One of S&S’s newest members, Scott S. Elliott, shared his terrific Postscripts paper on “Jesus in the Gutter: Comics and Graphic Novels Reimagining the Gospels” on his Academia.edu page. It’s free to read, even without a membership! Read more about it here.
Category Archives: articles and essays
Sequart’s The Last Temptation of Superman
Over at Sequart, Ian Dawe threads an intriguing connection between Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s milestone Superman story “For the Man Who Has Everything” and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Though Superman is frequently posited as a Christ figure, Dawe raises a number of thoughtful points on “Christian overtones” that likely hadn’t previously been applied to this work by the Watchmen team. Read more here.
Jeet Heer on the Inherent Gnosticism of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
This week Canadian literary critic, historian, and comics scholar Jeet Heer weighed in on Twitter with his thoughts on the latest Captain America blockbuster. Of particular concern to Jeet was the Gnostic manner in which the shifting status quo of knowledge as a sacred (or at the very least, exceedingly important) value is treated, thus altering the entire narrative function of the ever-nefarious Hydra. You can read the full Twitter essay and my thoughts in response collected here on Storify.
Sequart Reviews A. David Lewis’s New Book: “particularly timely”
Sequart‘s Karra Shimabukuro was given early access to the new book by A. David Lewis, American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife. Due out in November from Palgrave Macmillan, Shimabukuro detailed what readers can expect from the forthcoming book on superheroes, the afterlife, and audiences’ notions of personal selfhood.
As more and more people question the purpose and definition of self in the modern world, Lewis’ work is particularly timely.
Shimabukuro particularly noted the incorporation of theorists Benedict Anderson and Jeffery Burton Russell as personal attractions to the text. The book, she says, will be of interest to readers intrigued by the “argument for multiple selfhoods, and how this relates not only to how we view characters (in relation to reboots, revisions, and retcons), but also how we understand characters through the ever growing intertextual connections such as movies, cartoons, fan fiction, etc.”
Wednesday Theology: Daring to Address God
Mitch Alfson of Wednesday Theology shared his 2012 paper from Dordt College’s The Christian Evasion of Popular Culture Conference. In it, he encourages his audience to look beyond the superhero genre for (the lack of) engagement with God, featuring Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon’s Preacher in particular. Read more here.
