The question of religion. (A very late but Giant Sized issue!)

By Regie Rigby

Oh boy.

How late am I this week?!

I won’t bore you with excuses (although they’d be good if I did, and on the up side it means that my plug for the new UK exclusive Captain Britain story got a little extra time) I’ll just get on with a bumper edition to make up for my tardiness. Instead, have a double issue – this would have been a two-part column, so here are both editions edited together in one giant size spectacular!

As I write, I’m listening to a documentary on BBC Radio 4 which is discussing whether Superman is Jewish. It should be available online for the next week or so if you fancy a listen. The case is convincing.

“The Jews”, the bloke on the radio tells me, “are a dyasphoric people – for generations they had no homeland and were viewed as outsiders”. Kinda like Superman really, when you think about it. He is, the radio insists “the ultimate immigrant” coming as he does not from a distant land, but a distant planet. The fact that he was saved from a cataclysmic event because his parents placed his infant form into an escape capsule and sent him out into the unknown is more than a little reminiscent of the story of Moses in the Bulrushes, particularly when you consider that the infant Moses grew up to be a great leader of his people and Kal-El also grew up to be special.

As I said, there is a convincing case to be made. It’s funny, because I remember a discussion at the Comics Festival a couple of years ago about the lack of Jewish Superheroes. At the time the only ones we could think of were Ragman and “That Israeli kid out’ve that Blasters team that came out of DC’s Invasion crossover”. Sitting in the bar we came to the conclusion that this was odd, when you take into account the fact that comics creators from a Jewish background aren’t exactly thin on the ground.

I mean, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, oh, and Siegel and Schuster.

And then it occurs to me “why are we even asking the question?”

Setting aside the pedantic point that Superman can’t be Jewish because his mother wasn’t Jewish, and (so far as we know) he hasn’t converted. But his creators were Jewish. They came from a Jewish culture and so naturally any character they created would reflect that culture. To be honest, I fail to see how it could be otherwise. Although not a Christian myself, I grew up in a Christian culture and any character created by me would surely reflect that. It strikes me as a no-brainer that Superman must surely be culturally Jewish.

Admittedly, there are religious themes from outside Judaism built into the character too. It has become fashionable in recent years to think of the Boy Scout in terms of a sun god (which of course is why Ellis named the Authority’s version of him “Apollo”) and the whole “Death of Superman” travesty ended with a rather messianic sequence of events in which his body vanished from the tomb before he was resurrected into life. Then again, Christ Himself was Jewish, so having Superman imitate the resurrection doesn’t disqualify him from a Jewish heritage.

The fact remains, that whether Radio 4 was right or not there is a lot of religious imagery, a lot of religion in the character. Which of course, got me thinking.

How secular are comics? How seriously do comics take religion? How seriously should comics take religion? Religion is certainly impossible to avoid in American comics. Deities from every pantheon you could think of keep popping up, in the Marvel Universe they even have a thunder god as part of a superhero team!

You could argue of course that this is mythology rather than religion. After all, although there are bound to be a few devotees somewhere, there can’t be very many people who actually believe in Thor. Having him join the Avengers isn’t messing with anyone’s religious belief, any more than Ray Harryhausen was messing with people’s religious beliefs when he put the Roman and Greek gods into his films.

Playing with defunct pantheons is one thing. Using gods that people actually worship is another. Messing with a person’s gods or prophets risks causing offence, or worse. Just ask Salman Rushdie.

But if you play your cards right, you cannot only get away with such potential blasphemy, you can be hailed as a genius for doing so. Look at Neil Gaiman. His Sandman series featured Angels, Demons, and Lucifer giving up the keys to Hell itself. The presence of Cain and Abel in The Dreaming was explained by a Biblical reference (having committed the first murder by killing his brother, Cain was banished to the Land of Nod, Cain and Abel are themselves Biblical characters of course, indeed they appear in the religious texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

In many ways Gaiman put these characters on the same level as the gods from the ancient pantheons and characters from popular mythology, plundering all traditions equally as threads to weave into his tapestry. On reflection I’m surprised this wasn’t more controversial.

So, there’s no shortage of characters based on religion in comics, but what about actual religion? Well, we started this bumper edition of Fool with Judaism, and I have to say that some of the most positive portrayals in comics of people living a religious life come from the pages of the much missed genius Will Eisner. The Jewish characters in his tenement stories are precisely that – characters who live their lives according to the codes of their religion. Eisner doesn’t make a big thing about it, doesn’t preach, just shows people living their lives according to their faith.

I’m not really aware of any other religions that have been shown in quite this way, at least not in Western comics. It seems that every time a see an overtly Muslim character in a comic they’re either a fanatic or a terrorist, or both and Christians seem to be portrayed as utterly boring, dull people. (With the rather obvious exceptions of Nightcrawler, and the wonderful Pastor from Kingdom Come) In fact the only story featuring overtly Christian characters is Crag Thompson’s Blankets, a story which is as much about the gradual loss of faith as the way a faithful life is lived.

Of course it might well be that the fact that I’m an athiest makes me more likely to notice the negative images of religion while the positive ones pass me by. I’m not exactly on the look out for religious comics and I suppose that were I to see one on the racks I’d be unlikely to pick it up. Actually now I think about it, I seem to remember a co-publishing project that Marvel did a few years ago with a Christian publishing house. If I remember rightly, there was some sort of Evangelical Superhero they intended to call Paragon but ended up calling Illuminator. I don’t know if it was any good, because of course with my anti religious prejudice I didn’t buy it.

So, what do I know?

Besides, there’s another obvious reason for this lack of positive overtly religious characters. When you think about it, there aren’t that many in film, or on TV either. “Mainstream” comics, like blockbuster movies and prime time TV, tend to work around conflict. Who are the Justice League going to fight this month? How will Spider-Man deal with the latest menace? What will Batman do about the Joker? That kind of thing.

At its heart, most religion tends to be about harmony. From a comics script writer’s point of view, harmony is pretty dull. When you think about it, religion only makes it onto the news when there’s a problem. “Today, lots of people visited their Churches, Mosques and Synagogues in peace then went home and lived their lives like everybody else” just isn’t news.

“Mass suicide by weird Christian sect!” or “Islamic militant suicide bomber kills innocents!” are exceptions, not the rule, but that’s what gets on the news. That’s also what gets into our fiction. In the last time I’ve been reading comics I’ve seen a fair few strange religious sects, a fair few Islamic extremists (including the Ayatollah Khomeni, in a story that should shame DC forever, not because it was offensive but because it was bad) and a fair few “Eastern Mystics” (Batman is a particularly good source for these.)

Religious fanatics also make for an easy plot device. If you need a villain who behaves with ruthless single mindedness, make them a religious fanatic. It takes away all of the questions about why somebody would be prepared to take a life or commit a crime “oh – they’re a fanatic who think they’re on a mission from God” – whether you’re talking suicide bombers or the self flagellating assassin from the Da Vinci code, it works every time.

And of course, there is no reason why any of this should be a problem.

Fiction is fiction. It’s not real, and unless it claims to be speaking directly about reality (which is what got Rushdie into trouble all those years ago) it needn’t cause offence. Ordinary, what for want of a better word I’ll call normal religious behaviour doesn’t tend to make an impact in comics because, to be honest it doesn’t make itself all that visible in real life either. Religion is much like sexuality in that sense – both are huge parts of an individual’s life, but neither tend to be immediately obvious to the naked eye. In my view, it makes sense that niether should surface in the foreground of a story unless they become relevent to the narrative.

This is a profoundly realistic approach when you think about it. Although not religious myself, I know a good many religious people. My Atheism, or their faith, tend not to come up unless we happen to be talking specifically about religion. None of my friends introduce themselves to people with the words “Hello, I’m a Christian” or “Hello I’m a Muslim” any more than I introduce myself by saying “Hello, I’m an athiest”. The subject just doesn’t come up.

So why should it come up when the characters in our comics speak to us? Considering her age and social background I think Aunt May is probably a Christian. Why would she constantly tell us that? My Grandma (who is a little older than May, but of a similar background) is a deeply committed Christian, but she doesn’t quote bible passages at people in the supermarket or anything, it’s just the way she lives her life.

So, to return to the original question, is Superman Jewish? Are any of the characters we read about followers of a religious creed?

Probably.

Maybe.

Who knows?

They’ll tell us if we need to know. Otherwise they’ll just go on living their lives, and we’ll go on watching the interesting bits.