Page - 105 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

DOI: 10.25364/05.6:2020.2.9 Book Review: Comics and Sacred Texts | 105www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 105–109 Simon Philipp Born Book Review Assaf Gamzou / Ken Koltun-Fromm (eds.), Comics and Sacred Texts Reimagining Religion & Graphic Narratives Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2018, 322 pages, ISBN: 978-1-4968-1947-5 Can a comic book be religious? Or even sacred? At first, it seems a somewhat strange idea to look for the holy in the most mundane form of popular cul- ture. After all, the sacred and the profane are two strictly separated realms, as Émile Durkheim informs us, “two distinct classes, […] two worlds between which there is nothing in common”.1 However, as Assaf Gamzou and Ken Koltun-Fromm argue in their edited volume Comics and Sacred Texts, breaking up clear-cut distinctions and transgressing boundaries is the very nature of the graphic narrative itself. Comics are a hybrid medium of image and text defying any distinct categorization and highlighting the ambiguous space left blank in between the images: “In their showing and telling, in the stutter-step of the paneled narratives, comics offer us a liminal experience of reading, en- gaging, and constructing meaning. It is an experience ‘betwixt and between time’ [citing Victor Turner] that in its form as an imagetext both undermines the separation of media and harbors the potential for rethinking how media reveal the sacred” (xiv, emphasis in the original). So yes, on second thought, the sacred can be found even or maybe espe- cially in the world of comic books. It can be witnessed in the religion-like treatment of comic narratives as holy texts by fans and writers, where the au- thority of meaning is canonized in a continuity bible like the comprehensive Batman bible by Batman comic writer and editor Denny O’Neil.2 Or think of 1 Durkheim 2008, 38–39. 2 See Brooker 2012, 154–155.