Page - 18 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

18 | Christian Wessely www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 17–44 disregard something that, on the one hand, uses religious symbols (Christian or not) to spread a certain message and, on the other hand, utilises narratives that are deeply rooted in religious thought, such as the apocalyptic struggle of good versus evil or the myth of a saviour. Nor should it be allowed to ignore comics, for one of the true tasks for fundamental theology is to see how a society com- municates, and to analyse the religious context of this communication. in this article, i mix business with pleasure: a comic fan myself, i provide an overview of the history of the comic along with a hermeneutic take, and i end by looking to the topic’s potential within a society that is dominated by interactive audio- visual media. DefiNitiON PrOBLeMs What exactly is a comic? Intuitive definitions come readily, but a precise def- inition is more challenging for the range of genres – comical, criminological, pornographic, horror, for example – is so great. the Japanese man-ga means “funny picture”, yet today the most widely read Mangas share hardly any comi- cal elements. Just like Mangas, the comic more broadly has not been bound by the original meaning of the term used to describe it, and successful series like Superman2 and Mick Tangy3 or, more recently, Deadpool4 and Hellblazer5 (see fig. 1) are described as “comics” but have little to do with fun or humour. The definition of the term “comic” contains a compromise frequently found in definitions, between exclusivity and restriction, on one hand, and inclusion and trivialisation, on the other. Wiltrud Drechsel, Jörg Funhoff and Michael Hoffmann are amongst those who have pointed out that any formal definition of comics that ignores creation context and reception will be inadequate. Identification of the comic as “peri- odically published picture stories with fixed characters and speech bubbles with dialogues, where the picture dominates the word” leads us to “important ele- ments of the medium,” but as these authors acknowledge, this definition “fails to acknowledge the facts […] deliberately ignoring that comics can not be iden- tified without their producers or purchasers.”6 the comic has formal character- istics as well as a functional spectrum, both of which are defined by production and reception.7 We will return to this facet below. 2 DC Comics, since 1938. 3 Published by the Dargaud Publishing house (also responsible for the Asterix series) from 1961 to 1973 and again since 2002. 4 Published by Marvel Comics, since 1991. 5 Published by DC Comics, since 1995. 6 Drechsel/Funhoff/Hoffmann 1975, 11. 7 Drechsel/Funhoff/Hoffmann 1975, for example, argues in the tradition of the capitalist-critical thinking of the movement of 1968. such approaches banished the bald accusation that comics were an instru-