Jesuit Emblems and Catholic Comics
- Book Title:
- Emblematic Images and Religious Texts: Studies in Honor of G. Richard Dimler, S.J.
- Book Editor:
- Format:
- Book Chapter
- Year:
- 2010
- Publisher:
- St. Joseph's University Press
- Place published:
- Philadelphia
- Language:
- Abstract:
When the TV incarnation of Hercule Poirot haughtily dismisses Belgian detectives with small animals, the anachronistic reference is to one of the stars of Catholic comics, Tintin. Making the connection amuses the viewer, just as we might imagine the reader of Jesuit emblems playing seventeenth-century sleuth in piecing together the text/image clues.
This lecture explores the workings of two parallel forms, the Jesuit emblem and the Catholic comic: how they draw us in with speech bubbles, create characters we learn to love, and point us in the right direction with aptly placed mottoes. But the Spiritual Optiks can also jump across from Catholic to Protestant, or, in the twentieth century, to Communist or even Nazi.
A case study, that of the role and portrayal of women in early modern theology and in the Ideal Homes of the 1950s, will show how these forms and their methods can gently undermine the message we might have expected… Before we ourselves become the characters in a metafictional ending that returns to Tintin and to Agatha Christie.
- What (Subjects):
- When (Centuries):
- Worldcat URL:
- Page Range:
- 253–272
- ISBN:
- 97809161016190916101614