We need to refrain from unthinkingly grafting our own versions of history, biography, time, space, and religious experiences onto an entirely different world. As students of religion, we need to be more careful when attempting to understand Tibetan literature. Samuel’s summary of our struggles with understanding Tibetan history is illuminating in its simplicity: it points out the obvious. They are not part of a world based on such sequences” (1993, 296). As the anthropologist Geoffrey Samuel (1946–) explains in Civilized Shamans: “Constantly reincarnating do not fit comfortably into a linear historical sequence, but there is no reason why they should.
Tibetan Buddhists live in a cosmology and maintain a worldview that cannot be easily fit into the standard Western definitions of scientific materialism. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages analyze how comics communicate such messages place the religious messages contained in comic books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks and articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics. In essays by scholars and comics creators, Graven Images observes the frequency with which religious material-in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts-occurs in both independent and mainstream comics.
Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, Graven Images explores the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels.
Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics’ unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought.
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