books
BY AARON RAGAN-FORE
Holy Texts,
Wholly Heroes
Two new books explore
superheroes and religion
S
ometimes it takes a little love from another culture
to make us all appreciate something we think of
as uniquely American. The Japanese fi rst started
picking up baseball bats in the late 1800s. Paris embraced
jazz in the 1920s. And the late 20th century saw an infl ux
of British, Scottish and Irish creators refi ning, reworking
and reinterpreting American comic book superheroes.
The tights-and-capes set comprise a telling element of
the American psyche, and now two natives of the British
Isles have each produced a book examining the conception
and execution of the American superhero characters they
admire.
Ben Saunders, a professor in the UO English
department, was guest curator of the Jordan Schnitzer
Museum’s 2009 exhibition of superhero comic book art
(see “Affection and Nostalgia,” 9/24/09). His new book,
Do The Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and
Superheroes, (Continuum, $21.95) posits that “superhero
comics are especially, generically, suited to the task of
engaging, expressing, and addressing urgent and ethical
existential questions.”
Do The Gods Wear Capes? features a cover illustration
by Oregon comic book creator Michael Allred that depicts a
caped superbeing with the symbol for infi nity emblazoned
on his chest. It’s an appropriate crest for a book that
expounds on hero characters as workhorse metaphors for
inner struggles and psychological concepts.
Saunders suggests that Superman, for example, offers
his readers an adaptable conception of virtue that changes
per context, a series of “different ideological formations
that alter almost by the decade, and in accordance with
broader historical contexts: from thinly veiled revolutionary
socialism to wartime populism to Eisenhower capitalism to
self-canceling escapism to inhibiting self-skepticism.”
Saunders applies a similar degree of scrutiny and
interpretation to other popular hero characters, identifying
in Wonder Woman comics themes of loving submission;
in The Amazing Spider-Man, the struggle to operate as
an actively moral being; and in Iron Man, questions of
humankind’s role in a world supported by technology.
Saunders utilizes anecdotes from his own life in his
scholarly manuscript to illustrate and expand upon the
ideas he puts forth, such as an evolution from his boyhood
opinion that the ethically superior Superman is dull and
boring, to an appreciation of the character’s unshakable
virtue as part and parcel of his “mythic signifi cance” for
readers.
Scottish-born comics writer Grant Morrison (All-Star
Superman, The Invisibles), meanwhile, has penned his own
treatise dealing in large part with the question of comic book
characters as representatives of the divine, but to quite different
effect. Morrison’s sprawling and multifaceted Supergods:
What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun
God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
(Spiegel & Grau, $28.00) is long on anecdote but a bit shorter
than Saunders on substantiated academic theory.
Morrison, who now and then cites the work and
infl uence of Eugene favorite son Ken Kesey, structures his
book as part history of the comic book form, part personal
memoir, and part statement of personal and religious belief.
Morrison, a modern practitioner of magic, lays out the
origins and major precepts of his religion of one — a heady
mix of drug use, visits by spiritual beings, performance of
mystic rites as well as characters and concepts he readily
identifi es as fi ctional pop-cultural constructs.
In perfect keeping with our ironic times, the era of the
reality show as professional and public self-refl ection,
Morrison has literally incorporated into his beliefs a niche
for the comic books — the “radical enhancement of the
mundane” — that he writes for a living.
“I had no need of faith,” Morrison writes in a
characteristically bold and bizarre passage. “My gods were
real, made of paper and light, and they rolled up into my
pocket like a superstring dimension.”
The book is a catechism for Morrison’s acolytes, of either
the spiritually devout or comic book fanboy varieties. It’s as if
Morrison, fl ying high and prepping for a Mideast pilgrimage,
skimmed Saunders’ book while packing and decided to take
the title literally… despite the fact that work on the two books
was undoubtedly underway at the same time.
The two works dovetail nicely, for all their differences
in approach, style and material. And the nifty thing about
the two is that, if your personal reading docket has room for
just one tome devoted to comics studies, you can exercise a
choice between a taut and nuanced academic work by one
of our most important comic book scholars, and a personal
statement of gonzo belief by one of our most important
comic book creators.
ew
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EUGENE WEEKLY OCTOBER 27, 2011 39