Steven Grant wants comics to give up the God already:
Enter Vertigo. Again, Vertigo wasn’t the first company working with any of these things, nor, perhaps, even a primary one, but much of its material does embody the whole thing, as a crowd of Vertigo talent saw fit to get into the Judeo-Christian comics shell game. The approach, far from limited to Vertigo, is embodied in HELLBLAZER’s John Constantine, humanist reprobate magician with a cancerous heart of gold, who challenges the cosmic dominion of both sides of what’s essentially a good vs evil game. But those terms are now tainted; angels are just as merciless and ego-driven as demons, and basically just as faceless (in most comics, pretty much interchangeable demons serve the same function the Joker’s henchmen did on the old BATMAN TV show: cannon fodder), and Constantine can’t be considered “good” in any traditional sense, except when authors choose to play him that way. God himself is usually referenced as a remote, capricious bastard.
The “Vertigo approach” is basically one big mockery of the whole Christian mythology. Which, in itself (at least from my POV), there’s nothing wrong with. It’s fiction. You can broach anything in fiction. That’s what it’s there for.
But here’s what is wrong with it:
It’s candyass.
If the whole idea is that the Christian mythos is sheer bollocks – and, believe me, I can live with that – why play so much with aggrandizing it so they can tear it down? Why not just say, “Sorry, it’s all crap” and be done with it?
Much more in the link.
March 22nd, 2007 at 4:27 pm
It sounds like Steve wants to say that the Anti-Christ and Christ are the same guy. I’ve heard that before somewhere.
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:18 am
Steve,
Your little pot shots at religion/belief in a deity not withstanding, you seem like an intelligent guy. Intelligent enough to know that your aethist views fall into the minority, and that asking for religious themes to be erased from comics (or any area of culture for that matter) will fall flat on their face. Ahh well, I guess you just needed to vent?