I explore the connection between theology and graphic literature (such as comic books). New comics are released every Wednesday. Hence, Wednesday Theology.
Rennes-Le-Chateau? That's in France, right? Where have I heard that name?
There was a man. A priest. Named Berenger Sauniere. Who came here a hundred or so years ago. Perhaps you've heard of him.
Asmodel: Yield!
Superman: Never!
Flash: This is the guy who said he couldn't live up to his myth.
He's wrestling an angel...
Asmodel: You have chosen to stand at the traitor's side.
Zauriel: He's going to rebel, see? He's waited a million years.
And he thinks he can succeed where Lucifer failed.
Asmodel: Accursed of Heaven!
WILSON TAYLOR saw the real world, and he wrote about it. It's a world where magic works and where the greatest of all wizards, Tommy Taylor, died and was resurrected to bring us a message of peace and love.
If that sounds familiar, we're not supprised. The story of the god who dies and then is returned to life was so powerful that it created echoes through all the other worlds and all through time and all through the traditions of other religions. The first ever resurrected god long, long before Jesus Christ - was the Sumerian god TAMMUZ. Yeah, that name sounds familiar, too, doesn't it?
TAMMUZ = TOMMY
The real world of Tommy retroactively creates worlds in which Tommy is just a story. But it's OUR world that's fictional, and now the cracks are starting to show. When you stop believing in the fiction, you'll wake into the reality. Tommy is already here, to show you it's possable to show you the way.
With the arrival of the first real-life global supervillain, the stage was set for the Free World's response. When the retort came, it was from the ranks of the underdogs; two shy, bespectacled, and imaginative young science fiction fans from Cleveland, who were revving up typewriter and bristol board to unleash a power greater than bombs, giving form to an ideal that would effortlessly outlast Hitler and his dreams of a Thousand Year Reich.
Animal Man: I CAN SEE YOU!
Animal Man: If these are my stories you've been telling, if I'm the star of this "comic book," then why am I always on the sidelines? Why am I always just an observer?
Grant Morrison: It's the same for almost everyone. We expect starring roles in our own lives but somehow we just end up with walk-on parts.
Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.
Animal Man: Listen, if you can do anything...if you can...will you bring my family back?
Grant Morrison: Sorry, it wouldn't be realistic. Pointless violence and death is "realistic." Comic books are "realistic" now."
Animal Man: All this stuff. The whole world. Just...stories?
You write The Doom Patrol, too?
Grant Morrison: Yeah, but they don't know.
We'll stop at nothing, you see. All the suffering and the death and the pain in your world is entertainment for us.
Why does blood and torture and anguish still excite us?
We thought that by making your world more violent, we could make it more "realistic," more "adult." God help us if that's what it means.
Maybe, for once, we could try to be kind.
Animal Man: Listen, Just tell me one thing: Am I real or what?
Grant Morrison: Of course you're real! We wouldn't be here talking if you weren't real.
You existed long before I wrote about you and, if you're lucky, you'll still be young when I'm old or dead.
You're more real than I am.
Animal Man: Why?
Why did you do this? You killed my family. You ruined everything.
Do you know what you've done to me?
Grant Morrison: Of course I know. I wrote your grief and your rage and your acceptance.
It added drama. All stories need drama and it's easy to get a cheap emotional shock by killing popular characters.
Animal Man: But that's not fair.
Grant Morrison: No, it's not.
One of my cats died last year. Something, maybe a bone, punctured her lung. Pus built up in her lungs so that she couldn't breathe. She suffered for four weeks and then died at the vet's, a couple weeks after her third birthday.
Her name was Jarmara.
That wasn't fair either, but who do I complain to?
See, your world is so much simpler than ours. It can be invaded by aliens or suffer catastrophes and nothing matters. It all just comes back, good as new.
There's no problem that can't be solved by some idiot in tights.
So don't come here complaining to me about what's fair and what's not.
Animal Man: You're telling me you've been behind all this? You?
Did you create the yellow aliens?
Grant Morrison: Well, I didn't create them, but I did rescue them from obscurity and put them to work for me.
I didn't create you either. Or your family. I'm more of a demiurgic power.
Someone else creates you to be perfect and innocent and then I step in and spoil everything.
It's a little satanic, I suppose.
See? It's all done here.
I can make you say and do anything. I can make you hate your wife and children. I can make you forget you were ever married.
It's all here, this is where I write the wrongs of the world.
Magic. It was always really fascinating to me that Superman was so much older than me and yet I could come along and write adventures with Superman in them and add to his life story. Then I could die and Superman would keep going, with other people writing stories to keep him alive. He's more real than I am because he has a longer lifespan and more influence, so this notion of the 'real' 2-dimensional world of the comics and what it had to say to the 'real' 3-dimensional world of non-fictional people. That really connected with me in a big way and helped me grapple with big ideas about the universe and life and death. I wanted to really 'make contact' with that world and bargain with its inhabitants. I saw it as the lynchpin of my magic. The comic universes are living breathing alternate worlds we can visit. And, if we're lucky enough to be comic book writers we get to play directly with the inhabitants and environments of the 2nd dimension. I wanted to travel in those worlds. By the time I was doing The Invisibles I had gotten past the idea of just putting a drawing of myself in a comic, as I did in Animal Man. I wanted to treat the story like a real continuum. I wanted to really get involved with the comic, in the two dimensional surface of the comic itself and at the point of interface where 2-d becomes 3-d and then touches 4-d. I wanted to see if I could exchange places with a comic book character, so I made myself look like King Mob, and started to have adventures so I would have stuff to write about.
"People say kids can't understand the difference between fact and fiction, but that's bulls--t," he says. "Kids understand that real crabs don't sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really f--king dumb questions like 'How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile's tires?' It's a f--king made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!"
The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is.
