The Book of Comic Prayer

Using Art and Humor to Transform Youth Ministry

Heather J. Annis

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780819232786
• eBook ISBN: 9780819232793
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The Book of Comic Prayer takes a fresh look at prayer from an unexpected perspective: comic art, humor, and their relevance to today's image-driven youth. Part explanation, part instruction, it explores the role of prayer and faith in mainstream and underground comics, and provides resources for incorporating comics and cartooning into curricula for children and youth. The Appendix includes an illustrated booklet created by one group of young people as a supplement to traditional forms of prayer and offers tips and tricks for creating books of comic prayer. The church has always used visual arts for prayer, worship, and education, and religious themes and figures still permeate popular culture. Comics, with their larger-than-life stories of villainy, morality, and heroism, have religious undertones ranging from explicit to metaphorical, offering opportunities to explore what post-modern prayer and faith look like and why they matter. Comics are inexpensive, accessible, and adaptable to church school, youth groups, Bible studies, prayer groups, camps, and VBS. There have been illustrated comic Bibles and religious books, but no single resource dealing with prayer's individual and communal aspects as they relate to the comic art form. This is that book!

CHAPTER 1

Origin stories

Art, Comics, and
Youth Ministry

	If you do not say anything in a cartoon, you might as well not draw it at all.
	—Charles Schulz^5

I drew my first “religious” comic strip when I was nine or ten years old. Drawn in pencil on a narrow piece of poster board, it is called “The Three Wise Dudes” and is about the magi journeying toward Bethlehem. The camels are too slow, so the three supposedly wise men trade them in for a dune buggy. The beaming kings whiz across the desert sands, holding their crowns on with their hands. The dune buggy soon gets a flat tire, at which point the grumbling wise dudes end up back on the camels.

I drew the cartoon because I thought it was funny. I’m not sure I appreciated the irony, or that this was really a strip about patience: the patience of the journey from Advent to Christmas, from Christmas to Epiphany. Neither did I identify the crude drawings as prayer or commentary. Years later, I realized that I had something to say and could say it with comics.

As a kid, I scrawled pictures of Woody Woodpecker, Snoopy, and Donald Duck over every available surface. Since then, I have created a number of comics about a super-heroic sock, a little girl named Pentimento Jones, a robotic creature called Mobie, and, among other things, my work with teenagers.

The middle school and high school kids with whom I have worked over the years have personalities and stories as varied as cartoon characters. In each case, I have found the arts to be a logical and gratifying entry point into difficult topics. As an artist, comic book fan, and Christian educator, it makes sense that these three elements of my vocational identity should come together to influence and shape my ministry.

Heather J. Annis

For the past several years, I have also been traveling around the country doing workshops and presentations on the subject of art and faith. Jon Bowles suggests, “The church needs artists to come out from the margins and actively lead in the spiritual formation of its people.”⁶ The Book of Common Prayer affirms this sentiment by its inclusion of a little-known prayer for church artists and musicians:

O God, whom saints and angels delight to worship in heaven: Be ever present with your servants who seek through art and music to perfect the praises offered by your people on earth; and grant to them even now glimpses of your beauty and make them worthy at length to behold it unveiled for evermore; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.⁷

Participants in my workshops are unfailingly surprised and delighted by the inclusion of this prayer. Its existence is evidence of the importance of the arts in all their forms to the religious community.

Most faith traditions have made room for visual reminders of God’s presence in worship and personal devotion. Christians have long made use of icons, mosaics, and stained glass to communicate a sense of the holy. Islamic calligraphy is highly regarded as the embodiment of the sacred word. Making art to focus attention, direct prayer, and articulate the commandments is a component of Jewish worship. Buddhists and Native Americans create mandalas and sand paintings for the glorification of deities, healing of the community, and out of reverence for the earth.

The potency of art as a spiritual discipline lies in its ability to evoke and make known the presence of the divine. In addition to aesthetic functions, the arts have played a historical role in Christian education. Certainly the arts have been employed as tools of instruction throughout the history of the Church. One need only turn to stained glass windows and illuminated texts for evidence of the role visual arts have played in promoting the faith over the centuries. The illustrations that accompany early Christian manuscripts served to deepen religious understanding by making it accessible to a largely illiterate society. Early iconographers, illuminators, and mosaicists sought ways to enter into visual dialogue with God.

The visual arts can enliven one’s search for God when used as or in conjunction with worship, prayer, and study. There is no shortage of precedent for pairing word and image, ancient and modern; the drawings and stories in this book provide continued evidence of the place of these arts within Christian formation and spiritual practice.

Participatory Aesthetics

My particular interest in the arts and ministry falls into the category of participatory aesthetics—really a fancy way of saying “making art together.” Participatory aesthetics asks how worship spaces, spiritual practices, and religious encounters can be mediated and enhanced by communal engagement in the arts. Two fundamental assumptions of this approach are that “all the gifts and abilities that individuals possess are from God and, if surrendered to God, can become vehicles for spiritual ministry” and that these gifts can be used for “the perpetuation of community life.”⁸ Furthermore, the work of Leonard Sweet contends that in the post-modern age, the American religious institution is in need of a re-imagining of both worship and education. His “E.P.I.C.” model of church life advocates a shift toward a more active, community-oriented style of religious engagement, suggesting that this engagement ought to be Experiential, Participatory, Image-driven, and Connected. He asserts that post-modern churchgoers are interested in helping to create what they experience.⁹ It stands to reason, then, that the interconnected processes of prayer, education, and discernment can be enriched through the thoughtful use of the arts.

With these historical and philosophical underpinnings in mind, I have made it my vocation to explore the symbiotic relationships among art, faith, and community. As a youth minister and arts consultant, I have facilitated community projects from wall-sized murals to comics you can fit into the pocket of your jeans. While the practical considerations differ significantly, the approach is essentially the same: value the gifts and contributions of each individual, using them to build relationships, enrich faith, and glorify God.

Comics in Community

In his book on arts ministry, Michael Bauer states that creativity is “the result of openness to new ways of thinking, new approaches to solving problems, new materials, new paradigms.”¹⁰ As professor of Christian education Robert Pazmiño observes, “an educational program that gives participants the opportunity to express their creativity will also foster a sense of celebration and provide occasions for worship.”¹¹ These statements are crucial to an understanding of how the arts in general function within the context of spiritual formation. How the use of comics, in particular, fits into this model requires a bit more background and exploration.

According to comics and graphic novel legend Will Eisner, comics can serve two basic functions: to instruct and/or to entertain. The combination of words and images can be used to communicate shared experience and to provide new information. This assumption is at the core of visual literacy, a concept that is of particular value and significance in the increasingly image-saturated culture in which we live and to which Sweet’s “E.P.I.C.” model alludes. “To be visually literate,” maintains Lynell Burmark, students must be able to both consume and produce “visually rich communications. They must be able to move gracefully and fluently between text and images, between literal and figurative worlds.”¹² In comics and graphic novels, it is easy for both artist and reader to “make the move from the realistic to the fantastic … it can be done from one panel to the next or even within one panel. We accept strange transformations in comics.”¹³ The same delicate balance is necessary to be spiritually literate: this ability to negotiate the worlds of religious tradition and story—from fact to metaphor to experience. The ability to situate oneself prayerfully within this tension can be nurtured through creating a form of art, which, by its very nature, is a juxtaposition of revelation and implied meaning.

Finding meaning in the blank spaces between comic panels, or gutters, requires a certain participatory leap, an act of both imagination and faith. Finding God in the blank spaces between prayers—sometimes even in the midst of prayer itself—can be challenging and frustrating. Encouraging students to engage in prayer as an act of imaginative interactivity is of both creative and spiritual value.

Like prayer, the comics are at once deceptively simple and complex. While there is no “right way” to pray, there are forms and compositional structures that can make the process less frustrating. Similarly, “when students learn the composing techniques associated with the comics form, they tell compelling stories that often connect to [their] lived experiences and actual social worlds, rather than to capes and tights.”¹⁴ That is to say, while drawings may initially seem superficial, the comics and prayers that students generate offer rich glimpses into the spiritual environment of the teenaged heart, mind, and soul.

Re-Envisioning the Three Rs

Within the context of youth ministry, comics offer a new interpretation of the three Rs: reach, relevance, and relationship. Each of these attributes alone constitutes a reason for exploring comics with youth. Together, they make a compelling argument for incorporating comics into your programming.

Reach

In a strip called Mish and Meedja, a priest and a missionary stroll down a busy street. They are virtually surrounded by comics: on racks at a newsstand, in a vending machine, in a shop selling books and magazines. The other people in the strip are engrossed in comic books as the two clergy people walk by. “I give up!” moans the pastor. “I just can’t find a way to reach these people!”¹⁵ Far from giving up, the Church is called to identify and embrace new mediums for exploration and expression in education, formation, and evangelism.

Comic books, manga, and graphic novels are becoming increasingly popular in the United States; indeed, the medium of sequential art has its own subculture. Over 125,000 people attended the San Diego Comic-Con in 2014.¹⁶ Libraries have begun to pay attention to this literary trend by supplementing their holdings with books of sequential art popular with teens.

For an admittedly apples to oranges (but useful) comparison: The Economist estimates that more than a hundred million Bibles are printed every year,¹⁷ making a staggering total of over six billion in print.¹⁸ According to Diamond Comic Distributors (responsible for the direct market distribution of Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, IDW, and Image comics in the United States), their top ten titles sold over one million copies in the month of April 2015 alone. Fourth-ranked Batman sold an estimated 131,128 copies in that same month.¹⁹

The influence of comic book and cartoon characters is extensive. Character movies, toys, and other merchandise are pervasive in American culture, and the effects of their prevalence begin at an early age. Marketing and packaging matter; studies show that advertising with cartoon characters, for example, plays a strong role in inducing children and youth to consume products and engage in behaviors. What if we were able and willing to make prayer and worship more appealing to young people, thus attracting them to both spiritual practice and organized religion without changing the fundamental qualities of each?

Other organizations figured this out long ago. Thirty years ago, the comic book became a popular medium through which to deliver public service announcements sponsored by government and nonprofit agencies to promote everything from good nutrition and dental hygiene to preventing smoking and drug use. As recently as 2013, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four teamed up to battle underage drinking. In 2014, more than thirty cartoonists and comic writers contributed to a book dedicated to the prevention of bullying.

For the Church’s part, Christian-themed comics and graphic novels are slowly increasing in number, quality, variety, availability, and popularity. Done well, a comic book treatment of a religious message can be an invaluable resource for evangelism and education. The fundamentalist comic booklets known as “Chick tracts” offer over one hundred titles, translated into more than one hundred languages, sold by the bundle. Remember those figures about the production of Bibles and comic books? Jack Chick sells an estimated half-billion copies of conservative comics each year²⁰ and according to a letter from Chick Publications, the company has mailed out nearly “900 million tracts worldwide”²¹ in the past fifty years. Agree or disagree with their ideology, the tracts are high quality and they sell; if nothing else, we can take a lesson from their marketing strategy. As Robert Short observes, “the popular arts are important precisely because they are popular.”²² Which brings us to the topic of relevance.

Relevance

Pastor and author Rob Bell urges the church to find fresh, new ways to approach formation, saying “every generation has to ask the difficult questions of what it means to be a Christian here and now, in this place, in this time.”²³ Part of the Church’s task is to engage with popular culture, reclaiming tradition in ways that both respect history and evolve to make room for new meaning. The telling of stories has always been a cornerstone of religious tradition, providing a means of transmitting information, values, and experience. Sequential art frames stories within a structure that is flexible yet clear, offering what Darby Orcutt calls a “natural fit between comi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Origin Stories: Art, Comics, and Youth Ministry
• Chapter 2 Drawing Closer to God: Art as Prayer
• Chapter 3 Sunday Funnies: Humor in Prayer and Worship
• Chapter 4 Super Faith: Archetypal Heroes and Religious Themes
• Chapter 5 Saints and Sidekicks: Cultivating the Outrageous
• Chapter 6 Mr. Peace Be with You: A Case Study in Community Art-Making
• Chapter 7 From Common to Comic: A Practical Approach
• Chapter 8 Thinking Outside the Book: Interdisciplinary Applications
• Chapter 9 Zine and Unzine: An Introduction to Self-Publishing
• Chapter 10 Comic Book Grading: Evaluating Success
• Appendix A Let Us Draw: Games and Warm-Ups
• Appendix B Story Starters
• Appendix C 24-Hour Comics Retreat
• List of Illustrators
• Notes