Just over a month ago, I reviewed Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck #1. Where I landed then was on a note of cautious anticipation, despite not finding the comic book all that entertaining. In spite of my review being arguably negative overall, the creators have kindly turned to Sacred & Sequential and to me for a second review. While I wish I could say that the second issue did more for me, but having read it, I can’t help but feel my earlier anticipation was premature.
Hitting the stands on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck #1 (Action Lab: Danger Zone) seemed to confirm what it says in Ecclesiastes; there is nothing new under the sun. A heaven-hell team-up? Garth Ennis’ Chronicles of Wormwood gave us that. A hedonistic bad-ass champion of God? Robert Kirkman’s Battle Pope. A heavily armed – Rambo-style – Jesus? Warren Ellis’ Bad World. The one thing that seems novel in Holy F*ck is its alliance of forgotten deities bent on destruction in order to once again get people to believe in them. But this, too, has some precedents, even if not as directly comparable – Marvel Comic’s Council of Godheads immediately comes to mind for the gathering, and the worship-hungry old gods are reminiscent in some ways of the old gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the alien Goa’uld of Stargate SG-1, for example. And Jesus long ago came off the cross to duke it out with Zeus in Godyssey, because the Greek god was fed up with having lost worshippers to the new monotheism.
Holy F*ck #1 is the first of four issues of what the advance material calls “an edgy satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” The plot so far is pretty straight-forward: a nun, as yet unnamed, seeks out – literally finds – Jesus so he can help her save the world from Polydynamis, Inc., a multinational company bent on worldwide destruction. Led by Zeus and Isis, and with a board consisting of a handful of other old, no longer worshipped gods, the group wants to plunge the world into chaos so that people will pray for help; by responding to those prayers, the thinking goes, the Polydynamis board will once again be worshipped by humanity. The issue ends with Jesus and the nun traveling to New Jersey (complete with parodied Jersey Shore beach bums) to enlist some backup from hell.
RightWingWatch.org reported that, in the wake of DC Comics revising one of its Green Lantern characters as a gay man, Mission America’s Linda Harvey spoke out on her radio show against “the gay agenda” in comics. Christians, she says, should speak out against comics as “one more area of depravity” in popular culture.
Among her other warnings, Harvey spoke out in 2011 against Christians taking their children to gay doctors because Christians’ “values should be respected.”
Image provided by the Journal of the Lincoln Heights Literary Society Miscellanea and Ephemeron
In addition to being a civil union, many consider marriage to also be a religious union and rite. So, Rao has chosen to relay this report from Christopher Holden at The Mary Sue blog though it may not be explicitly religious (or, at least, not yet):
I am fairly confident that there has never been a polygamous, same sex marriage in mainstream comics before […] Regardless of whether this marriage remains canon or not, Gail Simone made a bold move in writing it into her last issue, and deserves admiration for including it because it was not done for shock value and stays true to the characters she had developed.
Get all the details on Scandal, Knockout, and Liana over at The Mary Sue, but, lest one is skeptical, here’s an image from the storyline in question.
Image from Secret Six #36, art by Jim Calafiore
Rao wants to know: Does this rare union pertain to religion, or is it exclusively a comics milestone/footnote?
@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic Religion
Just over a month ago, I reviewed Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck #1. Where I landed then was on a note of cautious anticipation, despite not finding the comic book all that entertaining. In spite of my review being arguably negative overall, the creators have kindly turned to Sacred & Sequential and to me for a second review. While I wish I could say that the second issue did more for me, but having read it, I can’t help but feel my earlier anticipation was premature.
