‘They’re True Stories? Yeah, No They’re Not’ Questions of Authenticity and Authority Raised by the Use of Comic Books to Represent Biblical Narratives in Religious Education

ABSTRACT

The affordances of the comic book medium facilitate individual, interpretive readings of narrative and as such challenge the notion of a single message or meaning. This article explores how secondary school students encounter and re-orientate themselves to personal concepts of religious and educational authority and authenticity as a consequence of reading a comic book biblical narrative in a Religious Education lesson. Through this encounter and dialogue with one another, they negotiate these concepts, the meanings of which are necessarily embedded in the social and are thus enabled to take a stance on competing truth claims. This article also considers the implications of rendering sacred texts as comic books.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious education (RE)
• comic books
• authority
• authenticity
• secondary education
• interpretation
• the Good Samaritan
• Bible

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to my supervisors Jo Pearce and John Yandell for their ongoing support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used throughout for students’ names. Both students and their parents/carers had given consent for this research to take place.

2. Aside from three comics, in the Key Stage 3 RE curriculum of this school, only monotextual religious narratives are used.

3. Smith, Nixon, and Pearce (2018) describe this approach as ‘non-essentialised’; however, I instead prefer the term ‘de-essentialised’ to signify conscious efforts on the part of myself and colleagues to teach a version of RE that deliberately challenges and differentiates itself from essentialist approaches.

4. A recurring feature of comic book Bibles is that they rarely reference their source text/s. The two multiple-volume exceptions to this are A Light in the Darkness (2014) and The Third Day (2014) both by Webb-Peploe and Parker and limiting themselves to the NIV version of the Gospel of Luke and the ongoing work of Simon Amadeus Pillario (The Book of Judges: Word for Word Bible Comic (2016), The Book of Ruth (2016), Gospel of Mark (2018) and the forthcoming crowd-funded The Book of Esther). His work is illustrated in a conscious effort to be as historically accurate as possible as well as keep every word from the source text (World English Bible). Those that do not make references clear are a source of irritation for researchers like myself as it is unclear if the comic creators have knowledge of different translations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rae Hancock

Rae Hancock teaches Religious Education in an English secondary school and is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research examines the place of comic books as disruptors of meaning-making in the RE classroom.