HOLY HEROES is a digital curated exhibition that chronicles Black religious presence in comics, cartoons, and related print media. It brings together the histories of race, religion, and visual media through images from comics, cartoons, and comic books. The site opens a window onto African American religions as they have been rendered in print media. Visitors can browse curated timelines and explore the visual record of Black sacred life in comics media.
Comics and cartoons have long served as an important visual record of Black religious life, preserving, circulating, and contesting ideas about Black sacred authority, religious identity, and racial representation across twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular media. These images, from newspaper strips, comic books, political cartoons, illustrated advertisements, book covers, and religious tracts, are available in library collections. Here they are gathered into a coherent online exhibit of Black religious representation.
Some of the images come from religious institutions and religious media or their publishers. Some come from Black newspapers or Black-owned publishing. Some come from commercial entertainment companies. Some are independently made.
About holy heroes
How have comic books, cartoons, and related comics media represented Black religious life? Their variety is animated by a question that runs through them all—what does Black religion look like when drawn in cartoons and comics?
the exhibit asks
WHY BLACK COMICS & religion?
Comics studies have developed important approaches to race, representation, and popular visual culture, but religion has rarely been treated as a central category of analysis. African American religious history places Black religion at the center of inquiry and has long used visual materials as documentary sources, yet comics and cartoons have not received sustained attention as a visual record of Black sacred life. Holy Heroes addresses this gap by gathering and interpreting images through which Black religious people, practices, institutions, and sacred worlds have appeared in popular print media.
Comics and cartoons deserve scholarly attention as sources for the study of Black religion.
Their visual form, popular circulation, and accessibility across age groups, literacy levels, and social settings made them an important medium through which religious images and ideas entered public culture.
Religionists work in an interdisciplinary field. Comics studies deals with representation but doesn't put religion at the center. African American religious history uses visual materials for its documentary sources and puts Black religion at the center. The result I am reaching for is a record that remains unexamined as a curated collection: comics and cartoons. The medium shapes the message, and it incorporates audiences across different literacy levels and demographics. My project brings diverse materials together and argues that their form matters. Comics circulate religious images through accessible, popular visual media across broad audiences and for different purposes.
Scholarship on Black religion in America typically defaults to "the Black church." But in this archive, African American Islam shows up consistently - from cartoon images of the Moorish Science Temple in the early twentieth century or the Nation of Islam's mid-century presence in syndicated comics from Muhammad Speaks newspaper to later formations of Black Muslim presence in comic books. Religious pluralism and diversity has been visible all along, but it has not been recognized as such.
The display includes newspaper strips, comic books, cartoon illustrations in advertisements, political cartoons, tracts, and other illustrated ephemera like book covers and brochures. It includes images and scenes of organized religious life and communities, promotional materials, biographical comics with historical personalities, and holy heroes - superpowered icons and fictional caricatures. These images show us what is valued by insiders and outsiders to Black religious communities. They detail images of reverence and ridicule. The work that they accomplish is representational, and it is also aesthetic.
Form, description, style, line, and layout can determine what is shown to be reverent and authoritative on the page.
The platform functions as a scholarly resource and a public archive. Readers can encounter the Black sacred in constructed images of faith and imagination that respond to African American religious histories. This living archive invites visitors to view comics as historical evidence and as sacred narrative. They are visual records of struggle, imagination, and faith rendered through line, color, and form.