The topic of climate change is neither settled nor one-sided. To those who accept it, the best scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests that anthropogenic climate change is real. But there are many who reject that evidence and dismiss any claim about ongoing climate change as not only untrue, but as a great evil.  In the mounting scholarly and popular calls to understand the “religious dimensions” of climate change, it’s nearly axiomatic that religion “has a part to play” in shaping responses to climate change. But as in other areas, there’s often an apologetic suggestion that hegemonic patterns – e.g., acceptance of anthropogenic climate change and commitment to counter it – are self-evidently tied to “traditional” religious values, while opposition to such patterns or denial of climate change is “cultural,” “political,” or otherwise somehow not really religious. That is, the (explicit or implicit) focus of much of this writing is more on what the public responses from groups and leaders some of us call religious ought to be than what they are.

Whatever the science might say, the social importance of anthropogenic climate change isn’t determined by its observable effects but by political contestation. Or, as Colin Hay has noted, “crises are constituted in and through narrative.” Different climate change narratives can serve different socially formative interests. Starting from this constructivist position, this paper discusses evangelical Protestant examples from Chick Publications, RaptureReady.com, and Resisting the Green Dragon, showing how contemporary climate change discourse itself is positioned as a Satanic or anti-Christian crisis, narrated as part of a battle between good and evil, and is ultimately part of larger, long-term concerns about evangelical power and social reproduction. Having raised some problems with assuming that climate change can be understood as a universal truth and that it is, in and of itself, self-evidently a crisis, the paper concludes with a discussion about ways of framing what is primed to be a long-running scholarly engagement with “religion and climate change,” arguing that before we ask what so-called religious actors’ responses to climate change are, we should first understand how they respond to the claim that climate change is happening and is a crisis to begin with.

This chapter offers a critical account of some important aspects of sf comics since the late 1960s, focusing mostly on developments in US contexts. It begins by outlining some terminological and conceptual concerns that limit its treatment of the topic. It then focuses on so-called superhero comics, discussing the variety of sf tropes and framing that have characterised the genre formation since the late 1960s and highlighting the impact of historical and social developments can have on superhero sf storytelling. The chapter also discusses superhero comics in relation to political developments and to the different, often conservative or reactionary, politics they can promote, citing examples of super-Cold Warriors, but also antiracist superheroes, and more. It further highlights the impact superhero comics can have on the world outside these texts and addresses their role and impact on synergistic marketing strategies. This is followed by discussions of sf graphic novels and anthology comics in the US and elsewhere in relation to their political messaging. The chapter ends by gathering up these threads into a discussion about how utopian, dystopian and otherwise speculative comics are sometimes used to offer critiques of power, citing feminist, antiracist, Afrofuturist, Africanfuturist and otherwise radical sf stories that challenge the historically common conservative and whiteness-centring frames of earlier sf comics.

The Vikings have found a place in nearly every medium invented since their passing. The comics medium is no different; it has served as a vast and protean global archive of stories rooted in and transforming received Old Norse tradition and representation for nearly a century. The extent and significance of this archive and the comics medium’s contribution to remain still largely unstudied. When discussed, comics are often either measured against supposedly more “authentic” forms of Viking or Norse representation or disparaged. This chapter attempts to bring the two fields closer together, and in so doing challenge the views that the emergence of Old Norse memory-construction in comics is, on the one hand, a sign that this memory is losing its relevance and meaning and, on the other, that we can understand what is being done in these comics without looking to the longer history of memory and reception. It does so by surveying global Old Norse-themed comics and identifying some general trends, similarities, and differences. Particular attention is given to two aspects: first, to the emphatic whiteness of many characters; and, second, on the growth in recent decades of feminist or recuperative uses of the Norse past in relation to gender representation. 

his book explores the historical and cultural significance of comics in languages other than English, examining the geographic and linguistic spheres which these comics inhabit and their contributions to comic studies and academia.

The volume brings together texts across a wide range of genres, styles and geographic locations including the Netherlands, Latin America, Greece, Sweden, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, the Czech Republic, among others. These works have remained out of reach for speakers of languages other than the original and do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve due to their lack of English translations. This book highlights the richness and diversity these works add to the corpus of comic art and comic studies that Anglophone comics scholars can access to broaden the collective perspective of the field and forge links across regions, genres and comic traditions.

Part of the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series, this volume spans many continents and languages. It will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, art and design, illustration, history, film studies and sociology. 

Comics are not fruits; they are more akin to vegetables. ‘Fruit' has a clear definition in botany. It is an ‘edible product of a plant or tree, consisting of the seed and its envelope'. Among the most commonly cited definitions of comics, as far as Anglophone comics studies are concerned, is the one proposed by the comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud in the mid-1990s. Decades before the late 1890s, when many date the ‘birth' of US American comics, sequential art from all over the world influenced the cultural landscape. Rather, there are many research questions that remain unprobed when it relates to these areas and their comics traditions. Comics are neither inherently revolutionary or regressive, liberating or oppressive. There can be no doubt that Anglophone comics studies is lopsided in its overall perspective. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.

The rapidly growing popularity of Christian Seders in recent years has been accompanied by the equally rapid emergence of a genre of “how-to” guides that tell celebrants, among other things, how to structure their evenings – what to do and when – and how Jesus is supposed to be understood to have fulfilled the hopes and promises embedded in the Seder and Haggadah. This paper positions the genre as a social phenomenon tied to a process of authentication, through which Christian Seders are simultaneously re-positioned as a form of authentically Christian practice and legitimized as such over and against ongoing critiques that the practice is an appropriative and supersessionist one. The paper maps and discusses recurring elements in the guides and analyzes their shared symbols, ideas, and objects to highlight the major constituent parts of supersessionist rhetorics of authenticity about Christian Seder practices. Using a critical form of social semiotics, the analysis highlights how guide-authors navigate both the modal affordances of traditionally Jewish practice and narrative and an historically Christian epistemological framework in their commitment to suturing them into a newly-fabricated and artificially-aged whole. This suturing is an appropriative process that often requires overexplicit Christian or Christianizing anchoring of core semiotic resources for Christian Seders to be legitimized. As historically conceived, neither Seders nor, for example, the conception of Jesus as the Paschal lamb or as Jewish, allow for easy cross-cultural translation; both modalities need to be actively shaped for any claim that they are related to be made. This shift, or suturing, may entail linking the New Testament last supper to the Passover meal or convincing readers how an element of the Seder should be understood to symbolize something Christian, often Easter-related. This is neither a neutral nor self-evident reframing of the Seder; how-to guides allow socially situated, often but not exclusively white US American Evangelical Protestants, to name and claim a Jewish practice as their own in a dual sense: on the one hand, they demonstrate the practice for newcomers and, on the other, justify, legitimize, and mark it as authentic.