All posts by Elizabeth Coody

academic, online

Comics Academe: How To Write a Comics Dissertation

[The following piece was originally published for the Women Write About Comics website, and it is reposted here with the author’s permission.]
Couverture de l'ouvrage de Mathieu Tillet, "Dissertation sur la cause qui corrompt et noircit les grains de blé dans les épis, et sur les moyens de prévenir ces accidens," 1755. Wikimedia Commons.
Out there, somewhere, is a woman who writes about comics who wants to turn that writing to a comics dissertation or thesis, or at least I sure hope there is! The field is wide open and ready for more. For the uninitiated, a dissertation or thesis is the long essay or project that serves as the capstone for most advanced degrees (especially doctoral degrees) in the sciences and humanities. There is some degree of coursework or class-type work in most programs, but this is the project that determines whether or not you earn the degree. The nature and form of these projects has been under debate in recent years, but the actual production of some object that concludes the PhD remains a constant. The internet has worked alongside the fast-moving and collaborative nature of digital scholarship in general to jolt the usually slow-to-change academic establishment. By making wide varieties of information more available to a wider public and expanding the possibilities of collaboration, digital forms of scholarship have disturbed the idea of authority. This idea of authority is what allows some group to grant a degree to someone else. You can see why this sort of debate can be disturbing!

What I’ll talk about most here is writing about comics in a dissertation as opposed to writing a dissertation as a comic. Be warned: the minute you start pairing talk of “comics” and “dissertation” people are going to assume you’re writing a comic. For some of you, this will be a fantastic way to go. If your committee has trouble imagining your dissertation as a comic, you might point out Nick Sousanis’s recently published comics dissertation Unflattening. His process bringing the dissertation into comics form is lovingly documented all over the internet by academics and comics people alike, such as here, here, and here. Such a precedent is wonderful to present to a wary committee. If their hesitation comes from fears that you won’t be taken seriously, it’s nice to have a publication from Harvard University Press to point out. Of course, you should listen to your committee, more on them in a moment.

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academic, contributors

The Tangled Relationship Between Religion and Comics

[The following piece was originally published at Women Write About Comics in two parts; and it is reposted here with the author’s permission, for the first time in its entirety.]

My cocktail party introduction of myself is basically, “I’m a religion scholar working on a dissertation that uses a comics to interpret religious text.” Maybe it’s not the smoothest handshake, but it’s a place to start. When I tell people this, I occasionally get quizzical looks from strangers who wonder how comics relate to religion at all. Either that or they are wondering if they are going to need another cocktail before we get into a conversation. The comics/religion relationship is a fantastic tangle that needs to be sorted out when we get into deep discussions. If we talk about religion and comics without sorting this out, we risk all kinds of misunderstandings and hurt feelings, not to mention frustrating cocktail parties.

Religion and comics have been in some sort of relationship for millennia. Stained glass church windows are a familiar Christian example; they tell the stories that are important to the builders of particular churches in different styles. Ancient peoples used comics-type language in cave paintings and Egyptian tombs to express their relationship to the supernatural. Although my own work centers mostly on Christian relationships to comics, I want to stress that there is much more out there to be discovered in comics from all the world’s religions. Comics are a medium that can deliver a particular message where text and images interact to create narrative and emotional results—something that religions of all stripes often strive to do and that comics can do with religious effect.

I conceive of the relationship between comics and religion in four categories: comics as religion, comics in religion, religion in comics, and religion and comics in dialogue. In this month’s installation, I’ll give you the first two categories (comics AS religion and comics IN religion), but be sure to follow along for the exciting conclusion soon. These categories are modeled on the four relationships between religion and popular culture more broadly as outlined in by Bruce David Forbes in his introduction to this great popular culture book with Jeffrey Mahan. They are solid tools for tackling a very messy relationship.

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academic, contributors, online

The Complicated Theology of a Wonder Woman

WONDER WOMAN
Wonder Woman. Photo by ClaraDon/Flickr

[The following piece was originally published for the Colorado Council of Churches website and it is reposted here with the author’s permission.]

Even before the new movie broke box office records and charmed the world this summer, Wonder Woman was an icon for feminism. She has a set of values in the film that closely approximates the best of theological thinking. That is, the movie hints at some concepts that have been core to the character from her creation—that love and diplomacy are better tools than war in solving the world’s problems and that women should have a role in leadership toward peace. Yes, the film has some well-executed fight scenes, but Diana—the Wonder Woman at the center—is determined to use her skills to defend and help. She refuses to vilify the soldiers and ordinary people participating in the violence of World War I; she remains convinced that human beings can be better than they are.

It’s complicated to use a fictional comic character as an icon for anything—peace, diplomacy, or feminism—because so many people are responsible for creating stories about the same character. Creators rarely agree on a single focus or value for characters in their charge. In this short presentation, which I did last year before the film came out, I wrestle with the way two very different origin stories for Wonder Woman create tensions around the character as an “ideal” woman. Thank you to Ryan Duncan and Cathie Kelsey at Iliff School of Theology for inviting me to share my passion for comics with the gathering for International Women’s Day last year. (I misspeak in the opening line of this video and say Women’s Day is a “year” rather than a day, but it’s just wishful thinking!)

I hope you enjoy learning about a little about the tangle of origin stories and my call to be wonders in the world. Despite the complexities, I’m happy that this character exists to give hope and inspiration to women. In moments when I feel powerless, it’s wonderful to have stories about a woman of such obvious power and love. I’m thrilled that this generation has the 2017 film to give them such a positive picture of the possibilities of this character.

For more, watch this video of Dr. Coody!

Elizabeth Rae Coody, PhD directs the Writing Lab at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.  Her own writing is often about the Bible and comics. As a trained biblical scholar whose PhD is in Religious and Theological Studies with a concentration in Biblical Interpretation, she values the contributions to biblical interpretation that popular culture can make. Her 2015 dissertation project was on the way comics can help interpreters imagine the scandal of Jesus’s death on the Cross that is often domesticated by modern Christian sensibilities. Her work continues and expands themes of how popular culture can give insight into the Bible and how knowledge of the Bible can return the favor.

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Cloning Enchantment: Jesuses After Climate Change

[This article first appeared in the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, vol 8, no. 3. It is reproduced here with permission.]

Elizabeth Rae Coody
Elizabeth Rae Coody (PhD) is a biblical scholar with a professional interest in comic books. She is the Director of the Writing Lab and adjunct faculty for the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.

When I found one comic with a Jesus that scientists had cloned from relics, I chuckled at its clever premise. When I found the third Jesus Clone comic, I realized that something had to be going on. As a biblical scholar with professional interests in comics, I had come upon one of those ideas that will not let me go.[1]

I find that Jesus Clone reflects an anxiety about human control and biblical promises in a underexplored corner of U.S. popular culture. There are other thinkers who linger over questions about the worth of popular culture and comics in addressing such ideas, but I am convinced that these comics, and others like them, offer insight into how people conceive of and combine elements from science, religion, and imagination to make sense of our world. These comics bring emotion and narrative to our effort to sort our identity as a species.

Human beings are having a geological effect on the planet we inhabit.[2] Once we allow ourselves to conceive of our role in climate change, we humans have to make sense of the control we have on the planet. Control that was once seen as solely divine is all too human, often with stomach-churning consequences. We have agency, but what have we done with it? What’s there to do when science pronounces planetary doom and religion is seen to falter when asked to answer? Why, combine the two! Bring the Second Coming with Science!
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