American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion ― The Superhero Afterlife

Just as often as superheroes journey into the afterlife, they also return from it. Their surprising immortality has created its own set of storytelling rules and expectations; it also has come to influence their secular readership in new interreligious investigations of narrative character and personal selfhood. Unlocking a new and overdue model for reading comic books, this unique volume explores religious interpretations of popular comic book superheroes such as the Green Lantern and the Hulk. A. David Lewis argues that the superhero subgenre offers a hermeneutic for those interested in integrating mutiplicity into religious practices and considerations of the afterlife.

A. David Lewis holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University, USA. He is the co-editor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age. He is also a graphic novelist and founding member of Sacred & Sequential.