Graven Images: Religion in Comics and Graphic Novels

GRAVEN IMAGES RELIGION IN COMIC BOOKS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS Edited by A. DAVID LEWIS AND CHRISTINE HOFF KRAEMER 2010 The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2010 by A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graven images: religion in comic books and graphic novels / edited by A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-5847-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4411-5847-2 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-3026-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8264-3026-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.--Religious aspects. I. Lewis, A. David, 1977- II. Kraemer, Christine Hoff. III. Title. PN6712.G73 2010 741.5’382--dc22 2010015163 ISBN: 978-1-4411-5847-5 (hardcover) 978-0-8264-3026-7 (paperback) Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in the United States of America CONTENTS Foreword: Looking for God in the Gutter Douglas Rushkoff (Creator, Testament; The New School) ix Introduction Christine Hoff Kraemer (Cherry Hill Seminary) and A. David Lewis (Boston University), Editors 1 NEW INTERPRETATIONS The Devil’s Reading: Revenge and Revelation in American Comics Aaron Ricker Parks (McGill University) 13 London (and the Mind) as Sacred–Desecrated Place in Alan Moore’s From Hell Emily Taylor Merriman (San Francisco State University) 24 Drawing Contracts: Will Eisner’s Legacy Laurence Roth (Susquehanna University) 44 Catholic American Citizenship: Prescriptions for Children from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact (1946–63) Anne Blankenship (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 63 Gold Plates, Inked Pages: The Authority of the Graphic Novel G. St. John Stott (Arab American University, Jenin) 78 Comics and Religion: Theoretical Connections Darby Orcutt (North Carolina State University) 93 Killing the Graven God: Visual Representations of the Divine in Comics Andrew Tripp (Boston University) 107 Echoes of Eternity: Hindu Reincarnation Motifs in Superhero Comic Books Saurav Mohapatra (Creator, India Authentic) 121 The Christianizing of Animism in Manga and Anime: American Translations of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Eriko Ogihara-Schuck (Dortmund University of Technology) 133 RESPONSE AND REBELLION On Preacher (Or, the Death of God in Pictures) Mike Grimshaw (University of Canterbury) 149 Superman Graveside: Superhero Salvation beyond Jesus A. David Lewis (Creator, The Lone and Level Sands) 166 “The Apocalypse of Adolescence”: Use of the Bildungsroman and Superheroic Tropes in Mark Millar and Peter Gross’s Chosen Julia Round (Bournemouth University) From God Nose to God’s Bosom, Or How God (and Jack Jackson) Began Underground Comics Clay Kinchen Smith (Santa Fe College) A Hesitant Embrace: Comic Books and Evangelicals Kate Netzler (Independent Scholar) Narrative and Pictorial Dualism in Persepolis and the Emergence of Complexity Kerr Houston (Maryland Institute College of Art) 188 203 218 230 POSTMODERN RELIGIOSITY Machina Ex Deus: Perennialism in Comics G. Willow Wilson (Creator, Cairo) Conversion to Narrative: Magic as Religious Language in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles Megan Goodwin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “The Magic Circus of the Mind”: Alan Moore’s Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness through Comics Christine Hoff Kraemer (Cherry Hill Seminary) and J. Lawton Winslade (DePaul University) 249 258 274 Religion and Artesia/Religion in Artesia Mark Smylie (Creator, Artesia) 292 Present Gods, Absent Believers in Sandman Emily Ronald (Boston University) 309 Tell-Tale Visions: The Erotic Theology of Craig Thompson’s Blankets Steve Jungkeit (Yale University) 323 Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Selected Bibliography Index 345 347 353 357 361 Foreword Looking for God in the Gutter DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF mythic narratives and beings: Superman is nothing if not Godlike, the Marvel Universe is virtually a pantheon, and even Charlie Brown was everyman’s Job. But recently, writers have been taking this mythic potential more literally by making comics explicitly religious: Virgin’s India Authentic, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis Illustrated, and my own Testament, to name just a few. Why do so many writers choose to explore their relationship to the gods through comics? There are plenty of answers — as many as there are comics, I imagine. But really, beyond the iconic representations, the history of superheroes, or the protection offered writers in a supposedly “kids’” medium, what is it about comics themselves that make them such an appropriate venue for Bible and Upanishads alike? The gutter. That’s right — the space between the panels. The parts of the page no one even pays attention to. Those white, empty lines separating one panel from another, one moment in comic narrative from the next. It’s there in that gap that the magic of comics occurs. In one panel, Clark Kent heads into the phone booth; in the next, he’s Superman flying above Gotham City. Between those two incarnations, a simple gutter in which nothing is drawn, yet the entire transmogrification of man to superhero has taken place. It’s the closest thing in comics to transubstantiation, and it happens in the unseen crack between two discreet moments. It is everything, yet nothing. This is core premise of comics, the art of sequential narrative. Our stories and their characters do not move in a line, as in theater or even C OMICS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT ix x Foreword literature, but through a series of windows. Frozen instants. These are the ticks of the clock, but not the spaces between each one where life actually happens or the story actually occurs. As such, a comic requires a leap of faith from its readers every time they move from one panel to the next. We move to the next panel and must absorb it before we even understand its connection to the panel before. Only then are we able to relate it to the narrative of which it is a component part. Picture, word, then connection. This gives the author an amazing opportunity: to instill word and image into a reader’s mind before the reader has a context for this information. This is the tremendous power behind comics’ ability to generate cultural iconography — to create modern mythology. Sure, the mere juxtaposition of word and image within panels holds a power of its own. Visual representations of characters were deemed such a coercive threat that rabbis forbade “graven images” altogether, lest the masses be drawn into the mire of polytheism or paganism. But when the illuminated manuscript is divided into separate but related panels of text and image, something even more inspirational happens: the reader is asked to participate, willfully, in the assembly of a whole from the parts. It is the reader who makes sense of the narrative, connecting the panels and turning them from separated moments into a living story. It’s this act of reader participation — this transformation of sequence into story — that implicates readers so much more fully in the very telling of the story they think they’re reading. The readers aren’t just going along for the ride, but providing the propulsion forward. They are rewarded with a sense of completion and sense-making every time they move their eyes from one panel to the next, implicitly agreeing with the sense they have made. For me, the gutter has always been such a powerful yet unrecognized element in the form that I decided to make its function explicit in my own work. For my own Bible-based comic series Testament, I chose to use the space between the panels as a zone for action. While my main, human characters lived in the discreet moments of the comic’s panels, I placed the gods in the gutters between the panels (see Figure 1). Instead of leaving those spaces blank, I turned them into a second universe where gods fought among themselves in a war to dominate the sequential action. Like the comic’s author and readers, the gods live outside sequential Figure 1 From outside the boundaries of the story, Moloch and Melchizedek influence the parallel actions of events in the near-future and biblical past. Testament: Akedah, 2006. xii Foreword time, a dimension above and beyond the story — capable of commenting on it, seeing where it is going, even pushing the panels around. But they cannot actually enter the world of the story, at least not as themselves. If a god reaches his hand from the gutter, where he lives, into the panel itself, the hand becomes an element, like water or fire. The god can set a bush on fire, for instance, and communicate to a character through the flame — but he can never enter into the world, completely, himself. Yes, it was a gimmick of sorts, through which I could create characters who lived beyond the story yet still had a stake in what went on. But it was also meant to reveal the power of the medium and its particular relationship to religious narrative. Religious experience, for human beings, consists of a shift in awareness from the particular to the universal — from the mundane to the mythic or, even more precisely, from the moment to the infinite. Religion attempts to codify and transmit the eternal to creatures who are (at least for the time being) trapped in the present. It means to make human beings who are trapped within panels aware of the gutter beyond — even for just a fleeting moment, in the obscure shadows of inference. And this is what attracts so many writers to comics as the ideal medium through which to express their own immortal intimations. The panels are winks: building blocks that, in themselves, may not amount to more than any other storytelling device, but collectively create a multidimensional rendering. Once they lock into place in the mind of the reader, they assemble, like a Kabbalistic Tree or I Ching sequence, into an informational matrix of a higher order than can be put into words. The scholars represented in this book recognize this unique ability of comics to communicate, simulate, and perhaps even actualize transcendence. All you have to do to understand them is get over the fact that God is less likely to be found in a sacred text than in the gutter. Introduction CHRISTINE HOFF KRAEMER AND A. DAVID LEWIS You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth . . . for I the LORD your God am a jealous God . . . — Exodus 20.4-5, Revised Standard Version 3,000 years ago, our epigraph warns against the power of images. An image of the divine, suggests the writer of Exodus, can be so compelling as to distract from the worship of a transcendent God, one whose nature is too vast and complex to be contained. This aniconic thread runs through all of the Abrahamic religions and has been particularly contentious in Christianity when, during the time of the Reformation, Protestant mobs rose up and destroyed “idolatrous” Catholic religious representations. Lest we think that such fear of the power of images is a thing of the past, however, contemporary debates continue to rage about the impact of images on television and film viewers, especially children. These debates reflect the implicit belief that viewing violent or sexual images encourages or causes violent or sexual behavior. Images, it seems, simply will not stay inert on the surface where they’re drawn; they penetrate our hearts and minds, and to expose ourselves to the wrong images invites the worst kind of disaster. With this background in mind, we offer this collection of essays on religion and comic books under the playful title Graven Images. Part of our titular choice is a straightforward homage to the historical origins of comic art: from the pictorial wall carvings of ancient Egypt, to the manuscripts painstakingly illuminated by monks of late antiquity, to mass-produced woodcut stories of saints in late medieval Europe, to W RITTEN THE BETTER PART OF 1 2 Graven Images the engraved books of visionary English writer and artist William Blake, sequential art with accompanying text has been a vehicle for religious storytelling in diverse cultural milieus. Modern technology may have alleviated the need to literally carve images into wood or stone, but in its fusion of words and pictures, comics is an heir to an ancient tradition of “graven images” in which artists attempted to represent the divine. We do, however, also intend to evoke the subversive — perhaps even blasphemous — connotations of the phrase. As comics has come into its own as a sophisticated art form, one that demands high levels of both visual and textual literacy from the reader, comics writers and artists have tackled controversial religious issues: offering their own reflections on traditional religions, criticizing or satirizing those religions, or breaking away from traditional religions in the pursuit of religious innovation. Though graphic novels now enjoy a newly won status as “serious art” in the United States, comic books in their magazine form continue to have a certain reputation for edginess: the gritty horror and crime comics that led the industry to impose its own censorship in the 1950s and 1960s, the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s that served as satirical and often vulgar mouthpieces for a disgruntled counterculture, and the status quo-questioning superhero comics born in the 1980s. The comics medium is no stranger to subversive subject matter. Additionally, comics rub uncomfortably against the Protestant heritage that so influenced the United States in its first few centuries. In contrast to Reformation-era and Enlightenment Protestantism, which prioritizes the holy Word and maintains a certain suspicion of images as being overly sensual, comics fuse words and images in complex combinations that frequently give images the final authority. Because of the aniconic threads in the theologies of Abrahamic religions (threads that are present in Christianity, but much more pronounced in Judaism and Islam), the medium can present challenges for creators practicing these religions — though such challenges are sometimes turned to their artistic advantage. Similarly, perhaps because of the problematic nature of divine images in Western culture, comics provide unique opportunities for those wishing to fashion postmodern golden calves — not mere idols, but genuine religious alternatives that nevertheless reject the ideal of a wholly transcendent, unrepresentable divine. This collection evolved from a conference by the same name that was hosted by the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University in 2008. In addition to scholarly presentations, Eisner Award- Introduction 3 winning creator and Director of the Center for Cartoon Studies James Sturm provided the keynote address, “Finding My Religion,” and creators A. David Lewis, Saurav Mohapatra, Steve Ross, Mark Smylie, and G. Willow Wilson held a round-table discussion of their works and faiths. In the “Graven Images” conference, we sought to bring scholars, comics creators, and fans together to explore the evolving relationship between comics and religion. Comics are able to blend text and image in a way that is aesthetically unique and also potentially emotionally powerful. What, we wondered, are the distinctive advantages of the medium for communicating religious messages? What religious messages are comics creators choosing to communicate, and for what audiences? Finally, what is the significance of both the traditional and innovative religious thought that is appearing in comics and graphic novels? The conference drew a lively audience, including many Boston-area undergraduates, and we felt that the time was right to turn the conference proceedings into a book. In order to address a wider range of works and topics, we supplemented the revised versions of many of the conference presenters’ papers with essays solicited from scholars and writers who had not been able to attend. Although, inevitably, significant works and religious traditions were still left out of the final product, we are proud to offer this collection as a representative cross-section of how comic books and graphic novels are handling religious issues. For the purposes of greater focus, and to avoid dealing with the very different relationships between religion, pop culture, and comics reading patterns in other cultures, we restricted ourselves to works written or translated into English that are currently being published and sold in the US market. Following current trends in scholarship of American religion and of religion and media, we have chosen not to limit our understanding of “religion” to major world religions or traditional religious institutions. We have been guided by the work of American religion scholar Catherine Albanese, who defines religion as a creed (beliefs), code (standards of behavior), and cultus (system of practice) by which a community “orients [itself] in the world with reference to both ordinary and extraordinary powers, meanings, and values.”1 While we do not necessarily wish to assert that comics are themselves a religion, they are one site where individuals grapple with issues of ethics, meaning, and values; engage in ritualized behavior; and explore both traditional and new religious traditions. Particularly in light of Americans’ increasing 4 Graven Images detachment from mainline churches, the religious explorations taking place in and around popular culture products should be taken seriously as one of the ways Americans express their religiosity. We hope that readers will find this collection useful in a number of different contexts. In addition to inviting comics creators to speak about the intersections between religion and comics, we have deliberately invited a wide range of scholarly approaches (literary and cultural, religious, theological, historical) as a way to foster dialogue and to chart the diversity of possible approaches to this material. We do not seek to proselytize for any religious tradition or even for a religious or spiritual viewpoint in general; certainly some of the works analyzed here are profoundly suspicious of religious institutions and attitudes. By the nature of this book, however, we do find ourselves preaching the gospel of comics reading. In Graven Images, we showcase some of the medium’s aesthetic and narrative capacities as well as its evolving artistic potential, particularly when turned to religious purposes. The conviction that comics can explore profound issues of meaning in provocative ways is indeed this collection’s raison d’etre. Whether you are a comic book reader; a scholar of religion, media, or literature; or a student just beginning to discover these scholarly disciplines, we hope to share our passion for the medium with you. This is not the first book on religion and comics — it’s not even the first book on the two published in English or during the Obama administration. We are aided by the inroads cut by other scholars into this intersection (some of which are listed, with gratitude, in the bibliography). However, in many of these previous efforts, the discourse often centers on a particular faith or topic: Jews or morality, Christianity or immigrant communities, and so forth. Graven Images is a response to those trends: a widening of the conversation. We are very pleased, therefore, by the diversity of our contributors. In addition to representing a wide range of faiths, our writers also epitomize an array of disciplines, institutional affiliations, educational backgrounds, intellectual histories, and nationalities. Graven Images may have started as our brainchild at Boston University’s Department of Religious and Theological Studies, but it has expanded across the US and around the world to Canada, the UK, Germany, the Palestinian territories, and New Zealand. Its disciplinary boundaries now include discourse from history, linguistics, literature, semiotics, sociology, theology, women’s studies, and more. With this rich variety in mind, we hope that readers will encounter Introduction 5 elements both familiar and strange in this volume, and that the contrast between will enhance their understanding of both. For comic book readers, we offer the essays composed by creators as windows into how religious concerns inflect these artists’ creative processes, perhaps in defiance of the expectation that comics is a secular medium. Within the scholarly contributions, fans may be especially interested in explorations of favorite works and creators. In the hands of comics readers, we hope Graven Images will be a tool for discussion that continues to legitimize the medium (a task that we both hope and foresee will be achieved — therefore becoming academically obvious — someday soon) and that may, perhaps, catalyze fans’ efforts at comics criticism and scholarship. For teachers and scholars, we intend the essays in Graven Images to provide exciting entry points for group discussions on religious issues and paths, as well as to serve as companion pieces in classes that include the study of graphic novels. More broadly, we see this collection as a historical marker for how scholars are approaching issues of religion and pop culture today, particularly the way in which religious pluralism is taken for granted as cultural context. The interdisciplinary approach of this collection demonstrates many possible approaches to comics and their subject matter; comics studies need not limit itself purely to the techniques of literary or art criticism. Finally, we hope these essays will entice students to grapple with the significance of religious issues in American culture, and that it will give them both vocabulary and space to do so. Graven Images opens with a section entitled “New Interpretations.” Here, contributors examine traditional religious themes in comic books to reveal those religions’ hopes, fears, prejudices, and values. In “The Devil’s Reading: Revenge and Revelation in American Comics,” Aaron Ricker Parks explores the continuing influence of dispensationalist readings of the book of Revelation on superhero narratives. Parks suggests that the sadomasochistic, apocalyptic revenge fantasy that appears frequently in superhero comics is actually based on a problematic misreading of Revelation, one that comics readers and believing Christians alike need to question in order to resist American culture’s voyeuristic love of violence. The section then moves across the Atlantic to Emily Taylor Merriman’s “London (and the Mind) as Sacred-Desecrated Place in Alan Moore’s From Hell,” where Merriman examines Moore’s portrayal of London as a physical embodiment of 6 Graven Images the city’s religious traditions. In Moore’s narrative, the Jack the Ripper murders are an exaggerated manifestation of the patriarchal religious culture that infuses Western society; the ritualistic killings are intended to bind and control London’s feminine energy. Using René Girard’s theories of ritual sacrifice and scapegoating, Merriman shows how From Hell confronts both writer and reader with his or her complicity in acts of religiously motivated patriarchal violence. Laurence Roth then examines the continuing influence of Jewish comics creator Will Eisner in “Drawing Contracts: Will Eisner’s Legacy.” Reading The Contract with God and related works as reflecting Eisner’s sense of the creative potential of Jewish culture and religion, Roth explores Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat and JT Waldman’s Megillat Esther as heirs to Eisner’s groundbreaking use of the medium. In contrast, the twentieth-century Catholics addressed in Anne Blankenship’s “Catholic American Citizenship: Prescriptions for Children from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact (1946–63)” use the comics form not to differentiate themselves, but to align with the political mainstream. Here, Catholic creators combat anti-Catholic social norms and government policies with comics that portray Catholic culture as highly patriotic and quintessentially American. Next, Graham St. John Stott parallels Roth in considering the comic book as midrash (a Hebrew term meaning the interpretation of religious text or tradition), but for a different faith: the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Stott considers issues of authority and translation around Michael Allred’s graphic novel The Golden Plates, which retells the story of the Book of Mormon. In attempting to draw new readers to the Book of Mormon with his comic book, Stott asks, does Allred undermine his own work by diluting the authority of the text, even as he resists working in an interpretive mode? From his experiences in teaching religion and comics to college undergraduates, Darby Orcutt addresses some of the religious capacity of the comics medium itself in “Comics and Religion: Theoretical Connections.” Engaging Scott McCloud’s theories about the reader’s tendency to identify with iconic imagery in comics, Orcutt points out the similar function of symbolism in religious imagery and demonstrates how other visual techniques can be employed to communicate particular religious worldviews. These visual techniques also concern Andrew Tripp in “Killing the Graven God: Visual Representations of the Divine in Comics,” specifically the problem of imaging the divine in Abrahamic traditions, where images of God are sometimes considered idolatrous. Introduction 7 Comics, suggests Tripp, actually avoid idolatry by continually destroying and recreating images of the divine in a process that demonstrates God’s ineffability. Next, in “Echoes of Eternity: Hindu Reincarnation Motifs in Superhero Comic Books,” creator Saurav Mohapatra explores reincarnation and karma as the implicit background for death and rebirth motifs in superhero comics. Mohapatra suggests that such narratives offer Westerners an entry point to essential Hindu scriptures. Tripp and Mohapatra’s approaches show how comics can contribute to theological discussions, but Eriko Ogihara-Schuck’s “The Christianizing of Animism in Manga and Anime: American Translations of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” proposes that theological expectations can muddle comics creators’ religious messages and damage opportunities for meaningful interfaith dialogue. The dualism that Americans take for granted in Christian theology, Ogihara-Schuck argues, distorts the message of Miyazaki’s animistic masterpiece when it is rendered in English translation. In our second section, “Response and Rebellion,” contributors highlight how comics provide unique opportunities to either subvert traditional religious iconography or to extend it in controversial new directions. Mike Grimshaw suggests that God is dead — yet the continuing news of his death is just more evidence of his lingering trace. “On Preacher (Or, the Death of God in Pictures)” explores the Vertigo title as a Generation X response to postmodern fragmentation, one that urges readers to take responsibility for the human condition fully into their own hands. Though God may be dead, Superman goes on forever for creator A. David Lewis. Resisting some critics’ urge to paint Superman as a Christlike messiah, in “Superman Graveside: Superhero Salvation beyond Jesus” Lewis portrays him as a different kind of savior: an endless story who preserves other narratives within his own. In a contrasting examination of messianic themes in comics, Julia Round’s “‘The Apocalypse of Adolescence’: Use of the Bildungsroman and Superheroic Tropes in Mark Millar and Peter Gross’s Chosen” analyzes a tale of the Second Coming where a young, modern messiah figure is ultimately revealed as the Antichrist. Using misdirections and inversions, Chosen satirizes Christian millennial expectations, but it also undermines audience expectations about the superhero genre by blurring moral absolutes. Moving away from the superhero genre, Clay Kinchen Smith’s “From God Nose to God’s Bosom, Or How God (and Jack Jackson) Began 8 Graven Images Underground Comics” reveals the religious underpinnings in the work of one of the most influential creators of underground comics. Jackson mercilessly parodies the traditional white-bearded image of God in order to critique the inhibitions, racism, and violence of American culture — a stance that has much in common with late-twentiethcentury liberal Christian theology. The comic book tropes that enhance Jackson’s work, however, may interfere with the form’s effectiveness when presenting other kinds of religious content. Kate Netzler’s “A Hesitant Embrace: Comic Books and Evangelicals” questions whether evangelicals can successfully use comic books to spread religious messages when their religious goals do not always harmonize well with the existing traditions of the comic book medium. In limiting the artistic interaction between “Christian” comic books and other graphic works, Netzler suggests, evangelicals may be reinforcing a problematic implied dichotomy between faith and art. The section closes with a treatment of rigid dichotomies in visual form. Focusing on the visual function of Marjane Satrapi’s heavy black-and-white line drawings, Kerr Houston explores the birth of adult moral individualism in “Narrative and Pictorial Dualism in Persepolis and the Emergence of Complexity.” For Satrapi, argues Houston, moral individualism begins with the rejection of fundamentalist Islam, but it develops fully through a nuanced engagement with the religious culture in which the main character lives. Our final section, “Postmodern Religiosity,” explores fresh and innovative ways of being religious in comics. In “Machina Ex Deus: Perennialism in Comics,” comics creator G. Willow Wilson employs the philosophy of René Guénon to explore the possibility of a primordial intellectual tradition that cyclically arises in all artistic productions, including comics. Megan Goodwin’s “Conversion to Narrative: Magic as Religious Language in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles” details the practice of Morrison’s chaos magic as a postmodern spiritual path devoted to increasing human agency. For Morrison, the comic itself becomes a tool for change in the reader and the world. Similarly, in “‘The Magic Circus of the Mind’: Alan Moore’s Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness through Comics,” Christine Hoff Kraemer and J. Lawton Winslade present Promethea as a text designed to instruct readers in the Western occult tradition. Like Morrison, Moore harnesses the visual nature of comics to increase the emotional impact of his work and perhaps even trigger altered states of consciousness. Next, reflecting on resonances between Joseph Campbell’s hero’s Introduction 9 journey and the superhero genre, creator Mark Smylie presents the mythological and scholarly sources of his polytheistic fictional world in “Religion and Artesia/Religion in Artesia.” In an examination of another polytheistic worldview, Emily Ronald’s “Present Gods, Absent Believers in Sandman” investigates the disconnection between deity and worship in Neil Gaiman’s influential series. To lose worship does not necessarily lead to secularism, however; Ronald suggests that the tangible presence of deity in Sandman encourages an attitude of wonder toward the everyday world, one that supports a search for meaning in the immanent here-and-now. Finally, in “Tell-Tale Visions: The Erotic Theology of Craig Thompson’s Blankets,” Steve Jungkeit argues for the role of visuality in reclaiming divine Eros. Drawing on postmodern Christian erotic theologies, Jungkeit portrays Blankets’s insistence on the priority of images as a key element in expressing the main character’s religious and sexual awakenings. Whichever course one takes through Graven Images, the reader should have faith that these essays are not random selections. We feel they draw a particular strength from one another, even those that presuppose distinctly different theologies (or none at all). While all the essays are respectful of other traditions, they are not toothlessly politically correct: they have distinctive viewpoints supported by research, and they want to convince — or at least challenge — the reader. Moreover, they engage in adult frankness. Though traditional Western religions may focus on the sacred and unseen, our writers engage the profane and concrete: sex, vulgarity, violence, drugs, crime, magic, and sacrilege are all necessary, useful parts of the coming discussions (as is devout belief in the supernatural, which may equally consternate the atheists in our readership). We have held none of these topics to be untouchable; with all due respect to our Hindu and Zoroastrian friends, Graven Images maintains no sacred cows. It is also worth noting that due to their intense interest in religious issues, certain comics creators are mentioned repeatedly in this collection. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison both hail from the United Kingdom and are well known for their interest in religion, magic, and the Western occult tradition; discussions of Moore’s work appear in essays by Merriman, Tripp, Mohapatra, and Kraemer and Winslade, while Morrison is a subject for Tripp, Mohapatra, Lewis, Wilson, and Goodwin. Particular religious themes and issues also recur in many of the essays, including the use of comics for religious pedagogy; the 10 Graven Images relationship between the comics form and its religious function; death and afterlife beliefs; the relative authority of text and images; and the tensions among monotheistic, polytheistic, and nontheistic theologies. The reader is invited to make further connections between these essays for him- or herself and also to fruitfully problematize and sever them, distinguishing any biases accidentally woven into our material. Inevitably, even with the marvelous diversity of the essays we have collected here, we have regrets about what was left out due to time and the relative availability of contributors. Despite the importance of Marvel Comics in the American comics industry, its series are underrepresented here, as are Japanese manga, which have become increasingly popular in the US over the last two decades. We particularly regret omitting seminal manga creator Osamu Tezuka, whose portrayal of the life of the Buddha in comics form is well known. Analyses of other provocative biblical interpretations, such as Steve Ross’s Marked! and A. David Lewis’s The Lone and Level Sands, would also have been welcome in these pages — but we leave those opportunities for future projects. Finally, any subsequent scholarly collections on religion and comics will necessarily have to include the increasingly important medium of web comics. Online strips such as Patrick Farley’s confrontational and often hilarious Apocamon (a play on the words “apocalypse” and “Pokemon”) represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the vast potential for religiously experimental comics art in electronic form. To that end, we have included three short appendices to outline other “hot” issues arising even as Graven Images goes to print. Addressing some of the early reaction to R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated (2009) is the masterful — and oft-cited — Scott McCloud, taken from his online blog at www.scottmccloud.com. Further, to acknowledge the explosion of digital comics and comics scholarship, we have also included a sampling of Beth Davies Stofka’s insightful online writings about religion and comics, particularly on Gary Panter’s deeply intertexual Jimbo’s Inferno. Lastly, remembering our past even as we look forward, the program for the original 2008 “Graven Images” conference has been reproduced both for readers’ interest and as a jumping-off point toward new writing. In closing, we would like to once again thank all those who made this collection possible. The “Graven Images” conference was funded by the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University, the Boston University Department of Religious and Theological Studies, Introduction 11 the Boston University Graduate Student Organization, and the New England-Maritimes region of the American Academy of Religion. Prof. Peter Hawkins and Cristine Hutchison-Jones were major sources of moral and practical support during the planning and execution of the conference. Along with the keynote address of comics creator James Sturm, conference participants enjoyed scholarly presentations by Rene Javellana, Marla Harris, Vincent Gonzalez, Josh Cohen, and Nicholas Yanes. Steve Ross (Marked!) spoke on our creators panel, while JT Waldman (Megillat Esther) kindly provided original art for a conference logo. Our continuing gratitude goes out to the enthusiastic audience who attended the conference and encouraged us to turn the conference proceedings into this collection, as well as to Burke Gerstenschläger, who coached us through the proposal process. Finally, as always, we owe our thanks to our families and friends, whose support of our academic and artistic passions provided essential nourishment for this work. Boston, November 29, 2009 Note 1 Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 3rd edn. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999) 8–11.