A couple of years back I attended a Comicon for the first and only time. Though I love all the normie favs like Star Wars and the Marvel movies, I am at best a pretender in this Fandom space. I did not go to the granddaddy of them all in San Diego—the source and summit of all such events. I had to make do with an off-Broadway variety up here in the mid-tier Northeastern city a few miles up the road.
A trip to Mecca will have to wait.
Immediately upon entering the Dunkin Donuts Center I was struck by the absurdity of it all, then experienced an overwhelming sense of sadness. It has been unshakable. I was walking through the convention center with booths lined up and down the winding paths amidst a slew of semi-adults dressed up in all manner of costumes—(cosplay, as those in the know, know) and I knew I had wandered into an uncanny valley.
Mind you, it was not Halloween. This was a random Saturday, midday in mid-Winter. I saw Batmen and Bilbo's, with Leias and Hans, “cute” anime girls, multiple Spidermans (pre Metaverse and Spiderverse), and an assortment of vaguely medieval, vaguely Stripperverse maidens with ample bosoms and questionable backsides. Dang those tights were (unfortunately) tight.
At any rate, I am not the target audience, with my middle-aged dad fleece vest and scuffed Sperry’s. My kids were fans of many of the “things” but even they thought it was a bit odd to see all these “not kids” dressed up in half-assed costumes. “What were they doing?” I asked myself. “I mean, what kind of strange lab-leak is all of this dress-upery? Who let the freaks out?”
Then it hit me.
This is church.
The event is a kind of satellite event to the main shindig started all the way back in 1970. It has grown from its original instantiation. At some point in the 80’s it exploded. What is it like for Truefans to witness Luke Skywalker descend from that Galaxy “Far Far Away” and great and bless the mortals in a San Diego convention center? I daresay that if I had been to Mark Hamill’s original appearance, it would have been nothing short of “a religious experience.”
What do we mean by this curious phrase “religious experience” anyway, and why do so many look at Comicon in ways that go beyond mere entertainment? It is an event, something prepared for, and planned for months in advance. There are seasons and liturgies, outward and inward forms of devotion. I am left with yet another question: what is the difference between entertainment and religion?
The connection is more real than folks in either camp probably wish to admit.
So as I’m walking through the center and rebuffing all my kids’ requests for crap, I cannot get this church idea out of my head. I like many of these shows and movies, but I kept asking myself why they felt the need to gather in groups and dress up. But then I asked myself, why do I dress up, load the kids in the minivan and go to church, all dressed up”? Why do we gather in groups? What is accomplished by the magnetism of the tribe at prayer in a basilica or the tribe in costume at a convention center?
My friend Dan joked to me “Kale, everybody worships.” Of course, he was riffing on the famous “This is Water” speech given by David Foster Wallace to the graduating class at Kenyon College.
But Dan was right. Everybody worships.
I have often ruminated (and tweeted) on this simple truth, and I have added my own second axiom to it: Everybody Sacrifices.
Why we do this is difficult to nail down, but that we humans worship and sacrifice seems to be at the very heart of what makes humans human. That we can sacrifice might even create the very idea of the future, as Jordan Peterson has speculated. We sacrifice ourselves, we sacrifice our attention, our treasure, our present. We trade off proximate pleasure for ultimate gain. We build out what we could become by killing what we are now. And we do this together.
Personal sacrifice morphs into a communal game. As we become a rapidly secularized population—the so-called rise of the “nones”—we must admit that the underlying substrate of our religiosity still needs to “live out” in some real way. Religion is what we do, still. It is just that we have traded the outward forms of worship and sacrifice to an alleged “sky daddy” for movies and shows. This new pantheon killed off the prior order, not unlike the Olympian overthrow of the Titans.
The inner reality remains.
We crave communion and fellowship and these events provide opportunities for us, many who are now two and three generations removed from regular church-going. Much has been written on the rise of the nones (and now the “dones”) but does this mean we really have gone “post-religion?” We need to devote ourselves to something more than just ourselves. One can be a devoted follower of almost anything. To devote yourself to something is to live as if by vow. The object is (seemingly) immaterial.
The rise of Fandom would suggest that we live in perhaps the most religious of times. If “religio” is what “binds” us, and becomes what we pay attention to, or worship, or order ourselves by and towards, then Comicon qualifies. Naturally, The Simpson’s has seen the underneath of this trend before almost everyone, with the longstanding character “Comic Book Guy” and his Mecca-like trip to “Comicalooza.” The episode is called “Three Dreams Denied” and it warrants a deep-dive for a future post.
But his enthusiasm for the event, the hopes and dreams he invests into the experience is both funny and profoundly sad. He longs to be recognized by the priests of his tribes: the producers and directors of his favorite shows. He fails.
But the underlying point, couched in the satire the show, is a prophecy of sorts. We are all comic book guys now.
When I showed up at Comicon I was not expecting to crash someone’s church. I was a foreign visitor, an outsider in the great temple of sci-fi/fantasy. I was like a long absent “Christmas and Easter” Christian who shows and doesn’t quite know where to sit, how to stand, what to sing, and when to do it all. Just a bit awkward.
No one was mean, mind you, but I certainly felt the sneering contempt of the vast collection of Comic Book Guys, barely tolerating my kids’ questions, though all too eager to fleece us of our normie civilian cash for cheap plastic goods and posed pictures.
I do not begrudge Comicon enthusiasts their cosplay, their seriousness, nor their hustle for cash. But I think we dismiss the deeply religious orientation of our humanity. I think seeing this as a fundamentally religious exercise affords us an opportunity to look more seriously at religion. Real religion.
It is not that we no longer worship or sacrifice, it is that we have chosen—so many of us—to worship and sacrifice to unworthy and even frivolous gods.
Doing Church with Comic Book Guys and Gals
Jonathan Pageau talks about the power of narratives you can live in, that's essentially what cosplay is. You and Rod spoke awhile ago about the failure of New Atheism, this Comicon is a visible sign of why it failed, there was nowhere to go with their materialism, no way to build a narrative people could inhabit. Given the choice between being a random collection of atoms in a random universe, or being a misplaced wizard that never got his Hogwarts letter, folks will go for misplaced wizard 11/10 times.
Just yesterday I listened to Bishop Barron's interview with Tara Isabella Burton: https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/wordonfire-show/episode340/. Her book, "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World," studies this relationship between fandom and these new religions.
Bishop Barron tried to identify if there was any universal truth asserted by the churches of Harry Potter or of the Avengers. The answer seemed to be no. It's intriguing to me that activities like cosplay and composing fan fiction dovetail with the assertion that the only truth is to be found in our individual selves. Attending Comicalooza is a shared group experience, but each participant is dressed in a specific costume, almost declaring his own creed through his dress. Is it like some ecumenical conference of people who are worshiping their own mutually exclusive, rival gods? Or is the shared bit just some belief in narcissism, like toddlers who play in each other's company but don't actually engage each other?
Personally, I'm convinced that the popularity of the Marvel movies featuring Thor underlie the Defense Department's recent inclusion of Troth and Odinism (aka "Asatru") as valid religions for military personnel: https://dwp.dmdc.osd.mil/dwp/api/download?fileName=ushris_faith_belief_code_table.docx&groupName=milUSHRIS. (My son tells a great story about a friend who joined him at Mass on a carrier. The friend, after having happily attended several pagan rites, was bewildered and discomfited at the incense, the Latin Agnus Dei, and the kneeling. "You have one crazy religion!" he told my son.)