Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined

Since the early twenty-first century, the study of comic books, manga, and graphic novels has taken off. This systematic collection of essays gives an impetus to this field of research from a sociological perspective and discusses comics’ relations with a large diversity of religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Japanese religions, and Zoroastrianism, but also the rituals, ethics, and worldviews that pop up in the comics milieu itself. It aims to further our understanding of comics as an important and transformative part of popular culture and of religion as a social phenomenon in all its variety. The volume departs from the notion that in liquid modernity, the boundaries between the institutional spheres have become fluid, the religious sphere included. It consists of four parts that answer the following questions: How do religions use and respond to comics? How do comics represent and criticize religion? When does the social role of comics resemble the social role of religion? And finally: what and how do comics teach about religion, culture, and society? Comics, religion, and society intersect in various ways. De Groot shows how comics are a way of doing, encountering, and making religion in liquid modernity. In contemporary societies, the articulation of the sacred is no longer governed by religions. Religion is both “in there,” and “out there,” mediatized also by cartoons, comics, and animated movies. Comics both serve the imaginative dimension of lived religion, contain religious imagery beyond the control of religious authorities, and contribute to the construction of imagined faith.