sequential Report from the San Diego Comic-Con, Part 1 →