Category Archives: academic

academic, contributors, controversy, interviews, online

Returning to the Religious Studies Project’s Comics Warning

A year or two ago, S&S Founding Members David McConeghy and A. David Lewis sat down to discuss the latter’s new book, American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife for The Religious Studies Project. Since that time, The Superhero Afterlife went on to be nominated for an Eisner Award, and McConeghy has switched American coasts, moving from West to East.

However, at around the same time, RSP’s own David G. Robertson penned this incisive response to the subject of their conversation, which, in light of 2017 politics and recent criticism of mainstream superhero storylines, now feels remarkably prescient.

Therefore it is vitally important for a non-essentialist and non-elitist study of religion that we consider comics in their cultural and historical context. Without that, structural analyses may be merely repeating hegemonic categories and structures of power.

Robertson is a Co-founding Editor of the Religious Studies Project and a committee member of the British Association for the Study of Religion. For his full CV, see his Academia page or personal blog here.

academic, online

Elizabeth Coody and Christine Hoff Kraemer, Unquestionably “Women Write About Comics”

Women Write About ComicsOver 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.

Read more on this and their views on Blankets, on Y the Last Man, and on Promethea here.

http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2017/01/25/comics-academe-christine-hoff-kraemer-on-graven-images/

academic, from the Internet

MUSLIM SUPERHEROES Begins “In Earnest”

Mizan logoIn 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 Qahera artist Deena Mohamed).

Muslim Superheroes

academic, contributors

Martin Lund Reconstructs Superman’s Judaism

Superman puzzleThis 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 book is due out this October and is available now for preorder. It is the second title in Palgrave Pivot’s “Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture” series.