At the comics shop, religion goes graphic

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

And the Lord said:

“OH, PETER ... DON’T YOU SEE? THIS IS ALL PART OF MY GRAND DESIGN.”

(Here, the Lord always speaks in CAPITAL LETTERS.)

Here, God is speaking to Peter Parker.

He is speaking to Spider-Man.

Peter Parker, Protestant
Throughout the history of Marvel Comics’ “Spider-Man” franchise, little clues have been dropped that Peter Parker is a believer (specifically, a Protestant, although what denomination isn’t clear). There’s the “God Bless Our Home” stitching on the kitchen wall, for example, and then there was the night he thanked God for bringing Mary Jane into his life.

God speaks to Peter Parker in pseudo-Gothic type in a 2002 issue of “Spider-Man.”

Critics have long found Christian themes in Peter Parker’s struggle to determine what’s right. “With great power comes great responsibility” may be a watchword of the recent Spider-Man movies, but it’s lifted straight from the comic books.

Comic books from edgier alternative publishers and adult-oriented graphic novels have explored explicitly religious ideas for several decades, but what’s striking is how often such themes have been appearing lately in the most mainstream of publications. For a character you can’t even see, God does seem to pop up all over the place in the comic book universe.

Or doesn’t. One of the more talked-about comic book debuts in recent years was the introduction last year of Antoine Sharpe, a government agent who rejects all things supernatural, by Desperado Publishing and Image Comics.

Sharpe’s rigid devotion to rationalism (“If your God falls out of Heaven tomorrow I’ll walk up, shake his hand, tug his beard, ask him who shot JFK, and then I’ll know God. Until then, he does not exist.”) provides his nickname around the office — and the name of the series: “The Atheist.”

‘Ultimate questions of good versus evil’
Using comic books as a popular medium to pass on ethical, even religious, values is nothing new, said Christopher Sharrett, a professor of communication and film studies at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J. What’s different is the serious, usually non-judgmental examination of core Judeo-Christian themes in mature stories.

Sharrett, who has written widely about both comic book literature and religion, traces the modern exploration of religion to the 1980s, “where various talented writers like Alan Moore [“Watchman,” “V for Vendetta”], Frank Miller [“Sin City,” the revival of Batman as the Dark Knight], Art Spiegelman [“Maus”] and many others showed that you could make the medium respectable and take on these moral and political issues without denigrating them.”

“With comics,” said Greg Garrett, the author of “Holy Superheroes! Exploring Faith & Spirituality in Comic Books,” “the fact that we’re dealing with ultimate questions of good versus evil — all of those things that we wrestle with in theology — it makes it a natural place for those to be part of any important story.”

The Jewish heritage of The Thing — real name: Benjamin Grimm — was revealed in a 2002 issue of Marvel’s “Fantastic Four” when he prayed the Jewish confession of death over the body of a shop owner he had sought to protect.

Those ultimate questions are being asked in unexpected places. Four years ago, we learned that The Thing is Jewish when he was shown praying in Hebrew over the body of a friend he had sought to protect. (“It’s just ... you don’t look Jewish,” a surprised character tells the enormous, destructive orange rock-man, who explains to another character that he never said anything about it because he didn’t want to embarrass other Jews, seeing as he was, after all, an enormous, destructive orange rock-man.)

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