GOODBYE GOD?

Goodbye God?
By Sean Michael Wilson and Hunt Emerson
120 6x9-inch pages, b/w
May 2015 New Internationalist
paperback
$12.30

Emerson is one of Britain's iconoclastic cartoonists, author of graphic novel adaptations of such classics as Dante’s Inferno and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and this book is another feather in his bad-boy cap. Under the subtitle “A Visual Exploration of Science vs Religion,” writer Wilson takes a look at the science vs religion debate in what he supposes is a graphic novel format and brings together a wealth of facts, figures and the views of some distinguished scientists, philosophers and atheists — and Emerson draws up this vision, filling pages with single panel and comic strip depictions of various personages looking at the arguments that rage over Creationism vs Evolution, belief vs atheism, etc.

The exploration is mostly verbal; Emerson’s pictures, while, as always, amusingly antic, contribute no substance to the arguments raging. He pictures Darwin, for instance, and Darwin utters one of his utterances in a speech balloon. It would be more graphic novel-like if Darwin were shown fishing and suddenly catching a fish with legs about to walk onto dry land.

Instead, Emerson’s pictures are mostly just decorations for Wilson’s words. And that’s too bad because the cartoonist’s own views on the topics under consideration would doubtless add to Wilson’s explications.

Talking with reporter David Bentley at birminghammail.co.uk, Emerson, named one of the 75 European Masters of Cartooning of the 20th Century by the noted French Comics Academy, explained how he came to collaborate with Wilson on this new tome exploring the age-old debate of whether God exists and where life came from.

Said he: "I got involved in the Goodbye God? project for three main reasons. The first is straightforward: it was paid work, and in the comics business we cannot afford to be too choosy about that. Secondly, I am always interested in the ways that comics can be used as a medium, and this project is one of the more radical and intriguing that I have come across. The third reason is that I am very opposed to the teaching of Fundamentalist, Creationist views to children. I think Creationism is wrong, is contrary to scientific truth, and is a dangerous and retrograde idea that should not be imposed on children’s minds."

He added: "Further than that, I disagree strongly with the teaching of any religious beliefs in school, and in so-called faith schools of whatever creed. State education should be secular — and, of course, free — and should not be dictated or shaped by the demands of patriarchal, morally authoritarian institutions whose primary purpose is to further their own views and beliefs at the expense of truth and freedom of thought.

"Am I an atheist?,” Emerson continued. “I suppose I am, though I don’t like to make a big fuss about it. I was raised in an average, not fanatical, Methodist household, and I hope that I carry the morals, gentleness and wisdom of those concepts. I have no regrets about it — but I can’t in all honesty believe in the supernatural basis for that or any religion."