Thursday, January 17, 2008
With our Powers Combined...
I was working my way through a long, involved comment about superheroes (in response to Susan's post) when a new thought struck me. Going through a mental list of all the superheroes I could think of, I remembered Joseph Linsner's Dawn comics. His stories basically revolve around Dawn, the goddess of birth and rebirth, lover to the god of death. I haven't really read the comics, but they do make me wonder if texts focusing on spiritual characters such as gods and angels and the like can be considered part of the fantasy genre. Obviously, if anyone's seen the proportions of the Dawn character, they will see just how fantastical these particular comics are. So, what do ya'll think? Gods as fantasy?
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2 comments:
I, for one, definitely buy into this notion. I think that fantasy often uses mythological elements; think about unicorns and cyclops...es... Inserting gods into the mix is fair game, I say.
I was actually going to make a comment (more like a thought-provoking question) earlier about religious fiction being fantasy, but I all kinds of forgot.
: D
Fantasy does indeed made copious use of gods, angels, devils, demons, etc., Jessie. Fantasy writers love creating whole new pantheons and playing with other people's, for example Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Anansi Boys, etc.).
Whether the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, etc., count as fantasy texts, of course, depends in part on what your own religion is, if any. But certainly the modern-day spinoffs of these old religious traditions count as fantasy (James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the Marvel comics about Thor, etc.).
Humans always have told one another stories about supernaturally gifted men and women. Sometimes we erect temples to them, and call them gods; sometimes we publish comic books and movies about them, and call them superheroes.
Every year, DragonCon in Atlanta is the site of a Dawn Look-Alike Contest:
http://www.linsner.com/dawncontest.asp
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