Over at Comic Bastards, Dustin Cabeal sat down with the writer of Holy F*ck Nick Marino about his and artist Daniel Arruda Massa’s “sacrilegious satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” As the Marino explains:
From my perspective, this is really Sister Maria’s story. She’s the one who finds Jesus. She’s the one who brings him to Satan. She’s the one who’s actively going after the mythological gods and trying to stop their oppressive agenda.
However, if that’s too heady for you… LOOK!!!!! Jesus and Satan with big guns! Zeus and Isis with nuclear missiles! Nudity and profanity!!!
One of S&S’s newest members, Scott S. Elliott, shared his terrific Postscripts paper on “Jesus in the Gutter: Comics and Graphic Novels Reimagining the Gospels” on his Academia.edu page. It’s free to read, even without a membership! Read more about it here.
Over at Sequart, Ian Dawe threads an intriguing connection between Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s milestone Superman story “For the Man Who Has Everything” and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Though Superman is frequently posited as a Christ figure, Dawe raises a number of thoughtful points on “Christian overtones” that likely hadn’t previously been applied to this work by the Watchmen team. Read more here.
Recently, the Sequart Comics Research Organization offered an editorial by library historian Stuart Warren on the inherent Christ-ness of Superman, no doubt times to coincide with the release of the new Warner Brothers big screen depiction of the Last Son of Krypton Man of Steel. It’s well-trodden ground, Supes as Jesus (and news outlets like FOX News and WND seemed to pick up on this popular observation, too, this cinematic go-around — AmericaBlog was among those who did not appreciate the repeated comparison)
But certainly Sequart didn’t give Warren the sum that Warner Brothers paid theologian Craig Detwiler of Pepperdine University for his notes on Superman as fodder for Christian sermons. Detwiler claims that his material, entitled, “Jesus: The Original Superhero,” gives “churches a chance to engage with pop culture instead of just condemning it,” according to io9 and CNN. Of course, none of the reports suggest free tickets are included with Detwiler’s sermon notes, so whatever inspiration or identification these congregations find through Zack Snyder’s Superman will also prove lucrative to Warner Brothers at the box office and in merchandising.
@ the intersection of religion and comics: Graphic Religion
Over at Comic Bastards, Dustin Cabeal sat down with the writer of Holy F*ck Nick Marino about his and artist Daniel Arruda Massa’s “sacrilegious satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” As the Marino explains:
