Page - 106 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

106 | Simon Philipp Born www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 105–109 the many ways superhero comics function as modern-day myths, combining the sublime and the grotesque in excessively drawn bodies and reinforcing and subverting traditional moralities of good and evil.3 Even more explicitly, there is a whole genre for comic book adaptations of religious stories. Gamzou and Koltun-Fromm point out that starting with Umberto Eco and Natalie Chilton’s influential essay The Myth of Superman,4 there has been a long-standing tradition of analyzing the interplay between religion and com- ics (xiii). From the mythological qualities of Superhero stories in comic writer Grant Morrison’s captivating Supergods5 to the growing number of publica- tions on the specific Jewish tradition of comic books like Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero,6 com- ic writers and academics alike have written about the connection between comics and religion. It is no coincidence that authors of publications on reli- gion and comics like Karline McLain7 or editors Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman8 also contributed to Comics as Sacred Texts. The book channels the results of various authors currently working on the subject and brings their studies up to date. Given this history of engagement with comic books from the perspective of religious studies, one might ask what is actually new about Comics as Sacred Texts. Primarily, it is the approach of the book: Comics and Sacred Texts looks at graphic narratives as “culturally educational, peda- gogical texts able to motivate new modes of seeing the sacred” (xx). Reading and understanding a comic book is as much a culturally trained activity as is recognizing the sacred, both of which align in their complex manifestation in image and text: “As a visual and textual medium, comics expose the graphic interplay of seeing the sacred and reading about it” (xii). This approach ena- bles the editors to collect a diverse selection of essays that explore not only the meaning but also the very form of how the sacred can be found in the words and pictures of a graphic narrative. In her essay “The Hebrew Alphabet as Graphic Narrative”, Susan Handelman, for example, puts comic book the- ories and rabbinic interpretation into a dialogue. By focusing on the graphic shapes of the Hebrew letters, Handelman addresses the multi-modal qualities 3 Born 2017. 4 Eco/Chilton 1972. 5 Morrison 2011. 6 Fingeroth 2008. 7 McLain 2009. 8 Baskind/Omer-Sherman 2010.