Thinking Outside the Panel: Rewriting Rebekah in R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis
The rise in popularity of comic book Bibles has brought with it the opportunity to interrogate, challenge, reframe and reimagine difficult aspects of sacred scripture through text-image retellings. By their nature and format, comic books are uncontrollable vehicles of cultural expression, and in the...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
De Gruyter
2020
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| In: |
Open theology
Year: 2020, Volume: 6, Issue: 1, Pages: 557-571 |
| Further subjects: | B
Rebekah
B visual criticism B Genesis B Comic Books B Reception History |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The rise in popularity of comic book Bibles has brought with it the opportunity to interrogate, challenge, reframe and reimagine difficult aspects of sacred scripture through text-image retellings. By their nature and format, comic books are uncontrollable vehicles of cultural expression, and in the case of biblical comic books, religious expression. As such, they can offer retellings of biblical narratives which challenge established practices of biblical interpretation normally rooted in patriarchal and conservative ideologies and may open the text up to more creative interpretations which are not restrained by those traditional approaches of reading the Bible. This article considers R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb (2009) as a case study which focuses on the character of Rebekah (Gen. 24:15-67 and 25:19-28), demonstrating how the combination of text and image acts as a commentary to the biblical narrative as well as reframing Rebekah as a matriarchal leader, a move which is not reflected in the words but is depicted through accompanying images. The case study demonstrates how biblical comic books can move beyond the constraints of traditional biblical scholarship to reinterpret characters and stories from perspectives previously unvisited. |
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| ISSN: | 2300-6579 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Open theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1515/opth-2020-0135 |