Page - 108 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

108 | Simon Philipp Born www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 105–109 complexities of the Bible instead of concealing them, creating a fragmented, at times even irritating reading experience. Both are defined by their way of engaging the reader in a dialogue about their understandings of biblical texts. Elliott summarizes: “I would suggest that the creators of The Action Bible and Genesis Illustrated similarly testify to how texts function as readerly or writer- ly interlocutors with readers – not as sources of authority, but as problematic renderings of the sacred” (146). The contributions are equally strong in their quality and very insightful in their own ways, which makes it nearly impossible to single one out without wrongfully neglecting the others. The articles mentioned here thus merely function as a pars pro toto representing the high standard displayed through- out all of the collected essays. In “Transfigured Comic Selves, Monsters and the Body”, the third section of the volume, the authors explore the monstrous bodies of comic books as boundaries of meaning and limits of the sacred. In the case of the Marvel comic X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga,12 the liminal body of Jean Grey/Phoenix raises critical questions of agency and identity. Saman- tha Langsdale argues in her essay “The Dark Phoenix as ‘Promising Monster’” that despite the feminist critique that the comic links “female desire and fe- male sexuality with psychoses, lack of control, monstrosity, and ultimately de- struction” (153), the troubled protagonist should be read as representing the promises of monsters: “Like female Christian mystics, Jean/Phoenix is bodily, she is mythical, she is textual, she is divine, and she is a human woman” (169). The last section, “The Everyday Sacred in Comics”, examines comics that display the presence of the holy in the mundane and teach how to look for the sacred in the everyday. And it is most fitting that this section (and the book itself) closes with an analysis of Will Eisner and A Contract with God,13 the ori- gin of the modern American graphic novel. In “Will Eisner: Master of Graphic Wisdom”, Leonard V. Kaplan compares Eisner’s drawn parables with the Jew- ish thinker Isaiah Berlin’s and Walter Benjamin’s conceptions of the German Tragic Drama. All confront the messianic mythos of the Jewish tradition: “Eis- ner’s hope for a messianic politics is always tempered by the knowledge that we will fall short. Such is progress in the everyday sacred” (279). Like none other, Eisner opened a new path in the relation between comics and sacred texts. He elevated the comic book perceived as low-brow to an inspiring art form, influencing generations of comic writers and artists and encouraging 12 Claremont/Byrne 2006. 13 Eisner 2006.