Spirituality, Comics, and Social Justice

Materials That Connect

The linking of the mythic and comics narrative, along with attention to religion and spirituality, were interlinked in my mind as a young reader. In the space of my elementary school library, the first book that stood out to me and which I would check out most often was the graphic novel adaptation of the film Clash of the Titans. It is an interesting interpretation of cosmology that speaks to the central role of the empowered hero, and one which immediately captured my attention. There is, of course, Laurence Olivier in the sky, who is orchestrating events, but there is also the presence of evil as performed by stop motion animation and actors with malevolent growls. Evil, in this chapter, is considered through the lens of what it means to be an enemy or oppressor. As seen in the Biblical account of Job from Judaism and Christendom, the notion of an enemy seeking to destabilize another person is a tradition that is threaded throughout sacred literature (Poling, 1996). This sense of an oppressor can also be located in commentary on what it means to be a just educator (Heath et al., 2022). I have, for some time, experienced difficulty with the presentation of the “Enemy” in sacred texts as someone who is allowed or empowered, a dynamic noted by Winnerling (2022). It is a Clash of the Titans dynamic that seems strange in the context of what it means to be creator and what it means to be created, and this has been a source of narratology that I embrace in comic book stories and science fiction narrative much more readily than in my spiritual thinking. I note that evil takes many permutations and is a subjective notion based on the positionalities and views of the individual; political, social, religious, and narrative ways of defining what is evil are profligate throughout human history, and are positioned and shared for a variety of purposes. With this book’s focus on religious diversity and inclusivity in mind, I approach an evil .or wrong in terms of an understanding of a breach of basic human dignity. Evil, in this case, is to oppress; to treat some other being as less than human.