Saturday, May 31, 2008

Two "Comic Book" Books I want

I am really, personally, fascinated by and interested in the sub-genre within Christian popular Christian writings that posits there are marks of people's interest in the sacred spread everywhere in popular culture. Here are two new books that I want to get. The first is entitled Holy Superheroes: Exploring the Sacred in Graphic Novels, Comics and Film by Greg Garrett. The second is entitled The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture by B.J. Oropeza, with a forward by Stan Lee (interesting...). My favorite book of all this sub-genre is Robert Johnston's Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue. That's the high water mark, in my opinion, for this kind of Christian cultural writing. He does a really awesome job of taking movies, and popular movies especially, seriously, and the chapters that detail the Church's checkered history with Hollywood is really interesting. I especially appreciated his adaptation of Niebuhr's "Christ and Culture" taxonomy, because it helped me get a handle on the possible options Christians can have to movies, in general. There are so many of these books,t hough, that it's hard to read even a fraction of them, but this is the first I've seen on comic books, which I'm guessing is partly a sign of the concentration of superhero films in Hollywood right now.

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