front page  ·  comicbook reviews  ·  interviews  ·  comics  ·  merchandise  ·  contact us  ·  newsfeed: rss xml

Interview: Greg Garrett   By Matt Yocum Published: 2006-01-09

I recently finished a book by Greg Garrett entitled Holy Superheroes! Exploring Faith & Spirituality in Comic Books. Mr. Garrett weaves his way through the tapestry of comics, threading through the concepts of power, responsibility, truth, justice, evil, and vigilantism. He also takes time to analyze the “beast” within all of us, looks back at the Holocaust, and talks about comics violence in the post 9-11 world. He comes to some interesting conclusions on lessons we can all apply to our own lives and what we can learn from comics.

Mr. Garrett has published the novels Free Bird (2002) and Cycling (2003) as well as nonfiction works such as The Gospel Reloaded: Exploring Spirituality and Faith in The Matrix along with Chris Seay. In addition he’s written short fiction, articles, personal essays, film, music, book reviews, and worked as a sports writer. Mr. Garrett is a Professor of English at Baylor University and is currently studying to be a priest in the Episcopal Church. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Garrett while he was in the deserts of New Mexico working on a book on religion and film.

Matt Yocum: How did the genesis of Holy Superheroes! come about?

Greg Garrett: I’ve loved comics since I was a kid, and the stories and characters have become a part of me. I still remember reading issues of The Avengers when I was maybe eight or ten and going out to my grandparents’ barn to try to reproduce one of the Black Panther’s particularly cool moves by swinging from the rafters. You’ll be glad to know that I was not badly hurt. When I was in high school and into college, before poverty stopped me, I collected Marvel comics religiously; I’ve got a terrific run of New X-Men, Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man. I started reading comics again after most of the wretched excess of the nineties was over, and also began picking up graphic novels and good collections that I’d missed. In the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of writing and teaching about what we learn from stories, and every week a new batch of comics came along to remind me that they distill our thinking about good and evil, about heroism, and about ethics into adventures starring characters dressed in Spandex. After my best friend and I wrote a successful book on the religious and philosophical elements in the first two Matrix films, I told my nonfiction publisher that I had an idea for a new book — that I wanted to apply the methods we’d used to discuss The Matrix to comics.

Every week a new batch of comics came along to remind me that they distill our thinking about good and evil, about heroism, and about ethics.

MY: Judging by the references page, you did a great deal of research for this book. Roughly how long did it take to research and write the book?

GG: I spent about a year and a half reading secondary material on comics, ethics, and theology and writing the book. Some of the books I refer to in Holy Superheroes were already on my shelf: Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, Desmond Tutu, Joseph Campbell, and some of the others I reference in the book are people I read and re-read because what they have to say about God, faith, and life inspires me. But a lot of the research took me to new places.

During the year and a half I was doing research and writing, of course, I was thinking about every comic and graphic novel I’d read over the last thirty years, as well as everything I was reading at the moment; since almost all superhero comics are about the struggle between good and evil and the difficulty of doing the right thing, every week I brought new material home from the comic store, and I had to constantly sift it to see if there was anything I wanted to include. There was always more than I could talk about, and I was constantly discovering new material up to and past the time I finished the book. If I were writing the book today, for example, I would probably talk more about Sandman and Hellboy, which have become some of my favorites. A lot of the things I particularly liked, I read after I’d already finished sections of the book where they would have fit. The Identity Crisis storyline in DC comics last year continues to reverberate through a number of books; it would have been great to generate discussion about how good people can do bad things — and what happens to them and to society when they do. And all of this end of the world stuff — House of M and Ultimate Galactus at Marvel and Infinite Crisis at DC — would have fit perfectly with the chapter on the Apocalypse where I wrote about Watchmen and Kingdom Come. Oh well — maybe we’ll do a revised edition some day.

MY: You definitely have an interest not just in reading comics as escapism but seeing how we as individuals can apply lessons learned from the vast contemporary mythologies we encounter in comics. Are these thoughts something that gestated over a long period of time or was there a point in your life when this struck you?

GG: As a storyteller and a teacher of stories, I’ve long felt that stories are how we make sense of our lives. They’re how we communicate the day-to-day events, and they’re how we find an order and structure to our lives in a larger sense. Mythic stories, whether “real” or fictional, are particularly valuable for this, which is why I spent a whole lot of time in Holy Superheroes talking about archetypal stories that human beings have always used to figure things out, many of which appear in a very pure form in comics and comic adaptations. The stories of the archetypal hero that comparative anthropologist Joseph Campbell recorded, the archetypal plot movement from despair to hope that the gospel narratives capture, and the archetypal American emphasis on individual self-reliance that we see in so many of our hero narratives from Franklin’s Autobiography and Last of the Mohicans on are all there in larger-than-life form in comics.

Because I’m both a writer and a person of faith, I think that stories have a duty to entertain us, but that the best stories also teach us something about what it means to be human and what we’re supposed to be doing on this planet. Through stories, we get to walk in the shoes of other people, try on identities and solutions, see consequences. Storytelling was the first virtual reality, and it’s been going on for as far back as we can reckon history. Good comics let you not only savor action and appreciate character; they also let you experience the moral dilemmas the characters take action against. X-Men, for example, has always been concerned with what it means to be oppressed and with the mechanics of prejudice that lead to oppression — and since many of us who read comics are middle-class and white, it puts us in the shoes of people who aren’t. During the civil rights era, X-Men provided a medium for exploring relations between blacks and whites; today, as in the movie X-2, it could open questions about bigotry toward people whose sexual orientation differs from societal norms.

X-Men, for example, has always been concerned with what it means to be oppressed and with the mechanics of prejudice that lead to oppression — and since many of us who read comics are middle-class and white, it puts us in the shoes of people who aren’t.

MY: At one point in the book you state, “This is what life on earth ultimately comes down to: What kind of heroes are we going to be?” Do you see comics and religion doing the same thing, offering visions of what we as individuals should be?

GG: Well, in the sense that we choose certain stories to live our lives by, we could say that comics and religion are both in the business of providing ethical narratives. It’s not such a stretch, I guess — I know people who have decided that they’re going to live their lives differently after reading Kerouac’s On the Road or Hemingway’s war stories, just like they might live their lives differently after reading the Koran or the Gospel of Mark. Ultimately, of course, religion is faith-based, which means that we’re talking not just about choosing a story that helps orient us, but about centering our lives around something to which you give absolute allegiance. Kerouac and Hemingway are both dead, and won’t be coming back anytime soon, I’m guessing, so it wouldn’t make much sense to worship them, however much wisdom we might get from their words and stories. On the other hand, if your narrative centers around Allah or YHWH or Buddha or Krishna, you get a story of ethical coherence that helps you live your life, and a divine figure worthy of allegiance and reverence.

But in a simple narrative sense, your question about heroism is what Holy Superheroes argues: that the stories we find in comics can give us direction about how to live our lives wisely and well, and that probably a big part of that will be in serving others.

MY: One of the points you make in the book is what makes Superman a vital character is his superhuman “restraint,” that Superman places on himself limitations. And we are even now seeing the response from other superheroes and the public what happens when those limitations are crossed when Wonder Woman killed Max Lord.

At the same time that I see these superhuman restraints, I also see that virtually every issue of a comic must show some sort of fight scene — even between fellow superheroes — for sometimes the slightest thing. It seems a staple of American superhero comics that there be a fight in every issue, and perhaps this comes from something else you said in the book: “We love violence just as much as we love hatred.”

From comics how can we take away lessons of non-violent action to make a difference in the world when every issue showcases the violent moments of our superheroes?

If I were writing the book today I would probably talk more about Sandman and Hellboy, which have become some of my favorites.

GG: I came back to Superman over and over again, not because he’s my favorite comic character — I have to confess that Batman, Wolverine, and John Constantine, along with other more conflicted and violent characters, are my favorites from a literary and a fan standpoint — but because he’s so clearly a moral paragon, from his creation by two Jewish teenagers to fight injustice to the present day. You can look at him as a big boy scout if you want to, but I also think there’s something supremely admirable about refusing to be pragmatic, about believing with all your heart and soul that some things are right and some things are always wrong. Superman does not kill because killing is wrong and because there are always other alternatives if you are resourceful enough. Even if there weren’t other alternatives, Kal-El would not want to live in a world where doing the wrong thing became the necessary thing to do. That’s what has strained his close friendship with Wonder Woman to the breaking point; he doesn’t want to have been saved at the cost of someone else’s life, even a villain’s life. Batman, violent and brooding as he is, dark to Superman’s light, is having the same conflict these days with Jason Todd (if the Red Hood is indeed Robin II returned from the grave): mangle and bludgeon the bad guys if you must, put them in a cast or in intensive care if that’s what it takes to protect society, but do not kill them. It’s why Spider-Man is always so uneasy with and sometimes fights to stop the Marvel universe heroes like Wolverine and the Punisher. We don’t kill. It’s what makes us different from the bad guys. It’s the same thing Catman says to Green Arrow at the end of the Villains United run: “You’re supposed to be the good guys. Act like it.”

Violence is a staple of comics, as it is of American culture. Because superhero comics are action/adventure stories, conflict is almost always worked out through violence, and I agree, in some cases it seems a little ridiculous: All right, we just met, so let’s fight. Of course sometimes it’s more justified as a plot element: the only way to stop the Joker/Bizarro/the Red Skull/etc. from killing a lot of people is to kick the crud out of him, and even people who oppose war will sometimes make exceptions. There is something called “Just War” theory, about making war or defending yourself when there really is no other option, and I’m not so naïve to think that, for example,

Think about Brian Michael Bendis’ recent work putting people in a room or standing around and talking. His recent “Decalogue” run on Daredevil was mostly just an encounter group sitting in a church basement, and it was freaking brilliant.

Hitler and the Nazi state would have ever stopped killing people unless they’d been forced to stop. We can sometimes accept violence as a necessary means to the ends of peace and justice. But violence in a story just for the sake of violence is probably pretty close to most people’s definitions of pornography — unnecessary, gratuitous, and just for our titillation. Other nations are amazed at America’s puritanical attitudes toward sex and our permissive attitudes toward violence. And frankly, I think they may have something. I don’t think consuming violence necessarily makes you violent — my older son has been playing violent video games since he was four years old and is one of the gentlest people I know, and I took a class this summer at the home of a Native American peace activist who had a copy of Kill Bill on her shelf — but I do think we have to recognize that ethically and morally, violence should always be our last solution, not our default setting.

Thankfully, there are also other kinds of conflict in comics — think about Brian Michael Bendis’ recent work putting people in a room or standing around and talking. His recent “Decalogue” run on Daredevil was mostly just an encounter group sitting in a church basement, and it was freaking brilliant.

MY: Parts of your book appear as commentary on the state of American foreign policy and international relations. Do you feel comic writers should more overtly express their opinions on the current state of world affairs in their comics (e.g., what Mark Millar is doing in The Ultimates) or do you think they should focus on comics as entertainment and leave others to draw whatever parallels they see?

GG: I think artists are like anybody else — some feel comfortable stating what they think about things and some don’t. And some do it well, without stepping on other people’s toes, and some are in your face. But we don’t always even know what an author’s beliefs are. In my novel Free Bird, I make some pretty explicit social, religious, and political statements that seem right in line with the characters expressing them; some of them I share, and some I don’t. I do like Millar’s political slant, if that’s what it is, but it’s partly because I agree with it. And I think that’s an artistic dilemma; people who disagree with you are less likely to get involved in the story. Of course, in a really good story, people may be more inclined to be sympathetic toward views that are not their own. So I don’t know where I stand on this: as a writer, I think thematic questions ought to grow out of the story itself, but as an American citizen and a person of faith, I want to see people speaking out against violence, oppression, and injustice in whatever medium is available to them.

MY: As the book clearly shows, spiritual lessons can be learned from the archetypal heroes in comics. Are you aware of any religious characters in comics? How much does this play, do you feel, into who they are as a character?

GG: A few overtly religious characters in comics — that is to say, a primary part of their identity is that they are people of faith — would be Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler from the X-Men, Peregrine and The Maid in Alan Moore’s Top 10 mythos, and some writers’ versions of Matt Murdock/Daredevil. There are other characters who profess a belief in God or a supreme being — in Holy Superheroes I mention a scene from one of the Superman books where Superman tells Lois that he is no different from anyone else using the abilities God gave him — but these four are characters for whom faith actually seems to make a difference in how they live their lives and in how and why they do the work they do. There’s a difference between surface religiosity that many people profess — “I believe in God” or “I go to synagogue every week” — and religion that transforms a person’s life, and I’d have to say that these characters seem to embody that transformation. The true work of religious people is the work of bringing peace and justice into the world. It’s a gospel message, it’s in the Hebrew Torah and the Koran, and we see it played out in the lives of these characters.

MY: As this site is devoted to the comics fan, what would you list as your favorite current reads in comics? And what do you consider the 5-star, must-reads that you would recommend to someone?

GG: I’m pretty mainstream in the comics I read — they’re mostly superhero comics, and mostly from the Big Two publishers. The books that I’m most excited about on a monthly basis are DC books these days, which surprises me a little, but I think DC has featured the best stories over the last year or two. I’m currently almost completely off the X-Men, which is a little troubling to me as they used to be among my favorite characters, but it got to be too much to keep up with — too many titles, too many characters. My current top ten would be Hellblazer, Planetary, Astonishing X-Men, Powers, Batman, New Avengers, Superman and Batman, BPRD or any current title in Mike Mignola’s universe, Daredevil, and The Ultimates. I also read or have read a lot of the company-wide event titles, but I have found the Infinite Crisis and House of M flagship titles a lot less interesting than some of the spin-off books. I liked Countdown to Infinite Crisis a lot, liked Villains United, and I’m intrigued by the new Quicksilver book following up House of M. Oh, and in case anyone’s listening, I want Hawkeye back.

I recommend a number of graphic novels at the back of Holy Superheroes, but there are some things I’d add now that almost two years have passed since I sent the book to the publisher. If I had to suggest ten graphic novels or collections, I’d go with Maus, Watchmen, A Superman for All Seasons, Planetary: All Over the World, Avengers Forever, Frank Miller’s first Dark Knight, one of the early Powers trade paperbacks, one of the first five Hellboy collections, some Sandman, and the first volume of 9-11: Artists Respond.

I don’t think consuming violence necessarily makes you violent… I took a class this summer at the home of a Native American peace activist who had a copy of Kill Bill on her shelf.

MY: If you had the chance to write one existing comic title, which comic would that be and why?

GG: I’d love to write Daredevil. Matt Murdock is a good guy who can’t seem to catch a break. He’s had a thousand beautiful girlfriends, a high-profile law practice, and yet he always seems to end up alone. I love to write characters who wrestle with life, and the fact that this one also wrestles with supervillains makes him that much more appealing.

MY: I would hazard a guess that most fans of comics are also fans of the movie The Matrix. Can you tell me a little more about your book The Gospel Reloaded?

GG: Well, it’s no secret to anyone that the Matrix movies are chock-full of religious and philosophical references, since the Wachowski Brothers are avid — maybe rabid — readers and thinkers. My friend Chris Seay and I looked at the first film and the script of the second (neither the second or third were out as we went to press) and talked about the many borrowings from Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist belief systems and how the mythic stories in the Matrix films can help us solve problems in our own lives — sort of similar to the approach I took in Holy Superheroes, although HS is a little more systematic and structured. So, Neo is the Messiah, and Jesus, and the Buddha. Oh, and Superman.

MY: You mentioned you’re currently working on a new book related to religion and film. Can you give an idea of where you’re headed with the book? Also, any other books in the works?

GG: This is a book in the best-selling series that includes The Gospel According to the Simpsons and The Gospel According to Tolkien. It’s going to be called The Gospel According to Hollywood, and I’m going to be trying to write the definitive book for a popular audience about how film serves both as a contemporary religious system and can help us connect or reconnect to other faith systems. The book will be out in spring 2007, and I can tell you it will discuss Constantine, Hellboy, The Matrix, Batman Begins, and the new Superman film, as well as a number of other films from classic films like Casablanca and Wizard of Oz to contemporary films like Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, and Signs.

I also have a book coming out this fall which is a real departure for me. Instead of fiction or critical writing, it’s a memoir about depression, which I suffered from for much of my life, and faith. It’s currently called Crooked Lines, although it may be out under another title. I’ve also finished my third novel and we’re shopping it around, so we hope to have it placed shortly.

MY: If you could leave one takeaway from your book Holy Superheroes!, what would it be?

GG: Dumbledore tells the students of Hogwarts in the fourth HP novel that we’re all presented with the choice between what is right and what is easy. What we choose defines what sort of person we’ll be. We can live like the superheroes we admire, giving our lives in service to others, or we can live like the villains we profess to hate, living only for ourselves. So maybe we should get bracelets that help us to remember: WWSD (What Would Superman Do?).

Feel free to email me at myocum@comiccritique.com and if you’d like to learn more about Greg Garrett, visit his site.