Spire Christian Comics

I can think of no better place to begin trying to make sense of the roots of contemporary North American fundamentalism than these comics (mostly from the 70s but also early 80s). They are posted here as PDFs, courtesy of Spire Christian Comics. Campy to the extreme, the work is almost single-handedly that of one man, Christian comics pioneer Al Hartley.

Highlights include black men speaking in a clearly white man's, stilted jive. Born again Johnny Cash as a title character. Archie Andrews and the Gang are recast as Evangelical proselytizers. Meanwhile, Archie's traditional foils, the teachers, in a particularly dark recasting of the traditional Riverdale universe, make cameos as murderous Nazis and maniacal scientists.

Other striking elements include nauseously detailed art, an odd pairing of aesthetic psychedelia with spiritually protestant illumination, with an attitude expressly hostile to the counter culture and the pop pulp industries.

Hartley was a renegade, first from Playboy comics, then from Archie. His reason for departing from each job was purportedly due to spiritual crisis. The son of a prominent American evangelical politician, his biography is worth a glance.

These comic books are a treasure trove for discovering the psychological forces at play in a single American's self-appointed mission to convert a secular, consumerist, institutionally enlightened but broadly uneducated geist into an ahistorical, anti-intellectual and wholly intuitive doctrinaire conservatism.

Interestingly, some of these elements (anti-intellectualism and ahistoricity especially) are arguably already present (but latent) in comics before being re-appropriated by Hartley as virtues.

Creepy, yet unintentionally hilarious on almost every page.