THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO COMICS

GRAHAM HEDGES

When I was at school most of my teachers disapproved of comics. No doubt

they believed that their pupils should be devoting their time to more worthy

reading material. Undaunted by their disapproval, I became an avid reader of

American comic books, and even began to write and distribute my own

comics featuring a not very original range of super-heroes of my own.

Several decades later, with the advent of so-called graphic novels and a

more adult approach to the writing and illustration of comics, the humble

comic has become more intellectually respectable, although some critics still

take exception to the graphic level of violence found in many titles.

Some readers have noticed implicit religious themes in super-hero

comics and this subject is considered in Greg Garrett's Holy Superheroes! (Westminster John Knox Press, £10.99, ISBN 978-0664231910).

This and similar themes were explored in a recent talk by Mark Meynell,

of All Soul's Church, Langham Place, entitled Why We Love Men in Capes:

super-heroes as western yearnings in a post-messianic age and given at the

London Institute for Contemporary Christianity on Monday 2 July 2012..

Mark argued that there is a link between contemporary super-heroes

and the heroes of mythology, such as Achilles. Super-hero stories resonate

with the deepest yearnings of the human person, including the need for a

Saviour figure. The creation of super-villains such as the Joker and Two-

Face can be seen as a search for a “vocabulary of evil” in an age that is

reluctant to use words like “right” and “wrong”.

The emergence of super-hero comics in the 1930s can be seen as a

response to the de-personalisation of the American city – as reflected in

Batman's Gotham City.

Super-heroes fall into two main categories. Super-heroes “from below”

include Spiderman, an ordinary adolescent who gained his powers from the

chance bite of a radioactive spider. Characters like Superman - the

“incarnational alien” from a higher world - are “heroes from above”.

The speaker continued by considering “rumours of redemption” in

super-hero stories and drawing parallels with “the one true super-hero” -

Jesus himself.

Although Siegel and Schuster, the creators of Superman, were Jewish

by birth, there are a number of obvious parallels between the Superman

narrative and the Christian story. These overlaps have been further

developed in the film versions. In the first film, Jor-El, Superman's father on

the planet Krypton, speaks about the relationship between the 'Father' and

the 'Son' in language that could almost have been lifted from St. John's

Gospel. And in Superman Returns, Superman asks Lois Lane “how can

you say the world doesn't need a Saviour when I hear so many people crying

out for one”?

The idea of the super-hero as a redeemer figure willing to lay down his

life for his contemporaries crops up in the new Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. I enjoyed the film on a recent visit to the cinema although the recent

tragic shootings during a showing in Florida again raise the vexed question

of how far violence on the screen is related to violence in the real world.

Graham Hedges is a member of the Barking Baptist Church and the

Secretary and Publications Editor of the Librarians' Christian Fellowship.