academic

The U.S.’s Largest Indian Comics Collection in Is in Illinois

Above: From Indrajal Comics Online

For the largest collection of Indian comics in the U.S., including those about Hindu myth, lore, and religion, one would want to travel to the University of Illinois where Mara Thacker, librarian and professor in South Asian studies, has curated a collection along with reference services librarian David Ward.

“The uniqueness is one of the things we first thought about,” Ward said. “It’s an area that’s not being collected heavily elsewhere in the United States, which provides the opportunity to have this unique collection.”

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

In addition to compiling the collection, cataloguing it has been its own “beast,” reports Nicole Ream-Sotomayor, foreign language cataloging specialist. “The comics proved to be the hardest material she has ever had to catalog,” reports Stephanie Kim of The Daily Illini.

The inspiration for such a collection, reports Jodi Heckel of The Illinois News Bureau, came from the library’s initial collection of comics and graphic novels as well as its push for foreign-language material. Spinning out of a workshop of he Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation, Thacker engaged in the task.

Along with the comics themselves, the library offers useful online LibGuide for research and popular resources on the topic, along with a go-to bibliography.

Tacker can be followed on Twitter as @marathacker.

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.

Continue reading The Tangled Relationship Between Religion and Comics →

academic, contributors

Martin Lund on the Possibilities of “Pantheonic Bricolage”

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[The following piece was originally published at MartinLund.me and it is reposted here with the author’s permission.]

The Marvel Universe pantheons

Is It a Thing? “Pantheonic Bricolage.”

If you are at all familiar with my work, you know that I have a particular interest in the intersections between comics and religion. I have spent countless hours studying comics in relation to Judaism and Jewishness, on editing a book about Muslim superheroes (the release of which is so close now I can almost taste it!), and I’m currently drafting a book about the recently deceased evangelical comics propagandist Jack T. Chick (about whom I have written here and here).

In addition to this, I’m also working on a guide to comics and world religions with a couple of fellow scholars of the topic. We have hashed out a rough structure and are working separately on our chapters. In addition to writing about the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), I will also be tackling what we have chosen, for now, to call “Archaic Traditions.” (I just might make another “Is it a thing?” post about that label somewhere down the line.)

This means that I am writing about Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Old Norse religions. And I am loving it to no end. There is so much interesting material to work with here, and I will be sharing thoughts and reviews as things progress.

But for now, I want to bounce a thing off the internet and see what happens.

I want to talk about what I have been calling, for lack of a better term: “pantheonic bricolage.” It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.

Continue reading Martin Lund on the Possibilities of “Pantheonic Bricolage” →

controversy, cultural, interviews, podcast

Writer Mike Baron on Based Stick Man, the Alt-Right, and Free Speech – 001 Sacred & Sequential Audio

Promotional cover art to Based Stick Man
Promotional cover art to Based Stick Man

A. David Lewis speaks with Mike Baron in August 2017 about the upcoming Based Stick Man series, the politics of the series, and Baron’s own views on free speech and violence.

“Sometimes our heroes aren’t the people we’d most like them to be. You’ve got to take who you can get.”

interviews

Ron Regé on Drawing from (Outside) the Qur’an

Ron Regé Jr.If you missed this year’s Free Comic Book Day, then you likely didn’t hear about Fantagraphics’ Worlds Greatest Cartoonists collection featuring such creators as Ed Piskor, Richard Sala, or Liz Suburbia. Additionally, the FCBD offering — intended, says the publisher, to “Features a Breadth of Styles and Visions and World-Building” — also included a notable piece from Ron Regé entitled “From the Star and the Clot,” a visual retelling of the Quranic visit of the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.
Given the frequently cited tensions between comics and Islam, Sacred and Sequential had the opportunity to interview Regé  about the origin of and his goals for this work. (Note: “From the Star and the Clot” was first presented as a minicomic and is still available for purchase as a stand-alone work.)
S&S: Where did “From the Star and the Clot” come from? What was your source of inspiration for it?

THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESSRR: I was inspired to draw this sequence after reading about it in a book called The Alphabet vs The Goddess. I think I happened upon it in a bookstore, strangely enough. In it, Leonard Shlain lays out his theory about how the development of written language helped bring about a patriarchal hierarchy of power and control that was absent from previous image based, matriarchal societies. It’s not a perfect work, but it brings up questions and ideas that I’d been curious about for my entire life.

S&S: How long ago was this, approximately? That is, was this a recent discovery or something that’s shaped your thought for some time?

RR: I guess between 2008-2012 I was putting myself through a sort of self-directed course, reading dozens of books related to spirituality, history, philosophy, etc. I found myself attracted to figures & people with some pretty out there philosophies & ideas. Tesla, Mesmer, Wilhelm Reich, Swedenborg, Gurdjieff, etc & so on. This was all in the period that I was working on The Cartoon Utopia.

The idea that laws and rules written in books could be used as instruments of control by men in power, that a literate class could control the rest of society with such tools is a pretty powerful & obvious argument when looking at the misogynist horror that is Western Civilization. Is it wishful thinking of the modern age to think that oral traditions and societies of the past were more holistic, matriarchal, and malleable when dealing with matters of their moment? Perhaps, but it brings up fascinating conflicts between left & right brain, male & female, science & spirituality that continue to cause much confusion in the world today.

Continue reading Ron Regé on Drawing from (Outside) the Qur’an →

@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic Religion