Over at Women Write About Comics, two of S&S’s founding members, Elizabeth Coody and Chiristine Hoff Kraemer, engaged in a marvelous discussion about Kraemer’s role in the 2010 Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novelsand her subsequent work. Their interview lauds not only Carla Speed McNeil, the groundbreaking comic creator behind Finder, but also Jill Lapore’s work on the originator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston.
His Wonder Woman stories from the 1940s demonstrate distinctively different values, including a commitment to nonviolence. After his death, later writers took the character apart, until by the early 1960s Wonder Woman had been demoted to Secretary of the Justice League and would stay behind while the male superheroes left on missions. Wonder Woman has had a few interesting rewrites since then, some more sophisticated than others, but I don’t think she’s ever been as revolutionary a character as she was in those early days.
Read more on this and their views on Blankets, on Y the Last Man, and on Promethea here.
WUSTL’s “Hold That Thought” podcast featured an episode this week on “Religion and Comic Books: A Tangled Web.” Based at Washington University in St. Lewis, “Hold That Thought” spoke with Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies Roshan Abraham on what they initially considered the odd pairing of topic and medium. Abraham assured them that the linkages are numerous, from mythology to canonicity to Christology.
After the podcast, Abraham was kind enough to give a shout out to some of S&S’s own contributors:
On Monday, the Comics Alternative podcast hosted a “special roundtable” discussion featuring S&S’s own A. David Lewis, Elizabeth Coody, and Jeff Brackett on the subject of religion and comics. One-half of the show’s “2 Guys with PhDs,” Derek Royal, led the animated conversation, spanning all manner of engaging topics:
The subjects that come up during the discussion range from superheroes and myths, manifestations of the afterlife, adaptations of religious texts, biographies of religious leaders, expressions of heaven and hell, the crossroads of faith and ethnicity, and parodic (even heretical) representations of religious figures, doctrines, and practices.
To paraphrase The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like Habibi?
Collected here, S&S’s own Jeff Brackett, Dave McConeghy, and A. David Lewis take to Twitter to examine the issues with bringing Craig Thompson’s 2011 graphic novel into the college classroom. (And Nick Sousanis and Chris Dowdy each make a special appearance!)
Some further evidence of religion and comics penetrating ever more deeply into academia…in both a negative and positive light:
Bleeding Cooland the German magazine Tazreported that a graphic novel exhibition by the German university of Duisburg-Essen was the subject of outrage and vandalism by Muslim protestors. The “What Comics Can Do!” exhibit included art from Craig Thompson’s Habibi and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds that the protestors found offense for their use of the Arabic word for Allah and for presumably pro-Israel sentiments.
BU Today, a publication of Boston University, highlighted a recent article in its School of Theology Focus magazine, a profile on pastor Andrew Tripp and his appreciation for superheroes and comics in accomplishing his job. They had a foundational influence on him, he admits, ““The superheroes and the comeback characters spoke to something profound about what it meant to be human.”
@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic Religion
Over at Women Write About Comics, two of S&S’s founding members, Elizabeth Coody and Chiristine Hoff Kraemer, engaged in a marvelous discussion about Kraemer’s role in the 2010 Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and her subsequent work. Their interview lauds not only Carla Speed McNeil, the groundbreaking comic creator behind Finder, but also Jill Lapore’s work on the originator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston.His Wonder Woman stories from the 1940s demonstrate distinctively different values, including a commitment to nonviolence. After his death, later writers took the character apart, until by the early 1960s Wonder Woman had been demoted to Secretary of the Justice League and would stay behind while the male superheroes left on missions. Wonder Woman has had a few interesting rewrites since then, some more sophisticated than others, but I don’t think she’s ever been as revolutionary a character as she was in those early days.
WUSTL’s “Hold That Thought” podcast
On Monday, the Comics Alternative podcast hosted 
