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.
I have been asked to comment on a short piece that was published yesterday on CBR.com, which I have to agree calls out for a response and fact-check. The piece announced that Frank Miller has said in an New York Comic-Con interview that he wants to “tackle one of the oldest, but oft overlooked, origin stories in the entire industry: Superman’s Jewish heritage.” The article then goes on to make a few questionable claims, many of which I have seen before, in my research on Superman and the so-called “Jewish-comics connection.” This notion holds that Superman, and – depending on who you read – the superhero genre, the US comics industry, or the comics medium itself, were created by Jews and has a sort of “Jewish essence.”
Let us return to the quoted line about Superman’s supposed, but “oft overlooked” origin story and Jewish heritage. It does not take much effort to poke a hole in the claim that this is an overlooked topic. In the past ten years alone, numerous books have been published that have this issue as their central focus: in 2006, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein published Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero; in 2007, comics writer and writing teacher Danny Fingeroth published Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero; in 2008 comedian and journalist Arie Kaplan published From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books; and in 2012 masculinity scholar Harry Brod published Superman is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. On top of this, there are several other books about Superman or Jews and comics more generally, as well as innumerable newspaper and online articles, in which claims about Superman’s “Jewish origins” are similarly made. Let us also not forget that what Miller proposes has already been done; in 1998, for Superman’s 60th anniversary, DC put out a series of Man of Steel comic books in which the superhero traveled back in time to face the Nazis and in which Siegel and Shuster’s Jewish heritage got a nod.
As entertaining and interesting reading as the books and articles mentioned may provide, they suffer from a lack of support for their arguments, and rely mostly on recycling the same tropes and claims in a sort of internal feedback loop. This has led to a collection of common assumptions about what Superman “is,” based on nothing but the fact that his creators were Jewish. But once you shine a light on these claims, they start to fall apart. I will not go into a more general charting of these books or their claims here – for that, you can check out my forthcoming book on the subject or this post on my old, now-defunct blog – but will focus only on the latest article.
In advance of the Spring 2017 release of Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation, Mizan has been featuring a series of related articles on its Mizan Pop site. The first, dated this past summer, provides an overview of that category’s — “Muslim superheroes” — history.
The study of Muslim superheroes has only quite recently begun in earnest, with scholars like comics historian Fredrik Strömberg and French scholar Shirin Edwin publishing some of the first scholarly articles in this specific field in 2011. There has been a small but steady stream of work on the subject since. Regrettably, while some of this scholarship is of high quality, it has, to date, been scattered over multiple disciplines, and new work has only rarely been in dialogue with what has come before.
In theory, Muslim Superheroes, edited by A. David Lewis and Martin Lund, is intended to further that dialogue and provide stronger connective tissue between the disciplines on the topic. Their promotional Facebook page features links to some of that “steady stream on the subject” and a preview of the book jacket (featuring art by Qaheraartist Deena Mohamed).
This Fall, Palgrave Pivot is releasing Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish–Comics Connection by S&S’s own Martin Lund. The super-sized title only hints at the herculean task Lund has taken on: To objectively explore the Judaic origins to the Last Son of Krypton’s publications, too often a site of distortion an mythicism. Rather than discard Superman’s Jewishness wholly, Lund “offers a new understanding of the Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the mid-1930s, presenting him as an authentically Jewish American character in his own time, for good and ill.”
The following announcement has been released and authorized for republishing and redistribution. Please feel free to copy the content below, link to this posting, or share this PDF of the Call for Papers:
From The Webster Journal – http://websterjournal.com/2013/11/20/global-thinking-kamala-khan-marvel-launches-female-muslim-superhero/
Call for Papers Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation
Editors: A. David Lewis and Martin Lund
Now accepting chapter proposals for new collection with established publisher interest!
Despite turning a rather blind eye to them through much of the twentieth century, major American comic book publishers like Marvel Comics and DC Comics have featured, in the twenty-first century, numerous Muslim superhero characters, with the seeming intention to diversify their fictional universes and to provide corrective representations of Muslims in a cultural moment when stereotype and vilification of Muslims and Islam is particularly rife. The most recent example is Marvel’s Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel, Feb. 2014). Although it might be easy to dismiss Ms. Marvel as something peripheral, she was discussed in various mainstream media long before her first appearance. High praise was expressed by Muslims and non-Muslims who thought the character could help “normalize” Muslims in American eyes while vehement opposition was voiced by critics who regarded her as “appeasement” of Muslims. As recently as January 2015, the character was plastered on anti-Muslim ads in San Francisco, illustrating the cultural power such characters can attain. It seems clear that, today, Muslim superheroes and Islam in comic books, more generally matter greatly to a large number of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Of course, Muslim superheroes are not restricted to the post-9/11 years, to the major superhero publishers, nor to the United States. There have been limited examples of Muslim superheroes in American superhero comics since their so-called “Golden Age.” And, smaller American publishers have created characters like Buraaq and the Silver Scorpion. More importantly, in recent years a steady stream of successful Muslim superhero comics has been emerging from Islamic contexts, ranging from the now multinational The 99 to the activist webcomic Qahera, much of which has also met with both approval and condemnation at home and abroad.
However, neither the historical precedents for the most recent American characters nor the contemporary diversity among Muslim superheroes is widely known. Although the Muslim superhero is becoming an increasingly important cultural phenomenon, it is still understudied and ill-understood, as is the representation of Islam in comics generally. Therefore, we are now looking for chapter proposals for the edited volume Muslim Superheroes. Through a series of close readings, this collection will study how Muslim and non-Muslim comics creators and critics have produced, reproduced, and represented different conceptions of Islam and Muslimness, embodied in superhero comics characters specifically and comic book protagonists more generally. The purpose of the collection is threefold. First, it will assemble studies of a variety of comics characters and, thus, begin to outline the long history and diversity of Muslim superheroes. Second, it will attempt to answer some basic questions about these characters: why do Muslim superheroes keep being created?; what purposes do they serve?; how do they succeed (and how do they fail) in performing their assigned duties as signifiers of one conception of Islam or another? Third, it sets out to consider the extent of the impact Muslim superheroes have and will continue to have on both the genre and its audiences today. Possible topics for proposals include, but are not limited to:
Muslim superheroes in Marvel or DC comics in a specific period (“Golden Age,” “Silver Age,” “Bronze Age,” post-9/11)
Close readings of specific characters from other publishers (e. g. Buraaq, Silver Scorpion, Qahera, The 99)
Reception (positive and negative), consumption, and uses of Muslim superheroes
Translation and transposition of American superheroes in Islamic contexts
Please send a short synopsis (no more than 150 words) of your chapter, a full abstract (no more than 800 words), as well as contact information, affiliation, and a short CV with publication list to a.lewis@mcphs.edu by April 30, 2015. Feel free to direct any questions to Martin Lund at p.martin.lund@gmail.com.
*** About the Editors A. David Lewis is the co-editor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels (Bloomsbury) and Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age (Praeger). He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Boston University and is both an Executive Board Member of the Comics Studies Society and a founding member of Sacred & Sequential.
Martin Lund is a Swedish Research Council International Postdoc at Linnaeus University and Visiting Research Scholar at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Lund University and is an editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art and a contributing member of Sacred & Sequential.
@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic 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?
Let us return to the quoted line about Superman’s supposed, but “oft overlooked” origin story and Jewish heritage. It does not take much effort to poke a hole in the claim that this is an overlooked topic. In the past ten years alone, numerous books have been published that have this issue as their central focus: in 2006, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein published 
This Fall, 
