Over at Slate, Arie Kaplan considers whether Spider-Man is Jewish, based on input from actor Andrew Garfield, novelist Michael Chabon, and producer Avi Arad. Or, at the very least, is he a “crypto-Jew,” especially considering his brand of humor? Read more here.
(Thanks to Steve Bergson, editor of The Jewish Comix Anthology and proprietor of the Jewish Comics blog for spotting this one. I think he’d appreciate the relevance of the clip below.)
Over at Comic Bastards, Dustin Cabeal sat down with the writer of Holy F*ck Nick Marino about his and artist Daniel Arruda Massa’s “sacrilegious satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” As the Marino explains:
From my perspective, this is really Sister Maria’s story. She’s the one who finds Jesus. She’s the one who brings him to Satan. She’s the one who’s actively going after the mythological gods and trying to stop their oppressive agenda.
However, if that’s too heady for you… LOOK!!!!! Jesus and Satan with big guns! Zeus and Isis with nuclear missiles! Nudity and profanity!!!
If that’s your cup of tea, click here for more.
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.
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.
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.
