Those who study comics are often avid consumers of the medium. How do I select comics for myself? I cannot read or afford everything. Nor is every comic equal in my eyes as an object of study. What does my list say about me? Or about comics today?
This post and my next outline my pull-list as an extension of my scholarly interests. These items suit my eclectic tastes, but they also identify several trends in recent publishing themes (especially from Image). I could say that the Gods Have Returned, but that seems overly simple. As A. David Lewis’ recently released American Comics, Literary Theory and Religion makes the case for the centrality of the superhero afterlife, I think there’s a broader case to be made for the emergence of religious themes as the narrative choice of the day. The gods have returned, yes, but we’re also going to hell (Hellboy in Hell), heaven/hell (The Life After), and bringing all of the spirits along for the ride (Wytches, Wayward, and Hexed). It’s a veritable Great Awakening out there, readers.
Here’s what my physical list looks like. It is surely missing at least another half-dozen titles I’m currently vetting for their pull-worthiness. This is from my local comic shop in Irvine, California:
DMcConeghy’s Pull List as of 3/25
As you can tell, my love for Image’s title selection is literally overflowing. I shun the conventional superhero titles from DC and Marvel. (I read the latest Thor but I have recently dropped Ms. Marvel when it became apparent that her religious identity was becoming more gimmick than substance and when Marvel decided her character would be crossing over into multiple other titles.) For clarity this makes my list:
while the temptation is to assume that religious expression in popular media must be kitsch–or at least bad art–and probably bad theology, a closer look reveals a more complex reality. While many examples of those stereotypes exist, there are also examples of deep spirituality and fine storytelling resulting in works of great power and beauty.
No reviews of the exhibit have been made known yet to Sacred and Sequential, however:
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.
Asher comments, regarding the controversial cover’s relationship to the 1998 Alan Moore and Brian Bolland one-shot comic The Killing Joke:
The Killing Joke is a brilliant story. It is also absolutely, fundamentally, a problematic story. For those of you who haven’t read it, a brief synopsis: this is the tale of Oracle’s origin, in which Barbara Gordon is attacked at home by the Joker, who shoots her through the spine and strips her, leaving her naked and paralyzed on the floor while he takes pictures…pictures he later uses to psychologically torment her father, Jim. It’s a classic example within the comics canon of a woman being victimized simply to provide a point of pathos for a male hero. Barbara suffers greatly, and is left paralyzed for life, but her ordeal is inconsequential to the story; the focus is on Jim as he bears witness to his daughter’s trauma. People are upset because this story bothers them. It should. It needs to bother us; we need to to be bothered by it; it is brilliant because it bothers us.
Stories that don’t bother us are not worth writing.
In addition to featuring this post by an S&S member, we are also inclined to ask what relationship, if any, this issue may have to religious imagery and iconography. Do some religious similarly feature/exploit women in threatening situations? Should “trigger warnings” be part of religious discourse, particularly with faiths’ visuals? Or is censorship overextending itself in some way that religious liberties might oppose? To what degree are even religious audiences willing to be “bothered” — willing to tolerate some level of being disturbed — for the sake of a story and its meaning?
Some side with heroes. Others spread dread and despair. One god cares for neither. He is the Chaos King. And he will stop at nothing to end everything with Chaos War.”
In many ways, “Chaos War” is a classic superhero comics event. It has the mandatory brawls between heroes who then become allies. It has the brains versus brawn tension and the triumph of ingenuity over smashing things that Marvel comics so often employ. It is also, like so many comics events, a massive weave of intertextual references: as always, it connects with established continuity in too many places to count and references to film and literature similarly abound. By virtue of the advanced age of many of the characters involved, there are a number of historical references (such as Sersi remarking to Thor that one fight “[k]inda reminds you of the siege of Paris by the Danes in the ninth century, huh, big guy?”). And, given its focus on gods, godlings, and pantheons, it also makes numerous implicit and explicit references to myth, story, and (what we can somewhat anachronistically label) theology.
But many of these references are arguably superficial. In most cases, “Chaos War” provides enough information for the reader to situate a specific god within the religious tradition from which it is appropriated, but there is not much of what we can call substance in those references. They have names that can be traced to one pantheon or another and an appearance that gives them the flavor of a place and (in most cases) a time, although there is a preponderance of gods in superhero-style garb. Thus, they are all interweaved and largely undifferentiated. The gods co-exist, they know each other, and some have banded together before the story begins, while others do so after. This mix gives the impression of a divine melting pot where all deities are superheated to become alike, so as to better fit the genre in which they appear. In this respect, it is significant that Amadeus Cho tells Hercules that he has “hooked [him] up with all-father powers” and that the hero is called a supergod more than once; even godhood follows the logic of power-levels and -types in the Marvel Universe. Continue reading Review: Marvel’s CHAOS WAR, an Epic (of Sorts)→
@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic Religion
Thus, with typical Marvel bombast,