Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives explores how comics and notions of the sacred interweave to produce new modes of seeing and understanding the sacred. The creative texts explored within this edited volume share an expressive interest in modes of seeing the sacred in graphic structures. We examine the intersections between religion and comics in ways that critically expand our ability to think well about religious landscapes, rhetorical practices, pictorial representation, and the everyday experiences of the uncanny. Sacred Texts and Comics engages the diver ... More

Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives explores how comics and notions of the sacred interweave to produce new modes of seeing and understanding the sacred. The creative texts explored within this edited volume share an expressive interest in modes of seeing the sacred in graphic structures. We examine the intersections between religion and comics in ways that critically expand our ability to think well about religious landscapes, rhetorical practices, pictorial representation, and the everyday experiences of the uncanny. Sacred Texts and Comics engages the diverse and expansive universe of comic studies and its capacity to reveal new modalities of the sacred. We explore how the sacred erupts in places, and through mediums, that challenge where we should see and encounter divine presence. Comics also reimagine sacred texts, and move readers to see traditional texts anew. But the sacred also has limits and borders, so we look at monsters and wizards in comic books, and how these beings challenge visual assumptions about the normal and the sacred. Finally, we show how comics reveal the everyday sacred: a presence in the mundane, common, and often overlooked features of familiar existence. Collectively, the essays in Sacred Texts and Comics reveal how comics, as a visual medium, moves readers to reimagine the sacred. We claim that seeing the sacred is a learned practice: we must learn where to look for and how to envision the sacred.