This past month, Sacred and Sequential had the opportunity to chat with Julian Darius, President & Founder of the Sequart Organization and creator of Martian Comics from his own Martian Lit imprint. With the release of the Kickstarter-funded Martian Comics #3 and its intriguing religious content, he talks with us about the wide range of thinking behind his (not-so-)alien tales.

S&S: Before we focus on the most recent Martian Comics #3, perhaps you could outline what “Martian Mythology” is and what was involved in producing these works?

JD: The “Martian mythology” is essentially the backstory of the whole series. Back when I founded Martian Lit, I thought it would be funny to have it actually run by Martians, and I worked up this backstory of planetary orders, an enlightenment program (that included Jesus and others), the cloaking of Mars’s cities, and the sort of vague threat that the Martians are still debating and split over whether to invade. There was a lot of detail for what was essentially a complex joke.

When Kevin Thurman pitched me on what became “The Girl from Mars,” it was wedded to this backstory I’d worked up for Martian Lit. As we collaborated on the early “Girl from Mars” chapters, I began expanding this backstory and writing these other Martian stories. It’s kept growing. It’s really because of this that the series is called Martian Comics — a throwback to titles like Adventure Comics and whatnot — and wasn’t titled The Girl from Mars. Initially, “Martian mythology” was a way of separating this backstory I’d created and was exploring in these side stories from “The Girl from Mars.” “Martian mythology” is kind of the backbone of the series — “The Girl from Mars” is the first story, the first window into that mythology.

But this “Martian mythology” has kept growing. There’s a map of stories waiting to be told, whole arcs of Martian history, ways in which themes echo throughout the stories and into the various more narrow stories, like “Girl from Mars.” It’s a pretty vast thing, which I’ve kind of put together over the past several years and keep adding to.

Continue reading The Martian Chronicles of Julian Darius, Part I →

academic, art, from the Internet

DHQ Features “Graphic Images of YHWH,” Adapting Ezekiel to Comics

February 25, 2016 A. David

In their final issue of 2015, Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) dedicated nearly the entirety of its content to the theme “Comics as Scholarship.” Included among the sensational pieces there was B.J. Parker’s daring imagining and annotation of Ezekiel 16, a text “early Jewish communities were wary of including […and] Christian communities have likewise wrestled with.” Parker not only fashioned his own comics version of the scripture but also some of his own exegesis. Such an approach, says Parker, “requires the scholar/artist to engage in fascinating and novel means of reflection.”

See Parker’s graduate student profile at Baylor University. His full adaptation can be downloaded as a .PDF file or .CBZ file for viewing (sans annotations).

academic

Announcement of Open Membership for New Comics Studies Society

February 19, 2016 A. David

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Comics Studies Society goes public on Feb. 14, 2016, launches its founding membership drive

The Comics Studies Society, a new professional association comics researchers and teachers, has launched its inaugural membership drive and is now welcoming members. Members who join now, at http://www.comicssociety.org/members/, can become Founding Members of this important new association, which promotes the critical study and teaching of comics both within and without the academy.

Announced in 2014, and now incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, the CSS is a learned society open to scholars across the disciplines and from diverse backgrounds. It is the first US-based comics studies organization to be supported by members’ dues while advocating for professional development, teaching, and the expansion of resources for comics research.

Founding memberships are now available at various levels: students, comics professionals, independent scholars, contingent faculty, tenure-line faculty, librarians, curators, and academic administrators. Founding memberships run from 2016 to December 31, 2017.

All new members during this Founding Membership drive will receive:

A two-year membership (after the membership drive is over, all memberships will be one-year);
The member’s name forever (digitally) inscribed in the roster of Founding Members at the Comics Studies Society website;
The Best of Inks Series 1 collection, featuring a selection of the best essays from the pioneering comics studies journal of the early ’90s, edited by Lucy Shelton Caswell and with an all-star cast of collaborators; and
A one-year subscription to the new journal of the Comics Studies Society, launching in 2017.

In addition, all CSS members are entitled to quarterly electronic newsletters and to vote in elections for the CSS Executive Committee.

The CSS is committed to the mentoring and professional development of students in comics studies, and to supporting student networking and activism. The CSS Graduate Student Caucus, http://gradcaucus.comicssociety.org/, is a vital component of CSS business. The Caucus maintains its own executive board, bylaws, election procedures, and website, while fully participating in the business of the Society. New student members of CSS are encouraged to reach out to the Caucus and seek opportunities for service and leadership.

The CSS is partnering with the International Comic Arts Forum through at least 2017 and will sponsor programming at the ICAF conferences, starting with ICAF 2016 at the University of South Carolina-Columbia (April 14-16). Plans are underway for expanded CSS conferences in the future. The next round of elections for the CSS Executive Committee will begin this March and conclude at ICAF 2016.

Background: The CSS launched at ICAF 2014 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, where its bylaws and interim Executive Committee were voted in. Since then the Committee has been hard at work, incorporating, securing nonprofit status, establishing the Society’s web presence, setting up membership and finance arrangements, collaborating with ICAF, and developing future plans for the CSS journal and conferences.

The CSS is open to anyone with a serious interest in comics studies, which it defines liberally to include the study and critical analysis of comic strips; comic books, papers, and magazines; graphic novels, albums, and other graphic books; webcomics and other electronic formats; single-panel cartoons, including editorial and gag cartoons; caricature; animation; and other related forms and traditions. All types of sequential art, graphic narrative, and cartooning are relevant to the Society’s mission.

Those interested in joining CSS are referred to its website, http://www.comicssociety.org/members

academic, articles and essays, contributors

Sacred Texts: Lovecraft, Alan Moore, and Religion in PROVIDENCE

February 9, 2016 Bobby Dee 2 Comments

(Facts in the Case of Providence is a collaborative blog by Joe Linton, Alexx Kay, and Bobby Derie dedicated to annotating Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence and Neonomicon from Avatar Press. In what follows, Derie gives S&S readers a sense of the works’ layers and linkages to the study of religion.)

The seeker of truth for its own sake is chained to no conventional system, but always shapes his philosophical opinions upon what seems to him the best evidence at hand. Changes, therefore, are constantly possible; and occur whenever new or revalued evidence makes them logical.
– H. P. Lovecraft, “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922) [Lovecraft 2010, 1]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an atheist materialist, who in light of reflection and the discoveries of science dismissed the orthodoxies and mythologies of the world’s religions, saying such beliefs “could not possibly arise from a close and impartial survey of nature and the cosmos today[.]” (Lovecraft 2010, 89) While he may have lacked belief in God or the supernatural, Lovecraft at least appreciated the importance of the religious feeling, as he expressed in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927):

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.

Lovecraft’s own mythos, inspired by that of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen, was filled with indifferent, alien entities that satisfied both his materialism and his cosmicism; these were not airy spiritual beings, but creatures of matter—yet possessed too of tremendous capabilities and knowledge, and were subjects of worship by strange cults, some of which predated humanity, and their scriptures were terrible tomes like the Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Cultes des Goules, and Livre d’Eibon.

Alan Moore (1953-) is a ceremonial magician who works in a pantheistic cosmology, taking the ancient Roman god Glycon as his primary deity. (Doyle-White 29) Moore’s approach to Lovecraft is flavored by his interest in the occult, and by Moore’s careful study of the critical literature that has developed surrounding Lovecraft’s life and writings. (Derie) In part, this is an outgrowth of Moore’s continual interest in the blurring between fiction and reality, as expressed in works like From Hell by Moore and Eddie Campbell.

Continue reading Sacred Texts: Lovecraft, Alan Moore, and Religion in PROVIDENCE →

academic, articles and essays, contributors, from the Internet

Jews and Comics: The Decade in Review

February 2, 2016 Steven Bergson 1 Comment

A little over 7 years ago, Aaron Passman wrote an excellent article for The Jewish Exponent, in which he discussed the growing interest in the topic of Jews and the comic book industry. At the time, the book From Krakow to Krypton (by Arie Kaplan) had just been published. In the article, Passman quoted Kaplan as well as the authors of 3 other similar books (Danny Fingeroth, Paul Buhle, and Simcha Weinstein). He also characterized the subject as “something of a cottage industry,” suggesting that the books, panels,and blogs dedicated to the topic were just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Passman was rather prophetic in that regard.

Alas, if one were to read Nirit Anderman’s article in last week’s Haaretz (“Supermensches: Comic Books’ Secret Jewish History“), one might think that research on “Jews and comics” mysteriously ended in 2008. None of the five books that have been published after Kaplan’s are mentioned (The Jewish Graphic Novel, edited by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman; Jewish Images in the Comics by Fredrik Strömberg ; Superman Is Jewish? by Harry Brod; Graphic Details, edited by Sarah Lightman; and The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel by Stephen Tabachnick). If Anderman wanted a 2016 “hook” to introduce the article, she could have announced that the book “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” by Tahneer Oksman (a study of Jewish women cartoonists’ autobiographical memoirs) is scheduled to be published this month. There is no mention of the travelling exhibitions which have helped to legitimize the field and to present the stories and artwork to the general public (e.g. Heroes, Freaks & Super-Rabbis; Graphic Details; Jomix). It would have been nice if the author had made reference to any of the academic courses on Jewish Graphic Novels which are now being taught (e.g. HUM113 at Union College; RELI217 at Wesleyan University; History 490Q at University of British Columbia).

Anderman discusses several Jewish-content graphic books in the article. However, many of these are several years old. It is impossible to list off every Jewish graphic novel in such a short piece, but one would hope that the most recent publications would have been included. Hereville : How Mirka Caught a Fish recently won the 2015 Sydney Taylor Award (Older Readers Category), the second such win for its author Barry Deutsch. Although Haaretz is an Israeli publication, no graphic books about Israel (e.g. Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me; Jerusalem: A Family Portrait; Exit Wounds; Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City; Mike’s Place) are discussed.

Though not as troubling as the incompleteness of the research, it’s a bit off-putting that carelessness seems to have resulted in quite a few factual errors. Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27, not in Batman #1. Iron Man is misspelled as “Ironman.” The story in which Superman captured Stalin and Hitler wasn’t published in a comic book, but in the magazine Look. MAD didn’t start out as a magazine. It was a comic book, but the publisher switched formats to avoid the restrictions of the Comics Code.

To be fair, I don’t know to what extent the shortcomings of the article may be the fault of the editor assigned to the story. However, ultimately, it is the article’s author who gets the byline and is deemed responsible for it. As someone who enjoys reading about the work of Jewish comics professionals and Jewish comic stories, I was looking forward to reading Anderman’s article after Weinstein posted on Facebook about it. I was expecting the article to be more relevant and up-to-date, but instead came away feeling disappointed. Jews have a rich and centuries-old history, but the immediate history of scholarship on comics and Judaism cannot be glossed over so hastily by any reputable news or academic source.

*****

Steven M. Bergson is a blogger at http://www.jewishcomics.blogspot.com and has reviewed several graphic books for AJL Reviews (Association of Jewish Libraries). He edited the first volume of Jewish Comix Anthology (Oakville, ON : AH Comics, 2014).

@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic Religion