I'd disagree about no serious crossover between occultism and comics. From my own experience, a significant amount of younger occultists are comic fans and vice versa.
There's actually a long history of crossover between the occult and even mainstream comics - for instance: the use of Tarot in 1970s and 1980s series like The Spectre and The Phantom Stranger (esp. the recent revival of the Madame Xanadu series). Marvel recently did a very researched series based on the Tarot and the Vertigo work from the early 90s, especially Gaiman, Morrison, Rachel Pollack (who is another comic writer who's also a serious occultist), and of course Moore's Swamp Thing and the Hellblazer series which was often well-researched. And yes, Moore and Morrison are self-proclaimed practitioners while Gaiman and Ellis are knowledgeable, but are not practitioners. With Moore and Morrison, however, the line between superhero mashup and occult philosophy gets pretty thin.
btw, I've been writing about Moore and Morrison for a while now and my collaboration with Christine Kraemer on Promethea as a magickal primer is in the forthcoming, Graven Images: Religion in Comics. One of our points is how practitioners have actually trumpeted Moore's Promethea as a magickal training manual.
Also, for people in the industry, 'graphic novel' is often differentiated to mean a complete full-length story within the graphic medium, as opposed to trade paperbacks that simply collect issues in a series. There's some wiggle room - for instance, Moore's Watchmen was originally issued as a 12 issue miniseries, but when collected, was called a graphic novel, and that's how most people encounter it. But graphic novels can be about superheroes or other subjects. For instance, Blankets, about a young man's religious upbringing, is a graphic novel with nary a superhero, sword, or gun to be seen.
From: LAITY, KATHRYN <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] A Graphic Novel'ization of Jack Parsons' Biography
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sunday, May 16, 2010, 3:58 PM
I have not heard of Ellis and Morrison actually practising magic. Moore is indeed more western trad than chaos (in fact has a certain dislike of most chaos magicians). The Bumper Book of Magic is a collaboration between Moore and Stephen Moore (no relation).
There are a lot of problems with the “graphic novel” terminology (doubtless beyond the scope of this group’s interest). Superheroes are just one genre of comics. Although both comics and magic are marginalised, I don’t know that there’s much cross-over at all of serious interest in magic. Moore’s work isn’t much at all like Doctor Strange etc.
Of possible interest to some: there is a conference on the work of Moore the end of the month at the University of Northampton. I’ll be there talking about ritual. Moore will be there as well.
Kate
On 5/16/10
3:58 AM, "David Robertson" <[log in to unmask]> corresponded:
Moore is arguably the most committed magician, but his interest lies in the Golden Dawn tradition, rather than Chaos. He is currently collaborating with a large variety of artists to produce a modern grimoire. His "Promethea" uses the Wonder Woman archetype to explore the GD system of Kabbalah - and it works better than you probably imagine. The use of both image and text is able to transmit the information in a way that is more readable and concise than words alone. "A Disease of Language" contains a long interview where he expounds his theory of magic, which is essentially the use of the creative imagination.
I would be wary, however, of differentiating between "modern
graphic novels" and "traditional superhero comics" - the difference is largely one of legitimisation. The term "graphic novel" was coined to sell collections of comics to people who assumed that "comics" were nothing but simplistic superhero stories. Specifically, Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series (not directly concerned with magic, but with a magical mood concerning worlds of imagination and stories becoming real) appealed to young women, and DC comics discovered that "graphic novels" would sell to different markets than the trade comic book market. But the material is the same - all of the works mentioned were monthly comics first, and collected later.
But Austin's idea of comics as an "alterna-culture marker" is interesting. Perhaps another way of describing it is to say that comics and magic are both culturally liminal, and therefore there is a
large crossover between the two fields.
David
----- Original Message -----
From: austin <[log in to unmask]" target=_blank rel=nofollow ymailto="mailto:[log in to unmask]">mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, May 15, 2010 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] A Graphic Novel'ization of Jack Parsons' Biography
On the contrary, I rather think this will do pretty well for being such a niche publication. There is incredible overlap between comics and the occult since the late 1980's; some of the biggest names in comics like Alan Moore, Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison are practicing magicians (primarily
super-modern Chaos stuff). Indeed, Morrison's series "The Invisibles" is purportedly an elaborate hypersigil. In my own experience comics readers are much more likely to be open to non-traditional realities than readers of other kinds of fiction including fantasy; I'd theorize (admittedly without much research) that modern graphic novels (as opposed to traditional superhero comics) have become more of an alterna-culture marker, which in turn attracts people with nontraditional mindsets.
~Austin Mullen
Undergraduate, University of Iowa
---
Virginia Woolf in 10 seconds:
Life is beautiful and tragic. Let's put flowers in a vase.
On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 4:32 PM, David Metcalfe <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
An interesting experiment in historical occult fiction - The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons ( http://www.webcomicsnation.com/rscarbonneau/parsons/series.php ), is now in print.
Some more info on it: http://www.zedura.com/?p=150
Looks like the author, Richard Carbonneau, has violated all the rules here, comics industry hates web comics, fiction fans aren't too into the occult and occultists aren't necessarily drawn to comics. He's done a good job of researching the subject though, and it looks like an interesting addition to scholarship on Parsons, despite it's graphic novel format.
- David
M.
--
K. A. Laity
Associate Professor of English
Coordinator, Women’s and Gender Studies Program
The College of Saint Rose
432 Western Avenue
Albany NY 12203
[log in to unmask]
http://academic2.strose.edu/Arts_and_Humanities/laityk
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