Page - 107 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

Book Review: Comics and Sacred Texts | 107www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 105–109 that connect comics and Torah texts, “with parallel tracks of text and images colliding and interacting, sounding and resounding” (27). Its unique perspective expressed in a variety of views makes Comics and Sacred Texts so appealing. The collection organizes its fifteen essays into four sections. The first section, “Seeing the Sacred in Comics”, focuses on script and language as the modes of representation in which the sacred is artic- ulated in graphic texts. Besides Handelman’s essay, the section includes an intriguing visual analysis of the graphic novel Habibi9 in “Writing the Sacred in Craig Thompson’s Habibi” by Madeline Backus and Ken Koltun-Fromm. The authors take on the critique of the graphic novel’s orientalist framework, tracking the construction of the space and gaze of the oriental sacred as the imagined other in the transgressive use of the Arabic calligraphy. In the graph- ic novel, the sacred words merge with the drawn natural landscapes, mythi- cal animals and the female body of the protagonist Dodola, creating a magical world which exposes the evoked orient as projected fantasy: “The exotic and even erotic forms of calligraphy stylize a natural and imminently accessible sacred that works within the oriental mode of visual exposure” (5). The important question of representation continues in the following sec- tion, titled “Reimaging Sacred Texts through Comics”. The essays in this sec- tion look at the many ways sacred texts like the Bible or the Indian Ramayana are adapted into comic books. In contrast to other media representations, these comics both reimagine and rework the source material, as Gamzou and Koltun-Fromm highlight in their introduction to the section, which leads to a new reading experience: “So if the comic is successful, a reader will not only see the text differently but also read the text anew. The scripted text itself, and not merely its representation in image, has changed for the comic reader” (75). In his essay “Transrendering Biblical Bodies: Reading Sex into The Action Bible and Genesis Illustrated”, Scott S. Elliott describes, for example, the distinct strategies of the two comics through Roland Barthes’s concepts of readerly and writerly texts. On one hand a readerly text like The Action Bi- ble10 straightens out all the gaps and contradictions in the source material in order to produce a coherent and easily accessible narrative with a plain mes- sage. On the other hand, as a writerly text, Robert Crumb’s The Book of Gene- sis Illustrated11 challenges the reader by highlighting the inconsistencies and 9 Thompson 2011. 10 Cariello/Mauss 2010. 11 Crumb 2009.