Following our year-end listing of the top new stories in 2019, the question arose as to what were the top overall postings in 2019. That is, what were the most-read articles, regardless of what year they were published.
So, to satisfy curiosity, here are Sacred and Sequential‘s most-read pages over the course of 2019:
Review – Toscano and Hartmann-Dow’s The Amazing Adventures of the Afterbirth of Jesus
More Than You Ever Wanted to Know on Black Panther and Religion
A multitude of issues pertaining to religion and comics have filled the media and the Sacred and Sequential site in 2016: Islamophobia, superhero gods, idolatry and blasphemy, proselytizing, memorializing. Below are the five most-read articles from our pages; in toto, they all seem to orbit concerns of the medium’s essential alignment with either Christianity, Judaism, or the far, far more esoteric. Is there battle for the “soul” of comics amassing?
5. Four-Color Christ Jesus
10/31: Ron Edwards of Comics Madness penned this birthday reflection on Jesus, comics, Jack T. Chick, and The Cross and the Switchblade (along with eye-opening comments from his readers).
4. Jack T. Chick dies at 92
10/25: Jack T. Chick likewise headlines this post by Martin Lund, who explores the difficulty of Chick’s impact and legacy.
3. Jews and Comics: The Decade in Review
2/2: The Jewish Comics Blog‘s Steven Bergson addresses the flaws in religion & comics reportage, particularly by a January Haartez article.
2. Questioning Frank Miller and Superman’s “Jewish Essence”
10/13: Lund approaches the “Judaism and comics” issue from a new perspective, this time triggered by Frank Miller’s comments to CBR.com.
1. Sacred Texts: Lovecraft, Alan Moore, and Religion in Providence
2/9: Bobby Derie of Facts in the Case of Providence gives S&S readers a tour of Alan Moore’s latest (and last?) comics series along with its deep linkages to the study of religion.
(Facts in the Case of Providence is a collaborative blog by Joe Linton, Alexx Kay, and Bobby Derie dedicated to annotating Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence and Neonomicon from Avatar Press. In what follows, Derie gives S&S readers a sense of the works’ layers and linkages to the study of religion.)
The seeker of truth for its own sake is chained to no conventional system, but always shapes his philosophical opinions upon what seems to him the best evidence at hand. Changes, therefore, are constantly possible; and occur whenever new or revalued evidence makes them logical.
– H. P. Lovecraft, “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922) [Lovecraft 2010, 1]
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an atheist materialist, who in light of reflection and the discoveries of science dismissed the orthodoxies and mythologies of the world’s religions, saying such beliefs “could not possibly arise from a close and impartial survey of nature and the cosmos today[.]” (Lovecraft 2010, 89) While he may have lacked belief in God or the supernatural, Lovecraft at least appreciated the importance of the religious feeling, as he expressed in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927):
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.
Lovecraft’s own mythos, inspired by that of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen, was filled with indifferent, alien entities that satisfied both his materialism and his cosmicism; these were not airy spiritual beings, but creatures of matter—yet possessed too of tremendous capabilities and knowledge, and were subjects of worship by strange cults, some of which predated humanity, and their scriptures were terrible tomes like the Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Cultes des Goules, and Livre d’Eibon.
Alan Moore (1953-) is a ceremonial magician who works in a pantheistic cosmology, taking the ancient Roman god Glycon as his primary deity. (Doyle-White 29) Moore’s approach to Lovecraft is flavored by his interest in the occult, and by Moore’s careful study of the critical literature that has developed surrounding Lovecraft’s life and writings. (Derie) In part, this is an outgrowth of Moore’s continual interest in the blurring between fiction and reality, as expressed in works like From Hell by Moore and Eddie Campbell.
Continue reading Sacred Texts: Lovecraft, Alan Moore, and Religion in PROVIDENCE
Around this time last year, S&S’s own David McConeghy penned a compelling piece for Sacred Matters on the integration and, arguably, augmentation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu gods in the narrative structure of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy — the comics series, its spin-offs, and its cinematic adaptations.
McConeghy hails this aspect of the Hellboy franchise in saying:
[I]t is foremost a comic that embraces the gothic as Lovecraft did in the interwar years in New England. The comic delights in paranormal abilities that connect to worlds beyond our own. It celebrates the prophetic as a link to authentic religious pasts long forgotten. It satisfies our desire to live in a demon-haunted world but feel protected by honorable, if flawed, guardians.
Part of Hellboy‘s success, he suggests, is Mignola’s employment of Rudolph Otto’s mysterium tremendum es fascinans, “the mystery that both repels and attracts us.” The titular hero of Hellboy is a product of that same dark mystery he both seeks to confront and defend us from: “Thank goodness for Hellboy,” acknowledges McConeghy, showing the fictional character’s engagement with a fictional religion as compelling stage for real-life religiosity.
