Abstract
Comic book authors and illustrators frequently incorporate mythical – and mystical – elements into their narratives and onto their pages, redefining the boundaries of what a comic book might convey and enhancing the medium’s potential for transmitting certain revelatory or “gnostic” truths. The inclusion of such material recrafts the comic book as a gateway for readers’ own possible “non-ordinary” mythical encounters. This introductory essay frames the volume as a whole from within mythological and depth psychological traditions and traces the origins and intersections of these rich comparative fields, including their potential for mining “hidden knowledge” (gnosis) in the graphic medium of comic books.
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Odorisio, D.M. (2023). A New Gnosis: The Comic Book as Mythical Text. In: Odorisio, D.M. (eds) A New Gnosis. Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_1
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