Calling Captain America

Captain America has hit the theaters, the summer genre comic superhero flick. I recall a conversation that I had with a comic book store owner in Elizabethtown a few years ago about comics.

He shared with me--a comic book novice--that many of the creators of comic book characters were Jewish. I found this article that provides additional details on this history. And the time period was the before or close to WW II for most of the lasting characters, Captain America included. In this first issue (1940), Captain America clocks Hitler with a right.

Besides a brief stint one summer and I where my brothers and I had a babysitter whose contributions to our well-being were to make us lunch, keep an eye for excessive trouble-making, and giving us access to her massive collection of comic books which I read for about three weeks straight and then moved on (I got burned out on Richie Rich, the poor little rich boy), I never really became a devotee of comic books. So I found the conversation with the comic store proprietor enlightening.

The owner commented that these Jewish comic book character creators, as outsiders and from immigrant families from Europe, used their imaginations to fashion characters who were both some variation on Everyman (Clark Kent) and a Superhero (Superman). Ethnic, social, cultural, religious, economic, historical, and political forces provided the spark for this creative era from outsiders who sought to illustrate power and goodness in a hero archetype, during an era that was dark and foreboding (one seemingly more like our own all of the time). Make the evil-doers pay.

The messianic parallels of comic books characters to Jesus are certainly startling. The confluence of power and goodness, the Everyman and the Everlasting. We need real heroes. We need Jesus.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shake the Dust: Anis Mojgani

Pslam 90:2 "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God." I am not real certain where Anis Mojgani comes from belief-wise. Cats like him tend to be synchrestic spiritually rather than Christ-centered. Yet, this poem captures the spirit of Jesus. What this poem also needs is grace....we shake off sin and mortality and take on Christ and immortality. This is for the fat girls This is for the little brothers For the former prom queen And for the milk crate ball players This is for the school yard wimps And the childhood bullies that tormented them Shake the dust. This is for the benches and the people sitting upon them. This is for the bus drivers driving a million broken hymns And for the men who have to hold down 3 jobs, Simply to hold up their children. For the nighttime schoolers And for the midnight bike riders trying to fly Shake the dust. For the two year olds who cann...
Read more

Thomas Jefferson & Jesus

Image
I was reminded today, by a friend's post on Facebook, that it is Thomas Jefferson's birthday. So, I had a little party on my own of watching two documentaries on him through Netflix Instant. There is much I admire about Jefferson, there is much I dislike. He is polarizing figure. Besides the owning of slaves, the second most odious character flaw was his castration of the New Testament . See my slice of his slicing. Live by the razor, die by the razor. I did learn a cool new word call Amphiboligism which means ambiguity. The arrogance of Jefferson is astounding as if he had a more accurate vantage point of Jesus after 17 centuries than Jesus's own contemporaries and colleagues. In an empirical and scientific sense, he is at a considerable disadvantage in his postulations. When my wife and I visited Monticello on our Honeymoon, the most memorable moment there --besides my downing a can of Pringles all at once (in my own version of the "Pursuit of Happiness" w...
Read more