Can you name Superman’s religious affiliation?  How about Hellboy’s?  Is anyone surprised to learn that Lex Luthor is portrayed, at least in one of his many incarnations, as a “Nietzschean atheist?” Adherents.com has an alternately comprehensive/tenuous listing of super heroes, sidekicks and villains and their religions.  If, like me, you’re into comics and religion (get a life!), this is a wellspring of conversation (and possible heated debates).

While religion didn’t dominate the comics of the 80s that I grew up on, the writers of my favorite monthlies made religion an important part of the back story.  My high school crush, Kitty Pride (aka Shadowcat of the X-men), was Jewish, Nightcrawler was a devout German Catholic, and Wolverine (characteristically) refused to be nailed down–at times he was a Western atheist, at others he flirted with Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism.  The comics I read now confront Christian cultural tradition head on, drawing on the rich heritage to spin new stories.  John Constantine, the magic-wielding humanist, struggles against the powers of heaven and hell; Spawn, an atheist resurrected by a demon of hell to become a lieutenant in Hell’s army (who subsequently rebels against this role); Hellboy, the demon child rescued from hell and who is raised to become a devout Catholic.  Neil Gaiman’s worlds are populated with Biblical and apocryphal characters.

Comics are an incredible venue for exploring religion.  Arguably, our age’s greatest mythical heroes were born in these cheap, colorful pages.  Artists and writers regularly co-opt religious symbolism and stories and refashion them to serve their own storytelling purposes (thus continuing what storytellers have been doing for millennia).  Finally, for all of their incredible powers or strange circumstances, the best written characters struggle with the humanizing issues of tradition and individualism, of faith and doubt.