To annoy and confuse…
Does religion make comic books better and more specifically does it make Neil Gaimans, the sandman better?
At first glance(and as I had stated in a previous post) it might seem that the motives of the author, in this case Neil Gaiman, would be an important thing to consider. However, another way to look at this would be to analyse the “readers” motives. Why is the reader even reading this comic in the first place?
Is the reader aware that the comic contains religious content?
Does the reader have any previous knowledge of religion?
A logical assumption to make is that a person with religious knowledge has already formed their own opinions that will be difficult if not impossible to change.
If we ask these questions, the following scenarios will occur.
- The reader has religious knowledge and are reading this comic because they know it has religious references.
- The reader has religious knowledge and does not know that this comic contains religious references.
- The reader has no knowledge of religion and does not know that this comic contains religious references.
- The reader has no knowledge of religion and knows that this comic contains religious references.
Here are the outcomes of the corresponding scenarios.
- The readers religious beliefs are possibly what has driven them to read this comic. They will read the comic and could agree with what has been said, not learn anything and therefore have wasted their time reading the comic. If they do not agree with the content, they will be annoyed for having wasted their time reading this comic. anyway
- The reader has already read religious material causing them to form their own beliefs. They are blindsided by the religious content in the comic and annoyed for having to read religious material that may disagree with their beliefs that they did not chose to read.
- Since the reader knows nothing about religion and is not aware they are going to be reading religious content in the comic, they will miss the point completely rendering it pointless and thus wasting the readers time.
- The reader will read this comic with no previous religious knowledge and is reading this comic in order to learn something about religion. The reader will only know what the comic has told them and will be misinformed about religion.
All four of these outcomes demonstrate that religion does not belong in comics since it will only annoy or confuse the reader, depending on their intentions/previous knowledge.
Yeah I found that I was really confused because I didn’t know things about religion when I first started out. I would have been annoyed and just left it at that if I weren’t reading the Sandman and learning about religion as I went along because it was required for the project.
Interesting post, loved the decisiveness. I can see where you are going with this and to some extent I agree. I must disagree though with #3 outcome.
In response to your #3 scenario, you stated as the outcome to #3 “Since the reader knows nothing about religion and is not aware they are going to be reading religious content in the comic, they will miss the point completely rendering it pointless and thus wasting the readers time.”.
I disagree because what if they find their own interpretation of what’s happening and simply enjoy the experience. I think it is absolutist to assume the reader’s time will be wasted. Furthermore, can we assume there is even a point to the Sandman aside from it being freely interpretable art?