Religion and Comics - A Critical Introduction

The course looks at how comics can be used to reinforce, reject, reconstruct, or manufacture meaning in relation to social formations and structures that some of us call religious or existential. The course studies not only comics texts themselves but also rhetoric on the topic of religion and comics from fan and theological contexts, among others. A primary aim of the course is to foster critical understanding of how comics and their reception can be vivid, and sometimes contentious, sites for the creation and negotiation of understandings of religion. As a field of cultural production and consumption, comics provide excellent examples of the ways in which popular cultures can help to manufacture and police the borders of what gets classified as religion, why and by whom, and how those borders shift and warp. Although comics are often thought of as entertainment, they are deeply political documents that are part and parcel of the everyday power struggles surrounding meaning and acceptance in societies and cultures all over the world. This course helps the student to understand and interpret these struggles.