Shine a Light

Today it’s about semi-autobiographical comics – fiction pieces that depict things close to the author, drawing heavily upon their immediate concerns, small press almost by definition, but not featuring the author as a character or claiming to depict their actual life. They loot freely from themselves and their kin and acquaintances, but put it into just enough of a fictional blender to be its own thing.

No pants necessary

Fleischer & Aparo

The Spectre wears a green Speedo over bare, pasty white skin. And he is scary as shit, man.

Mustache match

It’s the only unequivocally great villain protagonist book. And interestingly, he has no redeeming features at all: Dracula is a flat-out asshole, supremacist, bigot, casual serial murderer, and megalomaniac.

Super good

There’s a whole subculture of scholarship looking into comics and religion, very broadly, by nearly any imaginable definition of both “comics” and “religion” and how they might interact. Who knew?

God’s privy parts

You probably noticed that I had a little trouble staying out of the gender issue when summarizing the high-Church conflicts across the 300 issues of Cerebus the Aardvark

Elementary

As I heft the pile of issues and drift into a reverie, to see how Elementals fits in my mind, it emerges as a brilliant disaster. But I want to apply some historical perspective on why I might see it that way, maybe to consider it differently.

I just want to talk to him

Today’s about two comics published simultaneously in the mid-late 1990s, both of which I bought start to finish and for which I own the full runs. Each concerns going to find God and have a little talk. With a bullet.

God, an aardvark, and the man in between

This is the final page of issue 98. The text at the bottom indicates the title of the following issue – it reads, “Next: More theology”

Speak not the name! Wait for it … Dave Sim. OooOOoohh!

Everyday religion

First things first: never mind “belief.” I’m talking about upbringing, expectations, habits, and unconsidered identity, and about the real-world, utterly political history of institutions and communities.

Jihad, exclamation point optional

Cast your mind back to 1987, before Gulf War I. Here are the first two issues of Suicide Squad, which absolutely needed a villainous antagonist evil enough to  justify the dark-and-edgy premise of the U.S. government using supervillain felons for black ops. Need darker-and-edgier to fight!

Four-color Christ Jesus

Happy birthday to me! I grant you this is an odd topic for my birthday post, as I have zero affinity or resonance with evangelical Christianity. Its impact is definite at second-hand, though, as I think about the number of friends and family who became Jesus People (the early term) and (as soon called) Saved or Born Again during my pre-teens and teens,

Read your Bible

If anyone had suggested in 1968 that Bob Crumb should be drawing the Bible, they’d have been laughed outta the joint.