And the word became image
About comics and religion
3 to 6 June 2010
Opening hours: Thu noon–7 p.m., Fri/Sat 10 a.m.–7 p.m., Sun 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Neustädter Universitätskirche

God isn’t dead and neither are the gods. They are as alive in the world’s discourses as they haven’t been for a long time. They are also very present in the discourse of comics – not only on the internet. If the formerly blasphemous underground master Robert Crumb depicts the book of Genesis as the first book of the Bible with devoted textual fidelity with a naked bosom being the only thing that might shock a last chaste ascetic that pays tribute to the virulence of the age-old material. Did the new boom of religious topics in the medium of graphic storytelling begin with the controversy regarding the Mohammed caricatures? Not really. The contact between religion and comics has essentially hardly been broken since Wilhelm Busch skewered Saint Anthony of Padua and Pious Helena with his pen. In many ways religion and comics have an intimate relationship. Sometimes religious communities use them as a means of preaching (“The Bible in Pictures”). Sometimes they tell the stories of saints (Hal Foster: “The Song of Bernadette”) or the founder of a religion (Osamu Tezuka: “Buddha”). With the superheroes they serve the messianic longings of many people. Finally, they deal with the central religious question of good and evil, Satan and Saviour (”Preacher“, ”Spawn“, ”Hellboy“) and find images for the apocalypse (666). So the word that became image in comics is a fascinating object of study.
Herbert Heinzelmann