504 RELIGION IN COMICS
Spiegelman’s own epic Holocaust memoir Maus , one chapter of which was included
as a small-format supplement in each issue from #2 onward.
With the 1986 publication of the fi rst volume of Maus by Pantheon Books,
Spiegelman and Mouly began their partnership with commercial publishers. Since 1982,
RAW had released a series of “ RAW One-Shots,” stand-alone forerunners of today’s
graphic novels, featuring individual magazine contributors such as Panter, Sue Coe, and
Jerry Moriarty. Pantheon and later Penguin continued this series, but Spiegelman and
Mouly lost some of their creative control as they had to conform to industry production
standards. Pantheon’s reprinting of material from the fi rst three issues of RAW in Read
Yo u r s e l f R a w (1987) brought a retrospective note to the magazine, but RAW itself was
revived by Penguin in 1989 after a three-year hiatus. Even with Spiegelman and Mouly
at the helm, RAW was a very diff erent magazine under Penguin. Most important, it
became Maus -sized, reduced to a digest format, but it grew in length to 200 pages,
allowing it to show more work by more artists and reorienting it towards extended nar-
ratives. Despite RAW ’s expansion and its mainstream distribution, it ended its run in
1991 after three issues with Penguin and the publication of volume two of Maus. By
that time, though, RAW had fulfi lled its mission of bringing together like-minded cre-
ators to show what was possible in making and publishing comics and validated their
work as part of commercial culture.
Selected Bibliography: Kartalopoulos, Bill. “A RAW History: Part One” and “A
RAW History: Part Two.” Indy Magazine (Winter 2005), http://www.indyworld.
com/indy/; Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art.
London: Phaidon, 1996; Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise Mouly, eds. Read Yourself
Raw. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987; Witek, Joseph, ed. Art Spiegelman: Conversa-
tions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Michael W. Hancock
RED SON. See Superman: Red Son
RELIGION IN COMICS. Religion is frequently a topic of comics, whether it involves
the traditional organized faiths or goes beyond those to encompass a broader view
of religion. As represented in comics, religion frequently extends beyond recognized
modern institutions into the realms of myth, the supernatural, allegory, and outright
fi ction. Th ough only overt in select cases, the interaction between comics and religion is
quite multifaceted. Comics have served as the medium for religious narrative, religious
commentary, religious expression, pro-religious material, anti-religious sentiment, or
simply for spiritual subtext. Conversely, comics have been used as the tool of religious
organizations, creators, seekers, or critics. Given the plasticity of their dealings, comics
and religion need to be considered separately fi rst in order to assess the larger picture.
Creators’ religions have been a frequent topic of academic and journalistic attention.
Much, for example, has been made of the fact that a surprisingly large number of the
