Book Review: Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined

 reviewed by Dominick Grace

Kees de Groot, ed. Comics, Culture, and Religion:  Faith Imagined. New York:  Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 264 pp. US $39.95 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-3503-2162-5. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/comics-culture-and-religion-9781350321588/ (open access - free download)

 Comics, Culture, and Religion:  Faith Imagined, edited by Kees de Groot, adds to the growing list of books addressing religion in comics (2024 also, see Grafius and Morehead’s Horror Comics and Religion). The book also participates in the growing trend towards globalism in comics scholarship. While American texts, such as Maus, Watchmen, and Craig Thompson’s Habibi, are addressed, the book also covers European, Japanese, and Indian texts, and others on religions other than Christianity. These features are all to the good. While not every chapter, perhaps, will be of use to every reader, anyone interested in the range of comics with religious elements, and/or the relationship between comics and religion per se, will find material of interest here, and scholars interested in the specific topics of individual chapters will wish to check those ones out, at least. The scholars, whose work appears here, are mostly European, so though the lens through which most look is Western, it is not, with a couple of exceptions, North American. This is also all to the good. Diversity of topics and of scholarly voices remain important to the growth and robustness of scholarship generally, and comics scholarship specifically, given that comics are a worldwide phenomenon, but comics scholarship has not, as yet, fully encompassed that global reality.

Nevertheless, this collection is a mixed bag. The chapters are all in English, but many of the authors are not native speakers, so the prose can be stilted and occasionally, grammatically flawed. This might seem like a niggle, but careful editorial oversight should have been able to smooth out such infelicities without compromising the authors’ voices. Furthermore, the scholars included are not, generally, comics scholars per se, but rather religious studies scholars, who do bring an important perspective to a book on comics and religion, but who also do not always have the depth of comics knowledge or focus on comics-specific aspects of what they discuss that comics scholars may be looking for. The books’ approach is also oriented more towards social science than humanities, which is hardly a limitation or flaw, but it does mean that comics scholars more on the humanities side of the discipline may find this book less useful than will their social sciences colleagues. (Full disclosure:  I come from the humanities, so the methodologies and interests of some of these papers fall outside my own areas of practice, interest, and knowledge.)

The book is divided into four parts. As de Groot writes in his introduction:

 

The first part, Comics in Religion, starts with religions. How do religious communities and institutions use comics to communicate with their audience and why and when do they protest against them? The second part, Religion in Comics, starts with comics. How are religious beliefs, rituals, symbols, leaders, stories, and practices represented, criticized, and discussed in comics? The third part, Comics as Religion?, discusses the cultural role of comics in cultivating a sense of the sacred and making meaning (7-8). Part four, Learning from Comics, asks, “What and how do comics teach about culture, about religion, and about the intertwinement of the religious and the social?” (8).

 

The quality of the essays varies considerably. Some are well written and researched, and clearly argued; others fail on one or more of these fronts. Many of the essays also don’t seem to me to end up having much of use to say. For instance, Paula Niechcial’s “The Reception of Comics on Zoroastrianism” sounded like it would offer a useful exploration of quite an esoteric (to me) topic. However, her quantitative study of the reception of two comics had very low responses--in the case of one of the comics she was asking about, only one of her 91 respondents indicated being familiar with it. Consequently, it is difficult to reach reliable conclusions about responses to these comics, based on this research. Others drift from the book’s focus. For instance, the one on “The Magic of the Multiverse:  Easter Eggs, Superhuman Beings, and Metamodernism in Marvel’s Story Worlds,” by Sissel Undheim, has much more to say about film and TV than the comics--and there is much one might discuss about how Marvel Comics have treated (or mistreated) religion. Line Reichelt Føreland’s “Comics and Religious Studies:  Amar Chitra Katha as an Educational Comic Series” offers useful information on comics as educational tools and on the history of the comics she is discussing, but does not really answer her opening question:  “How can comics be used in religious studies?” (205; my emphasis). What would have seemed to me obvious examples to consider of comics that try to proselytize--Spire comics, Jack Chick tracts, for instance--are not even mentioned.

On the other hand, several pieces are strong, whether on comics familiar to North American readers. For instance, in “Implicit Religion and Trauma Narratives in Maus and Watchmen,” Ilaria Biano’s exercise in “framing Maus and Watchmen in the context of the implicit religiosity of their traumatic narratives” (141) offers useful insights into these canonical comics in their cultural context. Evelina Lundmark tackles the weaponizing of online outrage to attack comics that don’t conform to a particular religious orthodoxy in “Cancelling the Second Coming:  Manufactured Christian Outrage Online,” offering valuable insights. Irene Trysnes provides what is, for an outsider, an excellent analysis of the use of religion in Norwegian comics, in “From Subordinates to Superheroes? Comics in Christian Magazines for Children and Youth in Norway.” Christoffe Monotte takes a new look at Eisner’s A Contract With God in terms of “sociology of religion and migration sociology” (222), in “A Contract with God or a Social Contract?” Other papers were on Preacher, on Craig Thompson’s Habibi, junrei manga, the comics of Kaisa and Christoffer Leka, and other topics.

The final words of the conclusion are, “To be continued.” This is a fair conclusion. This volume is to be commended for its exploration of a diverse array of comics through a religious studies lens, but it also leaves room for additional work. The exploration of religion and/in comics does indeed need to be continued further than it goes here.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Comics and Religion in Liquid Modernity, Kees de Groot (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
Part I: Comics in Religion
1. From Subordinates to Superheroes? Comics in Christian Magazines for Children and Youth in Norway, Irene Trysnes (University of Agder, Norway)
2. Cancelling the Second Coming: Manufactured Christian Outrage Online, Evelina Lundmark (Uppsala University, Sweden)
3. The Reception of Comics on Zoroastrianism, Paulina Niechcial (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
Part II: Religion in comics
4. Drawn into Krishna: Autobiography and Lived Religion in the Comics of Kaisa and Christoffer Leka, Andreas Häger and Ralf Kauranen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
5. What Would Preacher Do? Tactics of Blasphemy in the Strategies of Satire and Parody, Michael J. Prince (University of Agder, Noway)
6. Islam and Anxieties of Liberalism in Craig Thompson's Habibi, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (Reed College, USA)
Part III: Comics as Religion?
7. Implicit Religion and Trauma Narratives in Maus and Watchmen, Ilaria Biano (Istituto Italiano, Italy)
8. Manga Pilgrimages: Visualizing the Sacred / Sacralizing the Visual in Japanese Junrei, Mark MacWilliams (St. Lawrence University, USA)
9. Comics and Meaning Making: Adult Comic Book Readers on What, Why and How They Read, Sofia Sjö (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
Part IV: Learning From Comics
9. The Magic of the Multiverse. Easter Eggs, Superhuman Beings and Metamodernism in Marvel's Story Worlds, Sissel Undheim (University of Bergen, Norway)
10. Comics and Religious Studies: Amar Chitra Katha as an Educational Comic Series, Line Reichelt Føreland (University of Agder, Norway)
11. A Contract with God or a Social Contract? Christophe Monnot (University of Strasbourg, France)
Conclusion: Comics as a Way of Doing, Encountering, and Making Religion, Kees de Groot (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
Bibliography
Index

 

 

Book Review: From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics

 reviewed by Brian Flota, Humanities Librarian and Associate Professor, James Madison University Libraries

Neale Barnholden. From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2024. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/F/From-Gum-Wrappers-to-Richie-Rich

 I was immediately drawn to the title of Barnholden’s book because of my role as an academic (comics) librarian. Librarians, particularly those working in or with Special Collections, are especially attuned to the materiality of comics, and often juxtapose them with materials more commonly associated with rare book reading rooms–such as illuminated manuscripts, illustrated hard-bound books, broadsides, serialized novels, early comic strips in newspapers, and dime novels, for example–to demonstrate for students the evolution of the form and its continuity with these earlier material forms. In a recent book chapter, Michael C. Weisenburg, the Director of Rare Books & Special Collections at the University of South Carolina, discusses how, in 1977, Pizza Hut restaurants gave away six DC Comics that reprinted Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman issues from the 1950s as part of a promotion. Despite the claim, on the back cover of these books, that “these comics are identical to the originals with the exception of the paid advertising,” Weisbenburg notes, “the format, cover, and other elements beyond the ads were also changed due to basic differences in production and distribution of the issues” (116). He concludes his discussion by arguing, “The point is not to scrutinize the historic claims of either DC or Pizza Hut but to show how diffuse comic books were during this period and to illustrate how being mindful of the bibliographic elements of any given copy might teach us unsuspected things about comic books and their history” (116).

This is a roundabout way of demonstrating the affinities between a librarian working with comics and Barnholden’s thesis in his book. In the introduction, he rightly acknowledges the slow turn towards the materiality of comics in Comics Studies. He is also correct when he observes, “although book history methods are present in comics scholarship, auteurism is still the predominant mode of comics criticism, and stories rather than editions are the common units of study” (17). As such, Barnholden selects four case studies to show how a cultural materialist approach to Comics Studies can deeply enhance and contribute to the interpretation and analysis of comics. The book’s four main chapters focus on the Uncle Scrooge story “Back to the Klondike,” which first appeared in Four Color #456 (March 1953, Dell Comics), the DC Comics series Watchmen (1986-87), the comic books associated with Harvey Comics character Richie Rich, and Dubble Bubble Funnies, the free, tiny comics given away with individually-wrapped pieces of Dubble Bubble Bubblegum. With each example, Barnholden provides rich material analyses, unraveling how meaning can and is changed in these properties over the course of time.

His first two examples, “Back to the Klondike” and Watchmen, pierce through the auteurist approaches that have been broadly applied to these works in Comics Studies scholarship. Barnholden traces the printing history of the notable Uncle Scrooge story over time from its first appearance in 1953 in a comic book that cost 10 cents to its inclusion in Vol. 12 of hardcover series of books published by Fantagraphics titled The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library in 2012 with a cover price of $35. When it first appeared in 1953, its artist and writer, Carl Barks, was unknown to all, recognized by Walt Disney comics obsessives as ‘the good duck artist.’ He is not credited at all in Four Color #456. The credit goes to the Walt Disney brand instead. In subsequent 1966 and 1977 reprints, Barks is again uncredited. These two reprints come in slightly different sizes, have different stories packaged with them, are colored differently, and have different advertisements. After Barks’ identity becomes known, the nature of subsequent appearances of “Back to the Klondike” changes drastically. Barks claimed pages were cut from the original issue, and since the original art for the issue no longer exists, it was recreated by Barks in the early 1980s and added to later reprints of the story. Barnholden discusses in great detail the changes made to this story, its recontextualization over the decades, and how contemporary readings of Barks’ work remove the “lowbrow” context which they were originally part of and replace it with the prestige afforded to the “graphic novel.” This first section is a great example of Barnholden’s approach, one in which materialist approaches successfully blend with close readings, and one he will repeat, with different emphases, in the chapters that follow.

In his chapter on Watchmen, the emphasis shifts, because, unlike the Barks story from 1953, the twelve-issue DC Comics series, written by Alan Moore with art by Dave Gibbons, was “an instant classic,” immediately recognized as a significant work upon its publication in 1986 and 1987. Commonly considered part of the highlights of 1986 which led to the popularization and codification of the “graphic novel” trade paperback–which in time would become the primary printed means of reading comics–along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight, Watchmen did not appear as a bound single-volume collection until late 1987. Due to the popularity of the series in this format, and writer Alan Moore’s unwillingness to participate in its subsequent rebranding and corporate canonization by DC Comics, Barnholden argues that reprints of the series that follow, containing added material, commentary, and pricier “prestige” editions, impose a highly-manicured edifice around this instant classic. In one interesting aside, he notes that the first trade paperback printing adds the Juvenal quotation “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“Who watches the watchmen”) after the text, which did not appear in the original twelve-issue series. The quote is added in the context of the long-forgotten Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra scandal, which is referenced nowhere else in the series. Barnholden argues, “The citation places Watchmen in conversation with the world around it in an unusually direct manner, part of the trade paperback’s agenda of positioning Watchmen as a weighty graphic novel with something to say about ‘real life’ using the debased genre of superheroes” (55). In these ever-evolving attempts by DC to shape the continuing sales of Moore and Gibbons’ comic, Barnholden writes, “Watchmen has come to exemplify a certain kind of prestige comic book, one that transcends its genre subject matter and context through the use of realism and becomes timeless rather than remaining dated” (80). I think this gets to the core of his project: using cultural materialism to unmoor the perceived and/or received timelessness affixed to canonized works by the cultural and corporate monoliths who have ascribed those values, by pointing out the (possibly contrary) systemic values in place at the time of their original production.

 The next two chapters are not quite as engaging, but that is mainly the result of Barnholden choosing subjects–the character Richie Rich and Dubble Bubble Funnies comics–which lack the fan and critical apparatus afforded to the works of Carl Barks and Alan Moore. Barnholden is not trying to “rehabilitate” or canonize these two comics series, but rather illustrate how these two different cultural artifacts have been relegated to figurative and literal dustbins of (comics) history. In the case of Richie Rich, a “glut” of product in the 1970s and 1980s–at one point over thirty different Richie Rich titles were in production at Harvey Comics simultaneously–led to the company’s demise. Barnholden cites how subsequent rehabilitations of the character (such as the 1994 live action movie, directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Macauley Culkin as the titular character) failed to resonate, culminating in the contemporary use of “Richie Rich” as an insult. His analysis shows how this is at odds with the ways the character is portrayed in the comics, suggesting a complex and strategically misremembered cultural memory regarding the character.

 In his analysis of the Dubble Bubble Funnies, he differentiates them from Bazooka Joe, another tiny comic given away with pieces of Bazooka bubblegum, because comics and art world luminaries such as Art Spiegelman and Wesley Morse were, at times, involved in their production. He discusses these comics in terms of “trash”: “While Bazooka Joe made a return from the trash through the operations of nostalgia and the association of several famous creators, Pud [the main character in Dubble Bubble Funnies] remains in the cultural sphere of garbage” (125). The role of trash is important for his discussion. He astutely observes:

 The rhetoric of trash also existed for comics creators. The attitude that, in the words of historian David Hajdu, comics were “a diversion that may serve a purpose for a time but is best considered abandoned before too long,” could also be expressed with the same rhetoric of rubbish put forth by [comics historian Les] Daniels, [historians George] Perry and [Alan] Aldridge, the Senate [S]ubcommittee [on Juvenile Delinquency], and [Helen] Meyer [the longtime president of Dell Comics]. Of course, this rhetoric also reflects the material fact that as ephemera, the majority of comics and comic books were literally trashed [...] [T]he evaluative words used here indicate a midcentury conversation in which people with a variety of relationships to comics, from fans to politicians, could agree that there was something trashy (and not booky) about comics, a move that eventually had to be undone by salvage. (127, ellipses added)

 By commenting on the trashy and disposable nature of most comics throughout history, Barnholden’s project also seeks to highlight how many Comics Studies scholars have been guilty of positioning the subjects and objects of their study as prestigious and exclusive ones, and, in the process, reinforce the notion that all comics are trash save for a select certain few. The deliberate erasure of the history of comics as lowbrow cultural objects and transformation from cultural product to literal trash from these analyses obfuscates the trashy roots of comics, and that is something Barnholden has no patience for!

Because of the lack of a critical apparatus around either Richie Rich or Dubble Bubble Funnies, Barnholden employs some novel techniques for reading them. In the case of Richie Rich, he painstakingly attempts to capture every variation (he counts 43) in the drawing of Richie Rich’s face on the 1,723 covers he appeared on. His distant reading of the covers, which prove that Richie Rich’s appearance on the covers of his comics show him “luxuriat[ing in his wealth] in a way that the Richie of the stories seldom does” contributes to the fact that “Richie Rich” is now a term of derision for those with inherited wealth (104, 110). Sadly, it is a fairly laborious read to have him arrive at this rather anodyne conclusion. To assemble the collection of 175 Dubble Bubble Funnies he analyzes in the final chapter, he describes buying a one-kilogram bucket of Dubble Bubble gum to get a large and representative sample of the comics (134). (In the Acknowledgements, he writes, “thanks to everyone who has, over the years, helped me eat the bubble gum”! [ix]) This approach, random distribution, yields better results, though these one- and two-panel comics do not offer much to actually analyze, but Barnholden does his darnedest. While he was quick to point out Richie Rich’s renovated signification as a specific contemporary popular slur, he misses the fact that the name of the protagonist of Dubble Bubble Funnies, Pud, although created in the 1930s, has  slipped into the vernacular as a slang term for “penis” and “loser” in the 21^st century. I feel this is ripe for commentary as well. These criticisms are fairly minor though.

Barnholden’s first book is a fascinating, intriguing, well-researched and -theorized read that rises near the top of the heap of Comics Studies monographs. My only other criticism is that I wish it was longer! To return to Weisenburg’s example at the beginning of this review, I would love to read Barnholden’s take on those Pizza Hut giveaways from 1977, for example. I think even Barnholden would agree, as he writes, “Comics offered as ‘premiums’--inducements to consumers to purchase items–are an undertheorized material form of comics, where the cultural values associated with the materiality of ‘the book’ or ‘the magazine’ are replaced by the visibility of consumer culture in such marketing schemes, and by the related concept of trash” (113-4). Another example that comes to mind is the IDW-produced mini-comic that comes with Anchor Bay’s 2004 4-DVD “Ultimate Edition” of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. I would love to read Barnholden’s analysis of this packaging, the synergies between movies and comics, and the history of film adaptations. But now I am just giving him more work to do, work that I or any other Comics Studies scholar could (or should) take up. That this book is inspiring such ideas as I write this is a testament to the quality and originality of the slim but dense volume From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich.

Works Cited

Weisenburg, Michael C. “Bibliography, Print Culture, and What to Do with Comics in a Rare Book Library.” Comic Books, Special Collections, and the Academic Library, edited by Brian Flota and Kate Morris, ACRL, 2023, pp. 103-119.