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Interview:
Interview with Greg Garrett
By Matt Yocum
Published: 09 January 2006
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Click here
for Part II of Matt's interview with Greg Garrett.
—CCdC— Cover image supplied by publisher.
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