From the Perry Bible Fellowship website, presented without comment:
Thanks to James McGrath for alerting us to PBF‘s return!
Category Archives: levity
Review of HOLY F*CK #1: “Small chuckles” but “already done”
Hitting the stands on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck #1 (Action Lab: Danger Zone) seemed to confirm what it says in Ecclesiastes; there is nothing new under the sun. A heaven-hell team-up? Garth Ennis’ Chronicles of Wormwood gave us that. A hedonistic bad-ass champion of God? Robert Kirkman’s Battle Pope. A heavily armed – Rambo-style – Jesus? Warren Ellis’ Bad World. The one thing that seems novel in Holy F*ck is its alliance of forgotten deities bent on destruction in order to once again get people to believe in them. But this, too, has some precedents, even if not as directly comparable – Marvel Comic’s Council of Godheads immediately comes to mind for the gathering, and the worship-hungry old gods are reminiscent in some ways of the old gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the alien Goa’uld of Stargate SG-1, for example. And Jesus long ago came off the cross to duke it out with Zeus in Godyssey, because the Greek god was fed up with having lost worshippers to the new monotheism.
Holy F*ck #1 is the first of four issues of what the advance material calls “an edgy satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” The plot so far is pretty straight-forward: a nun, as yet unnamed, seeks out – literally finds – Jesus so he can help her save the world from Polydynamis, Inc., a multinational company bent on worldwide destruction. Led by Zeus and Isis, and with a board consisting of a handful of other old, no longer worshipped gods, the group wants to plunge the world into chaos so that people will pray for help; by responding to those prayers, the thinking goes, the Polydynamis board will once again be worshipped by humanity. The issue ends with Jesus and the nun traveling to New Jersey (complete with parodied Jersey Shore beach bums) to enlist some backup from hell.
Continue reading Review of HOLY F*CK #1: “Small chuckles” but “already done”
Comics Remain Important — and Varied!
Over the course of the past year, various pieces — pertinent both to comics in terms of religion specifically or simply the serious consideration of comics — have come to light that either fell through the cracks at the time or deserve some wider coverage. They include:
- Back in mid-2006, Today.com reporter M. Alex Johnson took a look, albeit a superficial one, at the religiosity of Spider-Man, The Thing, X-Men villain Rev. Stryker, the Atheist and others with “At the Comics Shop, Religion Goes Graphic.”
- Graphic Medicine, founded by Ian Williams in 2007, was relaunched with MK Czerwiec in 2012, and they caught the “Graphic Fiction” panel (moderated by Shelly Wall) at the Toronto Comics & Medicine conference that year. Presenters included Steven Bergson with “From Ivanhoe to Rex Mundi: Jews and Medicine in Comic Books, Comic Strips, and Graphic Novels,” Jeffrey Monk with “A Ghost of an Idea: A Reflection on My Comic Adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carole’ for the Medical Humanities,” and Lorenzo Servitje with “Empathy in the gutter: Participatory delusion in graphic adaptation of Shutter Island.”
- Read the Spirit, an “online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity” as well as an extension of Dr. Wayne Baker’s Our Values program, answered the question to “Why Comics and Comic Books Are Important Today!” — and the solution seems to be “independent comics artist and author” Kurt Kolka.
- Most recently, Gene Yang of Comics in Education provided a valuable, digest-sized overview of the “History of Comics in Education,” spanning from 1933 to the turn of the 21st century — an adjacent topic to Religion & Comics but relevant and useful for a sense as to how serious academic discussion has arisen not only in but also for the classroom.
And then there’s just this odd/funny/insulting/compelling comic from Kevin Moore’s In Contempt comics from back in 2008. No better place to put it than here:
The Oatmeal Notes “How to Suck at Your Religion”
The online webcomic The Oatmeal recently featured a string of strips entitled, “How to Suck at Your Religion,” two of which are excerpted below:
Check out all the rest at The Oatmeal site or preorder a print copy of their latest book How to Tell if Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You.