"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

In which old themes are re-hashed and some conclusions prove more elusive than before . . .

by Daniel Morgan

There's a poem by C.S. Lewis, one from his earlier days before, I think, his Christian years. It wasn't very a good one, but then he wasn't much of a poet, admitting as much himself. What struck me though was his imagery: shocking, though in hindsight rather natural considering a young man in the prime of life. He spoke eloquently of space travel and how man spent his powers like starry semen across the night sky. Raw, yes. Tasteful, not necessarily. But out of the whole collection, there was only two or three that I remembered and liked and somehow that gamble of a conceit worked and stuck with me.

My point being: the elder Lewis might never have been so brazen as that, but literature has a long tradition of the colorful and otherwise vulgar rearing its questionable head. Go back and read those decadent Greeks and Romans, study how central flatulence and defecating and other nice-sounding Latin words were in the Norse sagas. Chesterton said that art, like morality, consisted in drawing a line somewhere. Which is true, but Chesterton also said that boundaries unite. And that is precisely the point missed by too many conservatives in the arts, though, indeed, I think there are far too few of them reporting for duty in the first place. For the imagination to have any real impact, it must reach out like any wild animal and test its boundaries, mark its territorial limits with a few well-placed spurts and proceed, like Koch's snowflake, to bring forth fecundity and life from its circle of dominion.

To put it plainly: censorship and community-governed decency can be a powerful thing to artists, to help them direct their talent, like shores to the stream or accentual meter to a poem. The balance is evident; too much shore means not enough stream, unless, of course, the stream in question is polluted and in need of damning.

What bothers me though, is this process seems lost on the majority of people. When Andrew Dice Clay and all of his followers got up and let out a profound amount of crude bathroom humor and changed the standard of the stand-up comic, nobody really had the sophistication to damn him up. When great shows like The Twilight Zone came out and messed with your head in brilliant and provocative directions, it got cancelled. I've always been at a loss as to why I did not find the whelming truths of Scripture scattered throughout the libraries I loved. Instead of growing more used to my pitiful sitz in leben, I've only found greater acquittals of beauty to truth or truth to beauty or both to nihilistic politicking so common to the art world. There are great Christian theologians and there are great secular writers, but the bridge from here to there is seldom crossed but by the most enduring pilgrims. The boundaries are done all wrong, like Cecil Rhodes carving up Africa to his cavernous delight. Meanwhile the true trail grows ever colder.

But love also believes all things. And to this end, namely, the rehabilitation of the Christian writer, we shall take Dante's path: we must descend before we can ascend — and that through our own pride. Take a moment and wipe your feet of any preconceived literary notions you entertain. If you are an entrepreneur or applied mathematics major, go ahead and take off your shoes entirely before entering. If we can, I'd like to discuss the world of comic books, and specifically the graphic novel. If we can learn from this burgeoning field, so late from the Comics Code that once guided and stifled it, we can examine good art and literature at the same time.

It need not be pointed out that this particular form of art (and literature) is commonly derided as the intellectual equivalent of sidewalk art. Wait, I take that back. Multicultural urban sidewalk art is esteemed by our communities right up there with the disingenuous sacred heart of Rigoberta Menchú and the lost graffiti of L.A.'s inner-city, Aztec-blooded youth. In comparison, comic books are still barely more than the defenders of status quo in the eyes of both the common man and the avant-garde ninny.

Fortunately, despite the best efforts of Joel Schumacher's campy Batman movie adaptations, much has changed about that opinion in the last couple decades. Legions of fans have written in admirable close readings on the subject — Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics being a staple there (read it; we cannot really be friends until you do). Let me be honest by telling you that as a long-time comic book reader, I am still uneasy about it all, the creeping of ephemera pulsing at my conscious and the horrible specter of Ozymandias laughing. It still feels like I'm reading something that will pass away in a few years, even while the left side of my brain rationalizes, "No, this is good stuff. It will, it must endure." For there is something of the unease of a paradox in the comic medium, the marriage of words and image, though examined on a higher level it is perhaps not so awkward really. It may even be the format through which God sees us. Being outside of time, He can look at a glance and see it all spread out like panels of sequential images. Not that we can form a theology of it, but there's certainly a mystique going on in the collusion of forms, the graceful manipulation of time and space, that few other mediums can provide, and it does not seem unrealistic to suggest there are perhaps acres of experimental ground left to till which music, art, and word-based literature have begun to fill out. Besides, it is the way of higher wisdom to express itself in paradoxes (what hard saying of the Christ was not paradoxical?). I'm just saying, you know, perhaps . . .

A little history might be in order for the neophytes out there. For a while back in the eighties there was some concern over whether the graphic novel (read: book-length comic) would be the end of the monthly superhero books. For one thing, the graphic novel was not just a collection of single issues, but almost postmodern literary essays that problematized the field. If they fell into the superhero genre, as Alan Moore's Watchmen did, it was usually as a sharp revision of the stock stereotypes and a slap in the face of the naïve reader who put so much faith in heroes that were clearly as messed up, if not more so, than the people they were supposed to save. More often than not, graphic novelists just did not bother with the costumed characters. And they abandoned the episodic format that hindered the greater stories latent in most monthly titles. Soon this newfound vigor warranted critical praise and eventually their own commentaries and literary criticism.

Watchmen had built-in commentary in the last four pages of each issue. The Sandman has been the subject of a many a dissertation, alongside its official companion guide by Hy Bender. Similarly, Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (again, ignore the movie version) has two wonderful annotated guides. But superhero titles still remain, and with much of the same crappy writing, but there is definitely an invisible bar where it is apparent how much harder writers have to strive to please the less easily placated readership of English professors, librarians, and the no nonsense female reader. Neither is the superhero genre left bereft of these anthologizing saviors. Gaiman tried his hand at some of Marvel's most popular character's (The X-Men, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, etc.) in 1602 and Moore's League grudgingly falls in the superhero genre alongside steampunk science fiction.

Nor were the awards short in coming. Jeff Smith's Bone, for instance, won nine Harveys and nine Eisners, and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman snagged a World Fantasy Award in 1991 (a short-story prize) for issue #19, "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream." It was the first comic to do so and, since the rules were changed the next day so it would never happen again, the last. What I am telling you, and without any profit to myself, is a great shortcut: comic books are great case studies for the aspiring writer.

Serious Comics

What's that? You don't remember much in the way of brainy topics in the funny books you used to read? It's time to start exploring that section of the bookstore you thought reserved for the delinquents on the block. One example I think of immediately is where Commissioner Gordon in The Dark Knight Returns says of the issue of vigilantism (a perennial one for superheroes) and of the Batman in particular: "It's too big." Gordon, a morally aware character, is forced to concede his inability as an officer of the law to answer this thorn in the side of the justice system. In fact, Gordon compares the ethics of allowing a vigilante to continue unmolested to the U.S. military allowing the sneak attack Pearl Harbor, knowing it would vault the public into action against Japan and the Axis Powers. The comparison is especially apt since Dark Knight was written in the eighties against the possibility of nuclear winter, which is realized in the book. In the second volume of League the similar question is posed concerning germ warfare. This is not kiddy fare anymore.

It ought to be apparent that our scope must suffer due to space restraints, so I'll only really be looking at American comics from the larger studios. Since most people are at least vaguely familiar with Art Spiegelman's holocaust memoirs Maus, whose sequel won the Pulitzer, and since I was not a big fan of the book anyway, I'll skip right on ahead to Alan Moore's Watchmen (Moore also did, in no particular order V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell — don't know anything about the movie, sorry) and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (along with Daredevil: Reborn, Ronin, and more recently Sin City — I'd told the movie was true to form, but I'm still a bit squeamish). As some of the earliest graphic novels, Watchmen and Dark Knight form the core of the canon today.

All of these rejected the traditional caption boxes and sound effects for more direct interior monologues or news-overs, where narration is given by newspapers (as in Watchmen), TV broadcasts (Dark Knight), radio (V for Vendetta), or straight up dialogue (Bone). They are in the European tradition: rather political with a decidedly liberal slant, though, it should be noted, Miller is American and the only writer I can think of who consistently writes his vigilante characters as right-wing. And even though Moore's atypical Rorshach (think the working man's Batman) as the fascist hero of Watchmen proves the exception again, Moore never meant the trench coat psychopath to be the fan favorite — his fault for writing such an amazing character.

Moore's dream sequence exploring the fleshly identity behind the Nite Owl and Miss Jupiter's costumes and the costumes beyond their flesh is the only one of its kind and says more in one page about the essence of the superhero than almost any other work before or since. And with Dark Knight the level of writing is as gritty and psychologically dead-on showing the dark creature draw a retired Bruce Wayne back into crime-fighting to the point where Miller can humorously lampoon the victim's rights psychologists and the evening news and even President Reagan in his spare panels. And Alfred is hysterical. I wish I could sit down and read it to you, but one line will have to suffice. Scene: Batman is casually following a crippled henchman who falls backward through a window deathly afraid and protesting. Batman merely says, "You've got rights. Lots of rights. Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy. But right now you've got a piece of glass shoved into a major artery in your arm. Right now you're bleeding to death. Right now I'm the only one who can get you to a hospital in time." Later, Batman catches up to his boss, Two-Face, and, looking into the man's surgically-reconstructed face, sees his own reflection. And the climatic scene with the Joker takes place — where else? — in the Tunnel of Love. So there. Read these two books at least and tell me I'm wrong.

There is not space to summarize or highlight these works, but I do want to touch on three that I consider seminal: Bill Willingham's Fables (up to six bound volumes as of this writing), which mixes in the European Volksmärchen of the Middle Ages like Red Riding Hood and Snow White; Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (the original ten volumes), which forms a vortex for world mythology and Gaiman's own wonderful pantheon; and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (currently up to two volumes), wherein we find a mad game of fitting together (mostly) nineteenth century literary characters. All of these writers explore classic characters with a new twist and vibrant story texture. Thus, even without the fifty-some year continuity of some comics, the heroes are already broken into like a pair of one's favorite sneakers. For the writer, however, behind the scenes, such a task far above the usual comic script; one might say it is akin to taking all the world's favorite recipes and blending it all together to make an edible meal, or this case a culinary masterpiece.

My selection of these three is somewhat haphazard. For one thing I found it curious that these are all secular writers, and yet they all recognized the great mythopoeic powers of one Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, and made homage to him in their own sub-creations. In Fables, when all the creatures of Fairy are fleeing from the Adversary, one of the animals is Aslan from Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, though admittedly in a lesser role for such a Christ figure. The Sandman references a distinctly Narnian landscape in the sixth volume, A Game of You, where the uncreating of the Land is almost straight from Lewis' The Last Battle. There is even a speech made in issue #38, "The Hunt," that echoes a terrific speech from a werewolf in Prince Caspian. The second volume of The League tips a nod early in the multi-novel Martian landscape to the Sorns of Lewis' space trilogy. An almost coincidental connection point to be sure, but this touchstone of referencing Lewis works here as a silent criticism of the dearth of Christian mythmakers today and just how much raw truth can be imparted to the secular world through good story-telling.

On another level, already mentioned above, these three works all strive to fuse and intersect mythology (Gaiman), folktales (Willingham), and British literature (Moore). The act itself is one of diligent play, but also an effort at metanarrative, a storyline that is linear enough to convey a satisfying conclusion but also internally references itself to provide the reader the assurance of a self-existing absolute reality. In order words, it tacitly acknowledges that there is meaning, not just the fancy words of a scholar's socially-constructed conscious. It is a telling critique that postmodernism is all its elusive forms is still too puny a notion(s) to stop constructive story-telling. Ultimately, all of these three optimistically seek to give us back our heroes, myths, and folktales, albeit different than our first knowing. For me personally, it is also a good way to eclipse the onerous stories of Camus I had to read in high school. Nor, for that matter, do existentialists have any business writing fiction at all with their oh-so-clever non-endings. Every tale needs a good ending, one that "fits" with the rest of the story. If you want to see how it's done, don't go back to find your high school English manual. Read The Sandman, then reread it again and again. The ending is all throughout the story.

The last similarity between our three specimens is less complimentary. The graphic horror or sexuality present is enough to be a stumbling block for any semi-conservative Christian. This presents a real challenge to enjoying them or passing them on when there are several scenes I feel obliged to black out or rip out. And this is of course our chief concern for the secularist wanting to portray truth or the Christian wishing to take on beauty in their writing.

The Dream-Weaver

Let us deal with the most popular first. As Gaiman says, "I made the Sandman as old as the universe because that gave me all of time and all of space to play with. And I made him the incarnation of dreams and stories because that gave me a framework for telling virtually any kind of tale" (qtd. in Bender 8). The gamut of time, space, and genre Gaiman runs truly is nigh universal. I try not to read much that comes out of this century if I don't have to, but Gaiman is a writer I follow . . . ahem, I almost said 'religiously.' Though The Sandman starts in horror, a genre I do not abide, it ends in Shakespeare, providing a lovely resonance to the previous Shakespeare story in the series (issue #19), the opening encounter with the bard (#13), the play itself, his "backstage" historical life, and most importantly the Prince of Stories' own troubled family life and sacrificed son (and, no, I don't mean that in the Christian sense). The whole series feels that way, the sort of magic realism I could swim in all day. Like the facets of a dreaming stone, everything reflects everything else — even the Sandman, like Hamlet, is his own antagonist.

I don't know that I could give an adequate summary of the storyline except for the bare essentials of who the Sandman is. He is called by many names (Dream, Morpheus, etc.), a member of the seven Endless, personifications of human emotions and states that exist prior to the gods. And this story about how Dream comes to terms with himself. That sounds really vacuous, but if you haven't read it, I can't give anything away.

But even the Endless are not endless it would seem. The human soul outlives them in eternity future. Gaiman contradicts himself several times concerning whether gods are real as personalities or mere metaphor or whether there is an overriding destined plan or not. In Season of Mists, sometimes he speaks of hell as a condition people volunteer for (like C.S. Lewis suggests in his myth The Great Divorce) and other times the fallen are "pushed" — as Lucifer Morningstar suggests, he was just a pawn in part of a larger plan. Sometimes, indeed, one senses that for all Gaiman's agnosticism, the Judeo-Christian God looms large in the background at the conclusion of Season of Mists "in which the vexing question of the sovereignty of hell is finally settled." One could even argue that the graphic scene at the strip club in Brief Lives is an acute commentary on the pitiable and hollow attempt at love by the vicarious fantasies of the so-called "adult entertainment industry". Though I imagine it is a lesson most Christians are aware of and not in need of reminding. The scene at the beginning in the gay bar, however, has no redeemable value whatsoever.

But as advertised, this is not kiddy fare and that usually means it is not suitable for adults either. For instance, I feel one could skip issues 6 and 7 ("24 Hours" and "Sound and Fury") of Preludes and Nocturnes. At the end of this volume, after some truly horrific scenes, the bad guy, Dr. Dee, is not even treated to a slap on the wrist, as though he is instead the archetypal Abel, the eternal victim, rather than a psychopathic megalomaniac. Still, there is the memorable line about the waitress and amateur writer Bette Munroe in #6: "All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem of stories — if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death." It is in all the myriad of forgotten lines like this that built up internal foreshadowing to the final culmination. And, of course, the next issue "The Sound of Her Wings" is the first hint in the series of how emotionally beautiful a Gaiman tale can be. I have never before, and I think never will again, see the equal of Gaiman's peak of resonance attained in writing. This is not to say that I have not read better literature than his, but there is surely nothing out there near his gift of "narrative harmonics", shall we say.

Personally, I thought World's End, contained the weakest stories — almost able to be skipped completely were it not for the wonderful frame of the Inn, the feature of Hob Gadling on the high seas and the subsequent feminist reading of it, and the last scene of the cortege explaining the reason for the "reality storm" outside. Commenting on the least popular story arc due to its gender bent and high fantasy/low realist style, A Game of You, Gaiman said: "What I want to do here, without destroying the story as an adventure yarn, is grab the subtext and make it text, grab the metaphor and make it text; allow that we're spinning a metafiction and see how far we can push that fact before it collapses in on itself. Which is going to be hard; good fantasy is as delicate as butterfly wings, and just as liable to crumble if improperly handled, leaving you with something that can no longer fly" (qtd. in Bender 110). And I love its quirky spin on the fairy tale genre even though it is consciously a woman's tale. Each of the ten volumes more or less switch out in tandem between genders. For in A Game of You, there is no Prince Charming. The closest thing to a man in the story is a nightmare creation and a pre-op transsexual.

But the less liberally-enthused among us don't have swallow everything whole. You can always spit out the bones when you're just reading casually, chewing the fat, as it were. When it comes to the Endless, one gets the impression that they are indeed fixed in their gender roles. In a world of nearly infinite possibilities, we would still never see a female incarnation of Dream, for instance. The personification of Desire, who is both male and female (the modern psychologist's dream), cannot be one or the other, but both simultaneously. He/she/it? has no choice but to be bound to such characteristics. Even in the personification of an emotion in fantasy, the writer's mind is bound to what is written in the nature of man. That is as close as one can approach to transcending both genders and understanding the supernal nature of God, whose ways are higher than ours, and exceeds our expectations by drooping down in the anthropomorphic "He."

There are so many themes, literary and visual, that thread through the tale that we almost need the companion's guide to appreciate some of the heights to which Gaiman so nonchalantly soars. A close reading reveals the theme of imprisonment. Not just for the obvious characters of Dream or Nada, but for Jed, Calliope, Azazel, Loki, and Susano. Or there is the reoccurrence of the Weird Sisters, again foreshadowing the end from the beginning (my favorite instance is at the end of A Game of You where he crafts them out of a lesbian couple and a witch — that's creative story-telling). Hy Bender's guide The Sandman Companion is great here. He does a decent job of summary and commentary, even pointing out what a significant act it was for Death to throw a loaf of bread at Dream, bread being a traditional image of life and subsistence. Bender also gives due credit to the various artists suited to each kind of tale, as well as the techniques, styles, panel-rendering and lettering that made the stories.

The best thing about The Sandman is that it ended. That is, when Gaiman finished the natural conclusion to his tale, he did not keep it an on-going series which is what is the standard thing to do with any hugely popular title. Instead, DC's Vertigo imprint chose to create the standard spin-offs that only touched the minor characters. Since then, Gaiman has in fact come back to do some miscellaneous tales around the Endless, though nothing touching that benchmark.

The Plagiarist (the good kind)

Even the poor souls that saw the movie know that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a far cry from heroes in the spandex sense. These figures are culled from Victorian literature and divers and sundry other sources. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (who does as much artistic research as Moore does literary), as well as Gaiman and Willingham, are doing to graphic novels what Shakespeare did to drama, mixing in a variety of old characters and plots and spinning out wonderful fleshy creations and group dynamics. As Jess Nevins points out in his companion guide to the first volume Heroes and Monsters, the whole crossover concept goes back at least to the Argonautica by Appolonius of Rhodes. The amazing thing about the League is that it probably owes something to every classic as well as all the penny dreadfuls and pulp dime novels that nobody has seen or read for generations (except, apparently, Jess Nevins). The beauty of the ultimate crossover, a theme shared by The Sandman, fulfills the deepest desires of our esemplastic imagination.

Then, as Watchmen subverted the immaculate idea of heroes as idols, League looks more sympathetically at the moral life and complicated manipulations that go into these extraordinary, often archetypal, figures. And then, of course, there is the boldest move of all, killing off key characters, showing the same support for story by giving a hero his realistic life expectancy.

As Moore has said, he's reinvested the old grist mill of ideas with their original potency. Submarines, alien invasion, biological warfare, are all yesterday's news. But in 1898 such notions as manned flights to the moon still held a wonder about them. It is also a way to critique and satirize fin de siècle British sentiment, playing off Victorian attitudes toward sex, race, and religion. However, it soon becomes apparent that like Rorschach, the book is involved enough that the reader falls right into it, modern sensibilities and all. Moore consciously wished to diverge from superhero comics ("this one sickly strain of show dog") to expand beyond the main market that he believes is destined to perish for lack of diversity, and draw upon our ancestors in a mad literary game of Scrabble. Thus, gospel-like, Moore proclaims, "if the League is about anything it is an attempt to write, an absurd attempt to write some sort of ultimate story. And that's probably all it is, ultimately" (qtd. in Nevins, A Blazing World 283).

At any rate, a writer's job is not to invent anyway, but to intuit platonic characters. Moore then goes from Platonism to Deconstructionism, intending all the while to do stories that are "having fun purely by pulling down the barriers between high literature and pulp literature and pornography and low literary forms like that. It's pulling down these snobbish barriers, these fancies between different genres, different levels of literature, supposed high and low literature, that has always been the most subversive thing about the The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." He goes on to say that it will get more extreme: "And we're almost certainly going to take it too far, because that is really the only destination worth heading for, too far." It's truth to bear in mind when you enter this world, but it should come as no surprise. Writers have been throwing out taboos for years. Is it any wonder when they rant when there is nothing left to throw out but their own frustrations at fulfillment?

Moore specifically mentions how he wants to normalize sex. I find this fascinating. As a liberated Brit, he sees Americans as still socially-repressed by Bible Belt mores. He must still be in a spyglass looking at 1898 though, because I can't go out the door today without being evangelized, proselytized, and euthanized by the sex industry's advertisements. If we can let Freud to roll over in his grave, let's just consider that closer: "normalize sex." An amusing term, and one that renders the statement absurd. If you naturalize an immigrant, he is no longer foreign and exotic. If you map out the world with longitudinal lines and place names and Starbucks, the mystery of the unknown has gone out of things. Pull a couple out of their darkened bedroom and onstage downtown and you will have ruined everything: the couple, the audience, and the theatre. Do the same thing to any distinction between the sacred and the profane with such intentions and see if crossing defecation with temple sacrifice lends itself to high culture.

While I cannot condone the egregious, though plot-driven, actualities depicted in League, there is also something bothersome in many Christian novels where such sins are nonexistent. They are the literary equivalent to Thomas Kinkaide paintings: nice, but lacking. And certainly repetitive. Life is bitter-sweet and must have both to balance the flavor. This is not to say everything must be sketched in the gritty, morally-depraved world of the detective novel, but for God's sake and His glory, reveal some of the nuances, undertones, and glimpses of stark reality of which the Christian is so thoroughly equipped to perceive.

The Fairy-Tale Teller (who isn't for kids)

I did not intend to say less about Willingham, just because he is more straightforward with the machinations of our favorite storybook characters. And he captures and creates insights into each one beautifully. Just as Moore developed Captain Nemo and Mister Hyde into startling characters, Willingham uncovers the best in the Big Bad Wolf and the worst in Prince Charming, how scheming Jack can be and just want a crybaby Bluebeard really is. Even if you've never read the classics Moore refers to or need some helps with the Arabic, French, Chinese, and Martian, everybody can enjoy Fables without need of commentaries or guides. Best of all, it's not the typically cynical modern reading our talking heads try to tell us. There is enough of the original content of the stories (yes, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty and Snow White were all the equivalent of pornographic horror films in their day) mixed in with the cautious, but balanced happily ever after. There is enough drama to propel the story, unify some together in action, and serve a few others with their traditionally gruesome demise. Imagine, you TV-ophiles out there, The West Wing and Law & Order, only at the end of the day you actually care about the characters, all of them, and can't wait for the next episode.

Nor is Willingham slow on the literary references. Sly nods to Animal Farm and The Lord of the Flies get equal billing with the rest of the residents of Fabletown, set on Bullfinch Street in Manhattan, having fled there from the Homelands centuries ago. Part of the running concern is protecting their secrecy while waiting to see whether they can reclaim their lost lands from the Adversary, a figure whose identity is so tantalizingly well kept. So far, League has been tightly self-contained, but Willingham has an easier ingredient list for his recipe and can afford to dangle out several loose ends at once.

For all the paranormal soap operas going on at any one time, Fables is still very cozy and familiar. Gaiman at his most domestic was never this wholesome. He had to have witches and transvestites and Medusa running around the apartment scenes. Here, we get to enjoy motherhood with Snow White and a whacked-out, gun-toting Goldilocks (who wants all species equal) get struck with an axe, fall down a cliff, and hit by a truck — funny stuff, and of an altogether different tone from our other two graphic novels. The same scene would turn you aghast if done by another writer. If you are still in shock from flipping through The Sandman or League, go ahead and start out easy with Fables. It is much more family friendly in comparison. Just be sure to do some selective editing. Just because some scenes have to be in there for local color or in order to present reality and not just some farce of a fantasy world, doesn't mean we have to dwell on all that's in the background works or let our kids be tricked out of the illusion too soon. I read issue #38, "The Hunt", from The Sandman to my own dear unlettered mother and she loved it. And I stopped there. To go on to the singing heads scene a few issues later would merely be, shall we say, counter-productive at this point.

It's hardly fair to say, but in some ways Fables feels less political because it's generally less liberal. The revolutionaries of the second volume, Animal Farm, were dealt with summarily, by the swift justice of Jack Ketch that is almost nonexistent in today's judicial haze. Later, in the fourth volume, March of the Wooden Soldiers, Snow White makes clear her stance against infanticide, championing responsibility over personal happiness — to me at least, it is a fresh break from the preaching from the other side of the aisle, where condoms are thrown among school children and tolerance is worshipped alongside Robespierre's Goddess Reason. In addition to the death penalty and abortion, Willingham can joke around in half-serious tones about the right to bear arms, the freedom of assembly, and the franchise. In each case, the characterized are so well-rounded and individualized that the sermon, if we read one there, is seamless in the narrative.

Of course, there is the cursing and fun violence and occasional bedroom scene, but one feels that now, at last, there mostly begins to show a modicum of decency to it. That is to say that we are nearing the solution to that problem of depicting life as we like it as well as life as it is. Rousseau called it the "cloak of modesty." In terms of Scripture, this means that Christ's nakedness on the cross is in the background; the astute reader knows it happened even if it is not spoken of. In the same way, we can have bedroom scenes done without feeling we are somehow voyeurs in the window. It's a sticky wicket, but the from of old Bible has shown it can be done quite well. It probably has more bedroom scenes than any other book and when its literary and moral influence were at their peak, writer's learned how much better the craft can be with the freedom to operate within the taboos and sacred spaces.

Bring Your Cloak and Dagger Next Time

For some of these stories, I don't really have an answer. And if you think you can just resort to your sanitized, care-free Narnia books and forget about the whole thing, you haven't read them carefully. This time spend some time over why Lewis included the necromancy scene under the hill or the astrology lesson from the castle tower. There is more than meets the eye, but there is also our elusive line: the difference is clear between Lilith or the Bacchante in The Sandman and the ones in Narnia. It is personally difficult for me to blacklist writing that is technically marvelous when it does not conform to all the fruits of the Spirit. On the other hand, there are some works that I have grown nauseous in reading and thrown away or burned and would never recommend to others. Perhaps, I ought to caution you now that I'm thinking of it against picking up Gaiman's prose short-story "The Problem of Susan" if you value your concept of Narnia — unless you want a lesson in how abominably dire and Nietzschean the story would be without a Christ figure at the helm. Again, the protective line. The extremes define the middle. The middle defines the extremes too. Life is messy enough as it is with birth canals and placentas; in stories, some blood must be spilled and some must be wiped up. Early on in The Sandman the reader learns what happens when the writer Richard Madoc is too raw with his subject.

What can we say? And by 'we' I'm usually forced to mean doctrinally-conservative, culturally-liberal Christians who are serious about engaging the world through the arts of Christ. Well, since the Word of God, by its literary nature, requires a tough nails literary reading and replenishes us with stories that are nothing less than breath-taking if we were to take them piecemeal and aside from the veil of the ho-hum, Sunday School familiarity we've grown, there is a definite call to interpret works by this light and disseminate its rays through our own works. Neil Gaiman, though unfortunately not privy to the mystery of the Gospel, understood this well enough to script part of the comic Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. Later, he would write the introduction to Marvel's version of The Screwtape Letters. He knows something we don't.

This means we should not fill our shelves with what passes for Christianized light reading. Don't ask me how many aisles of so-called historical romance I saw at the Christian bookstore the other day, or whether they even had a section on theology (you already know the answer). This means we should not settle for less than the uncanny and awesome in story-telling. This means that if the secular world, which can neither see nor comprehend the spiritual, is beating us to it, we are remiss if we cannot peek over their shoulders, share with them our sourcebook, and incarnate a fraction of what John spoke of when he dreamed of worlds of books that bespoke the doings of Jesus.

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