Fittingly enough, it was roughly six months ago that Jeff Jackson, ComicAttack.net writer of the “Comics Are My Religion” columns, discussed theological time — chronos and kairos, in terms of Jim McCann and Janet Lee’s Return of the Dapper Men graphic novel from Archaia Comics:
In the book, time has stopped, however, life goes on. Children have forgotten to grow up and robots have forgotten who built them. There is general dis-ease in the community, as these lack of understandings have driven the human children and the robots away from one another.
It’s not until the community is visited by a down-pouring of Dapper Men that things begin to change. One Dapper Man, designated “41,” brings about the epiphany of the importance of time to the characters, and they find that their destinies are even dependent on time.
Can comics as a medium escape a dependency on chronos, everyday chronological time? Or, does the medium already achieve this more readily than other media? Do comics actually operate in a hybrid between chronos and kairos, in aevum?
