The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1926: The Crusaders #5, 1975

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Today's featured artist is Fred Carter, who, according to the few bits of writing about him I can find was an illustrator for Chick Publications in from the 70s until at least 2001. The article above that talks about a new series of Chick Tracts redone with all black characters refers to Carter as a "black pastor" and "one of the world's best illustrators," and I have to agree that Mr. Carter is a really gifted artist, and brings that gift to his visions of suffering and redemption.

I have to say, up front, as I did in my last review of a Crusaders issue, that I find the overall message of this comic, and of Chick in general, to be absolutely disgusting. It's the worst kind of Christianity, and flies in the face, as I understand it, of what being a Christian person means.

That said, this comic offers a really lovely way of articulating how we can appreciate a piece of art while wholly disagreeing with the overall intention (stated, in this case) of the work and artist themselves.

First, it's surprisingly racially sensitive. One of the core teachings stated in the comic is that of racial equality. Of the two main characters in The Crusaders, one is a black man. However, the story does hinge on the guys helping to convert a Jewish man in Israel to Christianity. And the Holy Land is supposed to get invaded by an army of evil Asian people. So let's perhaps take that racial equality with a grain of salt. It's racial equality if all races decide to follow Christianity.

Second, Carter uses some amazing visuals to represent Heaven, even using contemporaneous deep space nebula pictures to offer a way of visualizing the Gates of Heaven. I've talked a little about this before when I wrote a piece for Sequart that explores the relationship between Christianity and comic books. In that piece, I talked about how Mike and Laura Allred's adaptation of The Book of Mormon adds visual metaphor to written text, offering another layer of teaching and interpretation. Carter's use here of an interstellar photograph to illustrate the Gates of Heaven is a clever updating of a difficult idea.

Third, and I noted this last time, Carter draws one fine-looking male physique. Both Tim and James are, to be blunt, hot. Perhaps working this devoutly for God confers special attractiveness powers? I am, of course, always wary of comics that are explicitly, as this one is, homophobic, yet contain some extraordinarily homoerotic illustrations. That said, Mr. Carter lavishes this kind of detail on all of his characters - but Tim and James get some special treatment.

So, a few things to pull out and consider. I think the addition of metaphoric pictorial representation is the most important thing comics can bring to spiritual texts - we are overwhelmingly visual creatures, so using pictures to elucidate some of our oldest metaphysical mysteries just seems smart.

But just to be clear, this comic was put together, and believed in, by some very wrong-headed individuals.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

Despite being firmly agnostic about just about every spiritual tradition, I tend to think a lot about religion because it impacts every facet of life in the world, despite our protestations of the separation of Church and State, and not always in such great ways. Here's some thoughts I've had.

Public Domain Comics! - "Heroes of the Old Testament" from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact v.20, #1, 1964

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Today's story comes from a Christian comic that was distributed to schools and not on news stands, as far as I know. The series began publication in 1946, and managed, according to the GCD, 496 issues before ceasing publication.

It's really a pretty great story, and does so much of the work I would like to do in showing how comic book superheroes and Biblical heroes are really one and the same.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1863: Archie's Love Scene, 1988

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I'm not sure why I decided to read another of these comics today. I am fascinated by Christian comics. They're basically telling all the same stories as the superhero comics I love, but the addition of the palpable need for the reader to join and believe all the stories, or the complete lack of allowing the reader to figure out the metaphors themselves is super irksome.

There was one story in here that I actually took quite a lot away from. It used the metaphor of thermostats and thermometers to talk about how we react to things. When a thermometer gets hot, the mercury rises and when cold, it drops. This is a person who allows external events to dictate their responses/behaviours. In contrast, a thermostat controls the reaction, and thereby is more able to handle difficult situations. I'm definitely a thermometer these days. But I'm trying to be a thermostat. That said, I do not need the help of an all-knowing God to help me with this.

I've got Superman.

More to follow.

Related Posts and Further Reading

I quite like Archie Comics, and have written a fair bit about them over the years.

And for a really (really) long read on my thoughts on Superman as contemporary religious icon, feel free to dive into my Master's thesis. 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1862: Archie's Parables, 1986

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The way I have my comics stored, I've got a bunch of short boxes on shelves, and I keep the box tops underneath them - this way I can access the collection much more easily than having to pull the box off and open it up. It's not a lot of time, but it also looks pretty nice. (I'll have to post some pics of my comic book kingdom one of these days.) Since the lids are on the bottom, I'm able to display a single comic by sliding into the lid. My plan this week was to read all of the comics that I've selected as the display comics right now. They change every couple of month, and I always try to put interesting or novel things on display.

Archie's Parables was displayed on the box containing my Spire Publishing/Barbour Publishing Christian Archie comics, so I thought I'd give it a try. I remember talking to Mike at Purple Gorilla Comics here in Calgary about these comics, and how one very rarely finds them in good shape. His theory was that kids got tricked by them (I know I did), thinking they were Archie comics, and then getting to the end of literally every story and the punchline, so to speak, was God. And re-reading this comic today, I don't think I'd realized just how Evangelistic they are. However, I think it's best to let Al Hartley's classic art, and, really, horrendously Christian writing, to speak for itself:

  

As a friend of mine noted upon seeing this sequence, it really does look like Archie has some salacious ideas about those filthy books.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that these comics are ridiculously Creationist. *sigh*

More to follow.

Related Posts and Further Reading

I had a bit more to say about Hartley's art and his adaptation of Corrie Ten-Boom's The Hiding Place.

And if you're interested, here's some other things I've written about Christian comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 336: The Lost Books of Eve #1, December 2006

We'll start off the day with another Biblically-inspired work, though this one is head and shoulders above Chick's vitriol from yesterday. If you can't tell from the cover, this comic is just beautiful. The art has an incredible kineticism to it, and somehow manages to combine manga and DC Adventures-style art into a gorgeous hybrid creature. Which, really, considering Eve's origins, is fairly apt.

We all know poor Eve gets short shrift in the Bible. She's blamed for a host of sins (well, all of them, really), and, as HE in this comic says, it's the fault of free will. I think I disagree. Free will is not the thing that pushes Eve to taste the forbidden fruit; it's curiosity. It's easy to choose not to do a thing if you're not curious about the consequences of that action. And what Josh Howard sets up here is an interrogation of Eve's flaw: not that she was defiant, but that she was curious.

Unfortunately, as the series opens, her curiosity has caused Adam to be abducted, and it's up to our uncorrupted hero to find her mate. This is an interesting moment to be offering stories of Eve. She's in what's referred to as the pre-lapsarian moment of the Eden story, in that she hasn't fallen from the grace of God yet. What this also means is that, as she ventures from Eden in order to find Adam, she is still an innocent - no knowledge of evil, of pain, or, as an amusing moment with the angel Asherah drives home, of nudity.

I bought this comic in a quarter bin, but I'm hoping I'll be able to find the rest of the series. Howard's art and storytelling are great. His choices of concealing moments for Eve's nudity are amusing and well-handled (in this comic is a depiction of the Luckiest. Butterfly. Ever.), and his respect for the source material, whether he cleaves to it or not, is evident. Sure, a comic about the scantily clad mother of all humankind (supposedly) venturing out with a demonic-looking angel to rescue a kidnapped Adam could verge into realms of disrespect for those who believe in the story, but instead Howard's depiction of Eve is that of a strong, curious, feisty woman ready to take on all comers, including God, to rescue the man she loves. We don't often see Adam and Eve as a love story, but rather as a tragedy. Milton gives us some beautifully romantic and erotic moments in Paradise Lost, but in general it's about falling. This story, however, seems to be more about climbing, about ascending. Unfortunately, that just means there's, inevitably, further to fall.

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 335: The Crusaders #2, 1974

What does one even say about such misguided and unpleasant vitriol?

If you're an old-time collector, you know who Jack Chick is. His tracts are infamous, especially amongst those of us who played Dungeons & Dragons in the 80s. I did in fact live through that era in which D&D was banned from schools because they were worried we were going to go crazy like young Tom Hanks (look it up).

I discovered Chick's Crusaders series a couple of years ago when researching Christian comics for a Sequart article. As you might well imagine, they're unpleasant and evangelical, and I really can't imagine them converting anyone to anything except maybe to being against really bad writing. They're optimistic in their expectations, though. There's even a little check box on the inside cover where you can check either "Yes" or "No" to the question "Did you accept Jesus Christ as your own personal saviour?"

I will say this for The Crusaders: the art is gorgeous. Fred Carter's work is beautiful, and, though he likely would be a little horrified at the assessment, quite erotic. His depictions of the two "Crusaders" in the comic are right out of a superhero comic, all muscles and bulges, and one shirtless depiction of "Jim" looks like it's straight (pun intended) out of a Howard Cruse comic.

While the message of the comic, and of Chick's publications in general, is hateful and venomous, comics like this offer a look at the some of the far reaches of the medium. We think of the quality of art as defining whether something is mainstream or independent a lot of the time, but quality of narrative, or subject matter of narrative, is also an indicator. It's unlikely you'll ever see a Chick comic (or an evangelically-inflected comic in general) at a comic store, even at one that carries undergrounds and indies. It's interesting that these comics, by dint of their subject matter, are excluded from the mainstream.

Before finishing, in brief: Tim and Jim, "The Crusaders," journey to a small town where Satanism is taking over. They convert a young lady who is subsequently kidnapped, and the two rescue her and cause the Satanists to vomit with their God-power. There's also a strange moment where the Satanists kidnap a little boy's dog, and Jim gives the boy money to buy another puppy. We see the original dog only briefly again, going under the knife.

Phew. Back to superheroes tomorrow, perhaps?

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 143: The Hiding Place, 1973 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 7)

I have a strange little soft spot for the comics that come out of Spire. Al Hartley's Archie comics from this line are some of the earliest I ever read, and I was always totally put off by the evangelistic tone that inevitably happened near the end of each story. I was too young at the time to notice that they were published by someone other than Archie Comics, so I just assumed that this was something that that publisher did.

But Spire also published straight ahead Christian proselytizing comics, and this adaptation of Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place is a perfect example. (Though, it being a dollar bin buy, it's missing the middle pages, but the plot is such that it's not that hard to figure out what happened in the missing sequences.) I'm interested to know if the explicit and constant references to God and Jesus are quite as rampant in the original book as they are here, and what has been cut out to adapt this story to the Christian childrens' market. A large portion of the narrative deals with the protagonist being interred in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, so I'm thinking that there's some really awful things deleted from the comic adaptation. In such a case, I wonder if the adaptation is doing even remotely any justice to the original narrative, and further if such stories ought to be adapted to an ostensible children's medium solely to spread the word of Christianity. Isn't it somehow disrespectful of ten Boom's experience to tidy it up in order to preach to children?

Though there's a "personal message" from ten Boom at the end of the comic claiming that Jesus has been with the reader all through the comic, so perhaps she didn't mind at all.

I'll hit up a few of the Spire Archies in the next little while, and will occasionally be reviewing some of their other works, either ones similar to The Hiding Place or others that are aimed at audiences even younger than the Archie audience. What I'll grant Spire's line is that the artwork is pretty great, though seeing characters in a prisoner of war camp with the same kind of rocket-boobs that Betty and Veronica sport in 60s Archie comics was a little off-putting. Perhaps, though, that helps to bring the story's horrors more into focus. Hartley's art, even out of the context of Archie, is very Archie-esque, and so a well-read reader is faced with something that both reminds one of the adolescent hijinks of Archie and the gang within the milieu of a concentration camp.

The preachy God stuff at the end still bugs me, though. See you tomorrow.

An article I wrote for Sequart about a couple of issues of Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur.

Re-Entering the Garden: late Mythic Work in Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur

"Let Them Serve As Signs": Graphic Adaptations of Christian Texts

An article I wrote for Sequart.org about adaptations of Christian holy works.


Let Them Serve As Signs: Graphic Adaptations of Christian Texts

Interesting Things I Have Found On the Internet #1

A very irregular (in all senses of the word) feature that I will try to keep up with.  As my studies become more focussed on comics, and less on course work, I begin to find fantastic things kicking about online.  Here is one of them:

This is an online archive of the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact.  Perhaps not light reading for all, but interesting to those of us who research spirituality in the comic book format.

Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact Comic Book Collection