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.
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.
Monty Python and ZERO THEORUM Director Sees Superheroes Replacing Religion
The man behind The Fisher King, behind Brazil, behind Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam, was making the interview rounds in September to promote his new film Zero Theorum starring Christoph Waltz. In speaking with CinemaBLEND, the Twelve Monkeys director expressed his concerns about superheroes replacing religion:
I mean the Church is a dying thing. But comics and Marvel are everything now, aren’t they? Don’t they have all the answers to our lives? Aren’ they the figures that we want to copy and be like and aspire to? Don’t they relieve us when we’re in trouble?
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.”