What is your favorite depiction of "God" in comics? Does it resonate with you in any way?
What is your favorite depiction of "God" in comics? Does it resonate with you in any way?
What is your favorite depiction of "God" in comics? Does it resonate with you in any way?
Is Preacher comic any good?
I read Ennis works, and it varies greatly, from pretty good (Punisher, Fury) to "frick this shit" (Boys)
It's Boys-tier honestly. The plot meanders for much of the run and has a terrible case of FRANKface.
Yeah, it's not plotgay-friendly. It doesn't acquire Frankface until near the end, though. Dillon's art is top-tier for most of it.
That's a great one.
I like that one, but this is the first one that comes to mind.
I love it. Preacher and Hitman are my favorites of his. I also like his Punisher and Fury a lot.
You read edgo’s work?
The only thing Ennis has ever done that surpasses decent is his Punisher.
Preacher, Hitman, Punisher MAX, and Fury: My War Gone By are all great.
I didn't read those so they can't be all that good.
>Custer lets himself be killed to release Genesis, God returns to Heaven, where the Saint has slaughtered all of the angels. Despite God's attempts to intimidate the Saint with His wrath and then offering to restore his family to life, the Saint guns Him down, ending His tyranny. With no one left to kill anymore, the Saint sits upon God's Throne and returns to sleep as the world is bathed in peace.
Sounds awful
>just reading the summary
>God is le evil
>Bunch of obnoxious butthole people want to kill him
Wow, it's shit
Is there anything to indicate that there's more to this depiction than just being an butthole god like in SMT?
Zoomer moment, innit?
I dunno, I read it and that seems accurate to me.
You're dumb.
I had a suspicion that people that spend time hating shit for years never actually read the thing they supposedly hate.
I don't want to read that since it sounds just awful.
welcome to the youtube review generation.
People refusing to engage in certain media because of a summary, blurb, or review has been a thing for literal centuries. Don't pretend like you've actually read , watched, played, or listened to everything you dislike.
I'm so atheist I make Dawkins look like the pope...and this is still a moronic ending.
>I'm so atheist
Opinion disregarded.
It's good, not Ennis's magnum opus though. I like The Saint of Killers.
Marvel's Hercules, specifically, Marvel's Hercules at the end of Chaos War
been a long time but it just goes on too long and leans too heavily into cartoonish villains
it's kind of like two different comics happening simultaneously, with wildly different tones
It's great except for Tall in the Saddle, a one-shot.
I like that.
I haven't read it because I'm a christian and wouldn't enjoy it but of what I know of it and Ennis's work is he's great at character writing and emotionally satisfying endings. Preacher is by some considered his magnum opus so if you are cool with blasphemy it should be a good read.
It's alright, Hitman is still the best of the three I've read (Hitman, Preacher, Boys)
It's the Source for me, that whole flashback with Izaya is top notch
It has highs and lows, if you're not a fan of Dillon's art of lowbrow humor you probably won't like it. It's generally better than the Boys but it's in the same territory so make of that as you will.
>Jesus was a selfish jerk that faked his sacrefice because his dad was also a jerk
>don't ask why there was a prophecy of Jesus' arrival and suffering
>don't ask why Jesus has arrived
It's shallow edgy wank of an atheist that will never criticize anything but Christianity.
Every single time they go with Judaism with Christian symbolism. Jesus is glossed over, nobody tries to understand Holy Trinity, nobody brings up that thrones alongside God are promised for humans (though this one is the Church's fault, because it sucks at promoting Heaven).
Trips of trivia! An inverted number of the beast! Does that mean God?
For me, I really like what the lawcomic did with Yahweh, It'd be great if he gets to your Jesus stuff, trinity, and heresies and all that, but he probably won't. Like you say, it's always glossed over.
Pic related is from his amazing history of how the Hebrews "invented monotheism, and law as we know it, entirely by accident." And though he doesn't admit it, it's also the story of how the birth of Judaism was the birth of anti-semitism (don't tell /misc/, he doesn't deserve to be raided).
I'd storytime it if this was the time or the place, but it begins around here-ish: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=7090
>https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=7090
A fictional character. Nathan went there.
I guarantee that lawyer made no friends at shul that shabbos.
Feels like it loses steam after Arizona for a while, the characters wandering aimlessly before slowly regrouping to actually resolve the ending. I like the ending though.
it's woke by today's standards
Come to think of it I cant recall a single comic god that resonated with me. Just lots of hot air
Every time I see Galactus I think about how Lee's pitch for Jack was "Have them fight god"
I wonder how it'd be like if Galactus was in fact the Marvel Universe's God.
I expected a comic sympathetic to Lucifer to portray God as a colossal dick with zero redeeming qualities (not unlike Preacher), and was pleasantly surprised
It also had my favorite interpretation of Lucifer. Being the fountainhead of Will in creation, Lucifer craves nothing less than total liberation at all costs. It becomes his sole guiding principle, because he abhors the idea of being a mere 'limb' of his creator. There's a nice conversation where God basically tells him, "Look man, I don't know what you want from me. You can't be your own creator. Even I don't know from whence I emerged." God eventually grants him his wish by allowing him to leave creation. It's left unknown as to whether this results in his freedom, destruction, or both.
>Chesterton
>not a colossal dick with zero redeeming qualities
He was colossal alright but not sure about the rest of the statement.
Hi Mencken.
Pr*testant scum
>what if women with big boobs and call of duty and badass giant guns and bad words and God but FRICK God
Why the frick did Ennis never emotionally mature beyond edgy 12 year old mentality
There's also DAVE.
Not sure what you're describing there, but that's not Ennis.
>Not sure what you're describing there, but that's not Ennis.
Cope
Allow me to rephrase
>what if wieners are chopped off and war is hell but soldiers are cool but war is unjust but also war is the only thing that makes a man a man and also dicks getting shot off and violence is always the answer but it's ugly but as the world is also ugly then violence IS the only answer and what makes a man BE a man and dicks being torn off and frick gays but wait a respect gays but frick them and god I love hardcore soldiers
I like the idea of the writer being god, especially the ones that deserve the spot like Kirby.
This might be my favorite.
Didn't the comic imply he lacked free will?
implied everyone lacked free will, but he’s the only one aware of it
A god lacking free will is a weird concept
>A god lacking free will is a weird concept
Not really. Free will is a function of the human response to the passage of time. A being outside of time can't change its mind because it implies a before and after state, implying linearity.
>A being outside of time can't change its mind because it implies a before and after state, implying linearity.
A true God does not need to follow that logic and can do anything, and so can change one's mind anytime if one wants.
Yeah but changing one's mind also implies that it could go from having an incorrect thought to an incorrect thought, or vice versa. That's not very godlike.
I feel like if something exists outside of time then they only exist out of time from the perspective of those "in" time. Like there's more "time" somewhere else that they'd exist in.
Bubbles within bubbles is the best way I can envision it being like.
Gods being subject to fate and unable to change it is present in both Greco-Roman and Norse-Germanic polytheism, anon. Not a weird concept at all.
boy that is a really shit GL costume for Hal
Yeah, he's not really God, but there are many reasons for the label in the comic. On top of all the things said, he wears what is essentially a god symbol on his forehead.
No. Since he could SEE time, he was aware of how everything he is present for happens. There are still limitations to this, though. He specifically comes back to Earth because he has an epiphany about Laurie being unique and therefore, worth saving; something he specifically states as "changing his mind" Tachyons have to actually be stable for him to do so.
Him insisting that everyone's a puppet, but he can see the strings is literally him coping with the ability to see where all of his actions lead to.
>god symbol
It's literally a simplified hydrogen atom.
>It's literally a simplified hydrogen atom.
It's also a third eye, a watch with no hands, a doomsday clock fixed at midnight, and it also sort of looks like the alchemical symbol for the sun, which is then attributed to Apollo.
Metacontextually, it's those things, but Jon literally burned the simplest representation of an atom on his head because it's the only symbol he believes in.
Its obviously the earth with the moon orbiting it.
It's an eyeball with an eyelash stuck
if you can see the past then the past has already happened, which means if you travel to the past, then either you were predestined to do that and had no choice in the matter - because you already did from your future perspective - or you're not in the past, but in a parallel universe created by your arrival (which depends on I think it's superstring theory being correct, or whatever superstring has since become, because otherwise it significantly breaks the laws of thermodynamics)
you can't go back and do things differently because that's a paradox (going back at all is a huge paradox but this is even worse because it's not just irrational but irreconcilable with leading to a future in which you travel back to the past; there has to be a specific YOU and a specific TIME MACHINE or, even if it leads to basically the same future, the alternate you may arrive in a different space and time, even off by a few meters or minutes would mean that they created a different you as well; eventually you have Dark Fate terminators coming back every five minutes because they all invent time travel and all have specific futures to preserve, but you in the past still don't have free will, and depending on who arrives last even separate alternate futures don't have free will)
theologically speaking there's some question as to whether a god which has free will can truly be infinite in power and action, since if all things are possible for a god then that god by definition must do all things, but again, that's a mess and not really worth engaging with
>since if all things are possible for a god then that god by definition must do all things
That does not follow.
It's not that Manhattan lacks free will, it's that he fully knows exactly what his future actions are (at least, future from our perspective). Think of it like an actor playing a role. He knows everything that's going to happen in the script because he's read it, but in the present moment he acts according to what the script says and, to him, it feels like there's no free will because he already knows what he does and what will happen as a result for every single action he makes.
Where it gets tricker is when Manhattan brings up and relies upon his knowledge of the future. Like pic related: he mentions that he knows Laurie has started a romance with Dan, because in a few minutes she implicitly tells him. Then, in a couple pages, when Laurie casually refers to Dan as her lover (saying it off-handedly since Manhattan already brought up that he knows), Manhattan is surprised by the news because this is the moment where he actually gets that information. He's still beholden to acting in a linear, causal way, but with the knowledge/experience of every single decision he makes already laid out to him. He makes choices of his own will, but his own personal perception of these choices is irrevocably hampered by the fact he already knows what those choices are even though he still has to make them every time, and that sometimes he'll make a choice dependent on his knowledge of that choice or another, future choice or piece of information.
It's deliberately paradoxical, and it's meant to be hard to wrap your head around. The reader is kind of supposed to just accept they probably aren't going to get it. Moore's smartest move in Watchmen is that he keeps Manhattan out of the plot until the very end, because it'd be impossible to craft a mystery with an omniscient character directly involved. Manhattan leaving is the real starting point of Ozy's plan, and he only returns when there's nothing he can do to affect it.
I could never see Manhattan as someone who (without tachyon interference) has full understanding of the script. The achronological order of his narrations makes it feel like there is a set order to his experiences instead of getting everything all at once. To go back to the actor analogy, it seems like the equivalent of getting fed pages of the script in a random order and acting out the scenes as they are received
if your gigabrain can process itself and the world until it's as simple as a game of chess, the illusion of freewill becomes an illusion of determinism
and the human ego naturally conceals itself behind layers of perspective and conscious and unconscious thought to keep up its illusions
the non-language side of the brain literally speaks behind your back
if you remove all those curtains your human condition won't last and the meaning of the world and time will change as well
seeing him in the process of change was interesting
I like the cowboy version in Umbrella Academy
Only if a character calls him out as a non European god unworthy of worship by White people.
>being a Larpagan
Good goy
God from Second Coming is the only one that comes to mind. I don't really get anything profound out of him, but I find him to be a very entertaining character.
The Conductor.
i have no favorite versions of god, but mike carey's lucifer is the best iteration of lucifer
any time comics have god or heaven as a backdrop to the setting it's always a disappointment. Mike Carey's Lucifer and Neil Gaiman's Sandman are the only exceptions to this rule for me
>What is your favorite depiction of "God" in comics?
Pic unrelated I hope
Jack Kirby
Neat idea but shit ass "beat."
>rip the guy off
>deify him after he dies
Real smooth, Marvel.
Would this make Stan Lee the Devil?
no, why would it? are you stupid?
I mean he kind of is but in a cool way.
this was one of my first comicbooks and hulk comicbooks
I read this one in early 2003. Here in my country they started to re-release hulk comicbooks really cheap.
one of my favourite issues ever EVER.
I thought it was sorta implied in that very comic when he mentions his "partner"
I will never not find it funny that Mr. Fantastic is an atheist despite having personally met God.
Mr Fantastic's not an atheist.
>God is bad because I have to pay rent and student loans
why are american comics like this?
The writers suffered from a disease called moronation
The Presence without the big hand.
Not exactly a comic but
best futurama episode
Honestly that episode gave me a spark of hope whenever I second guess taking chances. I mean, you want to think there is some malevolent force behind your every action in life, but also that is stupid and is a placebo for people to have blind faith in whatever they decide to do in life. Even if you think yourself an atheist.
>"You know, I was God once."
>"Yes, I saw. You were doing pretty well until everyone died."
Red dwarf did a similar episode that accidentally was pro-faith when it wasn’t supposed to be. Kryten The robot tells the living universe aka god you created love. That alone gives existence meaning and god handwork wasn’t in vain even when humans destroyed themselves. Life found away to carry on.
I liked TOAA's appearance in the last issue of Immortal Hulk
Wait, Immortal Hulk was about Hulk being the method by which God brings destruction so that things may be rebuilt?
No, the story's ultimate villain, The One Below All, was revealed to be basically TOAA's own "Hulk" - the counterpart of destruction to TOAA's creation, the reflection of TOAA's capacity for rage and violence as much as compassion and mercy. It was basically a teachable moment for Hulk that creation and destruction are ultimately conscious choices and not innate to anyone's nature, and it's entirely up to him to choose a merciful path instead of a destructive one.
Huh. Neat.
I don't like TOAA having his own Great Evil Beast, it does not fit Marvel cosmology at all, it's Marvel clearly taking an old DC concept and trying to make it "more fun" and "marketable" like they used to do in the Silver Age.
And now as always DC realized that and are desperately trying to use the The Great Evil Beast again after 40 years of doing nothing with him, I swear If Marvel didn't write a Superman clone story every couple of years about how Iconic he is DC would have dropped Superman years ago.
Is the Preacher live-action adaptation worth watching?
Meh. It starts alright and it's entertaining for a bit. But they're so. fricking. slow.
It isn't faithful enough.
Eh. Just eh? I like the actor for Cassidy.
>Cassidy
He did nothing wrong, btw, but don't tell normies that.
Autism check.
If you get it, you're in the clear. 1/3
2/3
3/3
So anon, do you get it?
Help me out here, anon. Did the woman knock that guy's tooth out? Where'd he get the hair?
You dumb shit, the guy getting ditched is killing the woman and the dog, and placing his guilt on the imaginary bald guy.
Alright, so what's the deal with the guy with the cigarette?
yeah sure I've seen Twin Peaks
I'm cheating a little here, but at the same time I'm not.
In Judas, by Jeff Loveness, God is portrayed as unsure if he can go through with the "sacrifice your only begotten son" part.
He'd tested it out with Abraham and decided that yes, he can do it, but sending him down into Hell with the weight of all the sins of man on his shoulders is a bit tougher.
So he decides he won't send Jesus down there alone. But there's only one way into hell. You have to be Damned.
And God, as Jesus, asks his friend Judas to forgive him for making him play his part in the Crucifixion.
I don't know his the guy that wrote MODOK the way he did could make this, but it's legitimately great, perfect around Easter.
Genuinely love the Uni-Friend for its simplicity and straightforwardness, honestly. Just a higher power that exists to basically give narrative exposition and frickall else, piss easy to draw, always looks good, ambiguous enough to not have any specific religious implication.
Infinity Man from the forever people reboot also gets points for being messianic captain planet and I wish we had explored that premise a little better.
What did you think about his portrayal in Bug! The Adventures of Forager?
A little wordy and up its own ass with philosophy 101 like the rest of the book (also sister entity being a weeb filled me with dread) but overall not offensively so.
Oh damn, now that weird digital hand in Final Crisis makes a bit of sense.
Kinda.
At least I know it's a reference now.
Note that having God declare man will "know evil" is an inversion of Genesis and can be read as an undoing of original sin, where man is punished for attempting to eat the Fruit of Knowledge (of Good and Evil).
What other writers are similar to Garth Ennis?
Brubaker, Azzarello, Mills, Ellis...
Not really.
hellblazer. iirc hes just a shepard
The first time he attempted to shock people.
This run gets shit on a lot of the time, but I really enjoyed it.
I really like how Gaiman portrays God in his stories. Someone who is fundamentally good, but is willing to allow great suffering in furtherance of some kind of unknowable plan.
>but is willing to allow great suffering in furtherance of some kind of unknowable plan
Everything was spelled out in the Bible. God wants people worthy of being promoted above all the angels, so He created a world where worthiness can be demonstrated, so angels wouldn't see said promotion as unjust.
Gaiman doesn't grasp it, so he makes Lucifer an rebel instead of realizing that Satan literally means the Accuser. He is the angel that argues against having any human above himself.
He even had Morpheus asking Shakespeare to write a story about a supernatural being becoming human, despite Jesus having done exactly that.
>Gaiman doesn't grasp it, so he makes Lucifer an rebel
Pretty sure he was just drawing on how Lucifer has been portrayed in literature for several centuries, rather than falling to grasp your personal theology.
>he went with the fanfiction like Dante's stuff instead the original story
I know.
It's not real.
Satan and THE Satan are two separate beings.
Satan the Devil is the Christian adversary of God and is completely barred from heaven.
The Satan is an angel who's job it is to point out people for God to test.
Jesus called Peter a Satan for tempting him into not dying on the cross. Satan tempted Jesus on the desert Jesus also said in Luke that Satan has demanded to test the Apostoles, right after telling them about thrones alongside His. Jesus also said He saw Satan falling from the sky, which has been recognized as a reference to the Morning Star/Lucifer passage of Isaiah.
They are the same character. An angel arguing against humans, as we've seen it in Job, who ended up rebelling against God. God still keeps him on the lash and allows him to come up with tests (that only happen with God's approval) and accusations, for the sake of fairness.
Satan rebelling from God is a wholly post-biblical narrative to give more importance to a pre-existing Adversarial character. Early Christians primarily came from faiths where there was a bad-guy deity, so the angel whose job it was to challenge humanity's faith got upgraded to be the source of all evil.
It is a common name among angels.
>Everything was spelled out in the Bible. God wants people worthy of being promoted above all the angels, so He created a world where worthiness can be demonstrated, so angels wouldn't see said promotion as unjust.
This is not at all spelled out in the bible.
Did God ever appear in Spawn or Ghost Rider?
I liked preacher's simple concept of god being a love parasite. He had his angels designed to love him but it wasn't enough, he needed a new creation with free will so that it could choose to love him because it was the right thing to do.
I think that's serviceable for a god-type villain, but he was too one-note and non-threatening compared to everything else going on.
I've always liked the idea of it still being the 7th Day and God has just assumed that humanity would have figured itself out by now.
My favorite version of Death visually is from Dawn.
A bit ostentatious for my liking.
I dig it in edgy 90's goth kinda way.
Im partial to god-dog
nice choice
?si=gU2xjMHQ98GbmrQo
>I AM THAT I AM
I love depictions of god being a hands off entity that just kinda lets things happen because of the free will aspect that has bestowed upon humanity.
That and Gnostic depictions where god is the Demiurge..
It's not a comicbook, but I believe the most accurate portayal of God is in Faith: Unholy Trinity, a indie game series.
God shows up only once, doesn't need to even introduce himself, there's no debate with the protagonist, no depiction of His image, no fluff.
Just the protag praying desperately to be saved from real demons. And God answers like often does, in my own experience:
>"Please give me X, please tell me how I can get X?"
>You know what to do
>Do it
>You have already been blessed
>Now help others
It's forgiveness and mercy, wrapped in a not so much a commandment, but a statement.
You have every thing you need, God has and will help you with the rest, but you still have to go out and continue to try. Continue to spread the glory. Keep the faith up, and pray for more when you can't.
>The being that centuries of wise men written and spoke about ans has positvely influenced the lives of billions of people is the bad guy but the good guy is some protagonist made by some modernist edgelord who thinks smoking and swearing makes a character cool.
Writers today are so arrogant, evil and prideful.
Frick off moron. Religion has been flinging shit at each other's creators deities for millenias.
A non-real being that wise men have projected their infinite lack of understanding onto and in whose name evil men have committed heinous acts of cruelty and debauchery for centuries.
It's very likely a net negative at this point.
The actual problem is that a lot of humans are just dicks, regardless of whether they believe, don't believe, or pretend to believe in sky wizard.
(Me)
I just woke up with a warning for violating GR15. I can't tell if the mod was just being lazy or intentionally abusing their power.