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He's an English professor at Baylor University, a lay preacher at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, and a Writer in Residence at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. But author Greg Garrett is also a fan of pop culture, represented both in films and in comic books. His work, Holy Superheroes is a seriously deep treatise on exploring -- as the subtitle indicates -- the sacred in comics, graphic novels, and film.

I recently had the good fortune to spend some time with Dr. Garrett discussing themes from his book, as well as theology and comics in general, in a conversation that meandered in and out among the players who help define good, evil, justice and mercy in the bordered four-color worlds we enjoy.

 

What was it you set out to accomplish with the book, and what prompted you to do so?

I am a long time reader and lover of comics, and I've got a long history of them. One of the things that I wanted to try to explain to myself -- like a lot of writers, the first reason I write a book is for myself, to help me figure out some things that I'm wondering about. And I was wondering, "What was it about these stories that kept me coming back to them?" And especially about these characters -- Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, some of the major characters that I've been reading since I was eight-years-old. And one of the things that I concluded was that there must be something going on in terms of the story -- something that I'm learning from them, or receiving from them, that's more than just entertainment. There are a lot of things that are just entertainment that don't stick with you like that.

So the book was an attempt to explore the sort of archetypal stories -- the spiritual, and even religious impulses -- that are at the heart of many of the comics.


You open up the book with a demonstration of the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm -- The Thing -- practicing Judaism. Did you intentionally start with this example to make clear that the theme of the book went beyond comparisons to Christianity -- that this was, in fact, more than just another "Hey, look, the Superman mythos parallels the story of Jesus Christ?"

It was one of the things that I wanted to do. But I also... it was an example for me of something that would not have happened forty years ago. When the character was created, Stan Lee shied away from anything like that, and there was this sort of generic thing throughout comics -- both DC and Marvel -- where occassionally you'd have a character pray, but there was never anything specific about it. And this for me was so specific. There was such an attempt to render him as an actual person with an actual faith tradition, that I thought, this was in many ways sort of an emblem of the sea change that I see in popular culture.


It seems like comics like to draw from the Christian ethos, and not necessarily be overt with it. Probably the most directly Christian story I remember reading was a Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes story, "Star Light, Star Bright," where they went in search of the actual Christmas star.

It's a very different thing, now. The last big event that DC Comics did was Infinite Crisis. And in the middle of that, there was this sort of break where all of the super heroes gathered in a cathedral to pray. And they actually talked about some of the faith traditions. And there's a character named Blue Devil who was having a very hard time being in church, and they acknowledged that as well. Christian prayer is hard for him when you get your powers from Hell.


And the character is a staunch Catholic at heart.

Yeah!


Which begs the question, "Where is God in the comic book universes?" Because if you have these characters... And I've had this moral quandary since the 1970s. Marvel comics had a hero who was called Son of Satan. And you've got Etrigan the Demon and Blue Devil, and some of them can't help what they've become, and some of them are just what they are from birth. But now you've got these demonic characters doing good, and characters who are good but cursed with demonic forces, and there's no healing, there's no deliverance for these characters. It's like, if you're going to be delivered, you're going to have to do it yourself, rather than through the interceding grace of God.

Well, a lot of those people have made choices. And a lot of people have different theologies around sin and damnation and whatever there is in the next life. But I think that whole question of where God is is really interesting, because almost every major comic mythos has demons, devils -- they have this whole sort of underworld thing -- and by implication, and sometimes more than implication, there's obviously something on the other side. You've got the DC character Zauriel, who I think is presiding over the worship in that cathedral, who is an angel who's renounced his angelic nature to live as a mortal. You've got the Spectre, who has been around for many decades, who's the representative of God's justice.

I guess what we have in most of these mythos is sort of this idea that... Some of my colleagues at Baylor did a massive survey on American religous belief last year, and it made a number of cover stories in the mainstream media. And what they discovered is that Americans believe in God -- we knew that -- but they believe in different ideas about God. And this seems to represent the idea about God who is, in some way, off distant from the events of these comic universes. Maybe He acts through intermediaries sometimes through these characters, but it's very rare that you see something miraculous -- God intervening, a more active idea about God.

Being a comics fan, as well as a theologian, do you ever find yourself in discussions with your colleagues and find yourself interjecting something along the lines of, "You know, this is a lot like the time superhero A had to deal with crisis B?" -- and then face down the blank stares?

Well, it depends on your context. In the organizations that I belong to that are theological or that do biblical studies, there's actually a lot of interest in popular culture. So you wouldn't walk into a room full of people who are not into that and interject that. There've been a number of panels and sessions that I've been on where we've had basically that same conversation. It's like, "Yeah, this reminds me of that time that..." And one of the things that I think is particularly interesting about theology today is that people are much more attuned to popular culture, to the sense that there's something worthwhile in popular culture, and that we could actually learn something from it.

A number of people -- and I'm pulling off my own religious upbringing -- believe that comics are the very antithesis to anything spiritual. (My own parents thought them to be the work of the devil.) And anytime I try to refute this, I run into several examples of comics that go out of their way to support their claims. Have you ever had to defend comics, not just as an acceptible form of entertainment, but as something that does not threaten faith?

Oh, absolutely. And I've had to do this with just about any kind of popular culture that I write about. From the spiritual side, there's the sense that there's a large percentage of Christianity -- and your parents and my grandparents would fit into this group -- that are very suspicious of the culture, and revelation, if it comes, does not come through comics books -- there are well travelled paths for it.

But I think when you do something like I tried to do in this book, where you isolate some of the things that are clearly in the mainstream of Christian thought and belief, and that actually are inspirational examples of that, it can be a powerful rebuttal to that.

On the secular side, the thing that I deal with most often is the question of violence, and I tried to write about that in what I hope was a useful way. Whatever you think about conflict, in popular culture it's almost always going to be expressed in terms of physical conflict. And once you understand that it's a genre thing, you can at least contextualize it a little bit. That doesn't make it any less disturbing if you're a person who's really profoundly effected by violence. One of the things that I always counsel is discernment; there are comics that I let my ten-year-old read, and there are comics I don't.


Violence is one of the topics that comes up a lot when discussing current American trends in comic books as they relate to censorship. The two great temptations that draw people to a story are violence and sex. Yet we tend to censor comics -- and punish retailers -- when the books contain nudity or sexuality that crosses some invisible line, but have no problem with storylines in which entire cities are obliterated, or supporting characters are raped and shoved in a refrigerator. Whereas the European sensibility is the exact opposite, where they tend to be more repulsed by the violence while being more accepting of displays of anatomy and sexual relationships.

I just got back from a couple of weeks in England and Scotland, and had this conversation with a couple of popular culture theologians over there. A lot of films that we would take for granted here ran into real trouble over there because of violence, whereas some of the things that would really offend us sexually don't really bother them at all. And they always ask me, "What is it about American culture that makes it so receptive to violence, that you're able to take your children to R-rated movies that are violent?" And I don't really have a good answer. Cultural critics and other folks have tried to figure out what it is that has, in some way, desensitized us to it, and I don't really know. I can tell you that in dramatic context I like violence a lot, but in real life the few times that I've been exposed to violence -- either personally or witnessed it -- it's just shocked me and really stunned me.


You mention in Holy Superheroes! the classic X-Men graphic novel, God Loves, Man Kills, which was the basis for "X-Men 3." The antagonist of that piece was Reverend Stryker. The Teen Titans also have a nemesis group with a member called Kid Crusader. These things stand in contrast to what we discussed before about how the heroes are people like magician John Constantine, Etrigan the demon, and others. Why do you think it is that, with so many religious themes found in the superhero comics, that it's so easy to portray the religious characters in the role of villains?

Well, that's part of our pop culture tradition. We've got characters in novels and films -- you've got Elmer Gantry, you've got characters in "The Scarlet Letter." It goes all the way back.

I think one of the things is that it's easy to make religious people of a certain type villainous -- particularly when you've got somebody like Reverend Stryker, who is intolerant and closed-minded, and represents a sort of type of Christianity -- certainly not the only type of Christianity -- and it's a stereotype. There are people who are conservative evangelicals who nonetheless are loving and accepting of others.

But in some ways, it's just convenient. Another great stereotype is "the businessman" -- the "power for profit" sort of person. And there are also people like Bill Gates who have given away much of their fortune. So I think, in dramatic terms, it's just easy. In some ways it's harder to write a nuanced religious character.

I really like some of the characters that Alan Moore has written -- and Alan Moore, of course, is not particularly Christian. But there are Christian characters in his work. There are a couple in the Top Ten mythos who are seriously faithful but clearly are not stereotypes.


It just seems I'd like to walk into a movie once and see a character walk in wearing a collar and not have to automatically assume, "Oh, he's the bad guy."

One of my favorite films in that regard is "Signs", where Mel Gibson plays an Episcopal priest. It's a really serious film about a person who has lost and ultimately regains his faith. It's also a science fiction film, about the invasion of Earth by aliens, but... It's one of those rare sort of films where the religion is not a plot device, but it's explored with some sensitivity.

I think one other comic that does that would be Kingdom Come, where the main character is a minister -- based on Alex Ross's father. That's one that I often recommend to people when they ask me, "What's the most religious of the things that you've read?" Because that takes very seriously the sort of apocalyptic tradition in the Judeo-Christian sense, but also faith -- of losing it, of where's God when these bad things are happening? All those theological questions are actually asked in that graphic novel.


Just to set things on their ear for a moment... Years back, Grant Morrison introduced a concept during his run on Animal Man that, rather than the comic book heroes being "repackaged gods" to us, we were rather actual gods to them, directing their fates. It's sort of the exact opposite of your thesis, and I was wondering what thoughts you might have on that.

That was sort of in the mainstream of post-modern criticism. What it did, essentially, was to decenter the author and to recenter it on the audience. So you got lots of mainstream literary stories in the fifties, sixties, seventies on up -- less so, I think today -- with this idea that the audience is the most important thing. And what the audience wants is also a central theme when we think about pop culture. It often determines what we read.

But I think that was really just sort of a fun way to turn the whole mythos around on its ear, to use your phrase, because typically we think of these as sort of little windows into universes -- and this is to turn it around and sort of look back into our universe.


Right before delving into Holy Superheroes!, I had just finished Christopher Knowles' Our Gods Wear Spandex, where he takes things back beyond Christianity and into ancient Egypt and the concept of freemasonry. since our heroes are a reflection of our own sense of morality and justice, is it even possible to write any kind of heroic story without it being a distillation of theology?

That really is, in some ways, sort of my argument: that when you have a form of literature that deals with ultimate questions -- good, evil, justice, mercy, revenge -- that it's almost always going to get into whatever the ultimate value system of a culture is.


In the ancient times, people started telling stories of incredibly powerful heroes -- Hercules, Perseus, Zeus, Apollo -- and as time went on, these grew from stories to actual central tenets of worship. Can you posit a world a millenia hence where the sacred texts include carefully illuminated reprints of Action Comics and Amazing Spider-Man?

(Laughs) Yes! "All hail the Spider god!"

That's a great question. I've been reading the new Captain Marvel limited series where there's actually a church that forms around him. (Captain Marvel is one of my favorite Marvel characters -- not the Captain Marvel that's in the DC mythos.) We know that he died some years ago in one of the very first graphic novels. But he's sort of plucked out of time, and they regard this as miraculous. (It actually seems to happen to characters in comics with some regularity, but...)

What I liked about what they were doing with it was how they took it from being just sort of silly to saying, "If we worshipped gods were were about justice and truth, what would that do to our lives?" And so we see them basically trying to make a difference in the world, which, for me, I think is the big thing about any faith.


Has there been anything in Holy Superheroes! that you find people tend to not get, or not ask about?

One thing that I've noticed is that people tend to look either at -- and this is often whether it's a secular media or a spiritual media... But the spiritual media tend to look simply at the spiritual themes in the book, and the secular often ask about the political -- because there's a lot of political and cultural criticism in the book. And I find it interesting that it tends to sort of divide one way or the other.