POPE CULTURE

Like so many people of my generation, I've read and loved comic books since I was a small child. Over the last year or two, however, for some reason I've experienced a resurgence in my enthusiasm for weird-ass comics from the vintage of my own childhood and youth (and earlier), including titles I missed back then. Here, for instance, is an odd specimen I had never heard of, but which I turned up recently in the same junkshop stacks in which I found the Classics Illustrated version of Wild Animals I Have Known. This one is the 1982 Marvel Comic The Life of John Paul II.

"THE ENTIRE STORY!" the cover promises, "FROM HIS CHILDHOOD IN POLAND TO THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT!" This was, almost certainly, the only time that the face of JP2 ever shared a cover with the face of Spider-Man. I also love that the Pontiff gets his own little upper-left-hand corner box illustration...

...by which Marvel allowed browsers to flip through the rack and spot their favorites without pulling whole issues out, just like Spidey or Iron Man or She-Hulk or any other superhero. His superpower, I guess, is Infallibility when speaking Ex Cathedra.

Anyway, home with me it went.

This book has no ads or editorial content, no "Marvel Bullpen Bulletins" or "Stan Lee's Soapbox," no full-page strip advertisement in which the Pope uses Hostess Fruit Pies to outwit an enemy. The back cover...

...depicts the Papal Coat of Arms.

The script, by Marvel veteran Steven Grant (later of The Punisher), uses a sort of Citizen Kane structure, with an American reporter waiting for a Papal appearance at Yankee Stadium in 1979 ("Me? I'm a newspaper man--and The Pope is my beat!"), and thinking back over the Pontiff's life as Karol Wojtyla back in Poland. We learn of his love of sports...

...his youth in the theatre, his struggles as a seminarian during the Nazi occupation of Poland...

...his rise to Cardinal, then to Pope...

The comic is at pains to place its admiration for the Pope on a social and secular basis...

...lest anybody suppose that Marvel, of all entities, had gone into the business of Catholic proselytism.

According to the inside back cover, the comic came about when Gene Pelc, a Marvel rep in Tokyo, became friends with a certain Father Julian, a Polish priest serving in Japan. In 1980 Marvel had published a comic book biography of St. Francis (!) called Francis, Brother of the Universe. Father Julian liked it, and thought Marvel should try their hand at a comic-book bio of JP2 as well; Father Mieczyslaw Malinski, who had been a pal of the Pope's when he was still Karol From the Block, was made "Consulting Editor."

Despite the secular disclaimers, though, the result is on the hagiographic side; it's largely a reverent, uncritical account. Which was the tricky part for me, because...I've never been a big fan.

Don't misunderstand: Though I was raised Presbyterian, I come from a heavily Catholic town, went to a Catholic college, had close friends, teachers and mentors who were Catholic, dated and married Catholic women. I've always found the Catholic world seductive, from the dazzling theatricality of its rituals and trappings to the mind-expanding, soul-wounding power of its philosophy, theology and art. The cultural legacy of Catholicism, for beautiful and for horrible, for nightmarish and for glorious, is awe-inspiring to me.

But JP2? For me, always kind of meh.

After John Paul I offered a flicker (possibly illusory) of hope for a more progressive direction for the Church, JP2, while undeniably formidable and charismatic, marked a return to dour, paternalistic, my-way-or-the-highway conservatism. He always seemed to me like part of the Neocon Holy Trinity of the '80s, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Even back then I would have regarded him as the least hypocritical, most intellectually complex, and indeed most admirable of that trio, but nonetheless his hardline positions on issues like gay rights, abortion and birth control struck me as harmful, and still do.

But while it didn't completely change this feeling in me, this improbable collaboration between the Vatican and Marvel--and I'm afraid that the values and ideals promulgated by Stan Lee's cornball comic empire of the '80s are closer to my heart than those of the Vatican from the same period--made me take into consideration JP2's staunch insistence on human equality, his ecumenism, his opposition to the death penalty, his capacity for forgiveness, etc. And thus this comic taught me an embarrassing truth about myself: If Marvel Comics thinks you're OK, I'm likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.