I don't actually want to discuss Supergirl Plus #1, so let's instead look at a Final Night tie-in and Supergirl Annuals #1-2

Gail Simone and company's story from the Summer of Supergirl anthology—which was collected in Supergirl Vol. 2: Hometown Horrors, a trade I reviewed in this column—was about the first meeting of the current version of Supergirl and the current version of Mary Marvel. Reading it made me curious about a previous story about the first meeting of a different version of Supergirl and a different version of Mary Marvel, 1997's Supergirl Plus. 

There weren't all that many Plus books, but I thought they were a pretty fun idea, oversized one-shots featuring a team-up of a popular character plus a sometimes less popular one (There were a whole round of them featuring the cast from the short-lived monster rock band book Scare Tactics, for example). I recall liking the handful of them that I had read (Batman Plus featuring Arsenal by Devin Grayson and Rodolfo Damaggio, Green Lantern Plus featuring The Ray by Ron Marz and Scott Kolins, The Flash Plus featuring Nightwing by Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid and company, and so on). 

I had never read Supergirl Plus, but I rather vividly recall a friend of mine talking to me about how insane it was. A fan of the Supergirl TV show, she went looking for Supergirl comics during its first season on the air, and this issue was one that she found. That it featured another young female superhero just made it all the more appealing. In her words, it was about Supergirl and Mary Marvel teaming up to fight a child molester at the mall.

As I said on Bluesky the other day, I had assumed she was kidding. Or at least exaggerating. 

She was not. 

Seeing that DC had fairly recently collected the one-shot in DC Finest: Supergirl: Body & Soul, I ordered the trade from the library, and was excited to dig in, as the lead story, the team-up, was written by the writer of the Supergirl title at the time, the great Peter David, and it featured pencil art by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins, with Jon Nyberg handling the finishes. It looked great.

But yeah, it's about a child molester targeting Mary Bromfield at the mall...and Supergirl and Mary Marvel don't team up to fight him, but end up fighting one another for most of it. First physically and then, later, taking opposite positions on how to deal with the alleged molester.

I say alleged because the book itself never clarifies whether or not the man, a police officer who is friends and colleagues with this version of Supergirl's policeman father, had sexually assaulted Mary or not. We see him approach Mary Bromfield and put his hand on her shoulder. Then we see Mary Marvel attacking him, saying he tried to assault a young girl. 

As to what happened between those two scenes, we get Mary's telling and the man's telling. The basic events line-up—suspecting her of shoplifting, he takes the young Mary out of the mall and to his car, she escapes and runs away—and even the dialogue is close if not exact in both tellings. In Mary's, he's depicted as lascivious and she says she touched her before she manages to run away. In his telling, he's completely professional throughout the entire encounter.

Before reading it, I was planning on reviewing the story for a blog post. But having now read it, I don't want to. It was just too weird and too dark and too unpleasant. 

I don't want to speak ill of the recently dead David, an unquestionably great writer who has produced an incredibly revered an influential body of work, including several series I quite enjoyed. 

I don't want to quote and try to parse the dialogue.

I don't want to scan an image of the middle-aged police officer licking his lips as he pushes Mary into the car in her telling of events. 

And I just plain don't want to spend an hour or two thinking about the subject matter, honestly. 

Maybe I wouldn't have minded doing so as much in the late '90s, when it was originally published, or in the late '00s, when I launched my blog, but not now, when there is a man adjudicated of sexual assault and accused of at least 20 more sexual assaults in the Oval Office, when there is an apparently whole of government effort to cover up the Epstein files, full of stories of adult men preying on minors, which is being led by the current Attorney General of the United States, and not when the story of a horrific rape at Cornell University is in the news, a story that has provoked a grotesque, inhumane backlash against the alleged victim and a defense of the young men who raped her (and other young men who were told about the events in real time and yet did nothing to stop them). 

Now, that 29-year-old comic book story is technically well-written. And it is quite well-drawn. 

But it's weird as hell that DC Comics published it. 

We, the readers, never find out what exactly happened, whether the man did attempt to sexually assault a child or whether Mary had misinterpreted the situation (The ending, showing the man alone in his car and bursting in to tears suggest he likely did assault her...although it's also possible to read it that he was so upset over the fact that he was accused at all that he broke down). 

But the story presents us with one superhero who may have been mistaken about whether or not she was sexually assaulted in Mary Marvel. And another superhero, the one whose name is on the book, torn between whose word to take, and ultimately deciding that the legal process must play out to determine whose version of events is actually true (A technically, legally correct opinion, I guess, but why would the writer maneuver her into this position at all?). 

That Supergirl learns that Mary Bromfield and Mary Marvel are one and the same by the end of the story, and that Mary is thus hamstrung from pursuing justice through the legal system because she also wants to preserve her and Billy Batson/Captain Marvel's secret identities, doesn't seem to factor into Supergirl's thinking at all.

I guess I said more than I meant to say about it, but there's a lot more I could say. 

Let's leave it at this: What a weird fucking comic book story this is.

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Instead of a full discussion and dissection of the Supergirl story I picked up this collection in order to read, let's instead focus on a few other points of interest in it, tie-ins to various DC Comics events of the time. 

This volume collects the first 18 issues of the 1996-2003 Supergirl series, all written by Peter David, plus Supergirl Annuals #1-2, the aforementioned Supergirl Plus #1 and a short story from Showcase '96 #8. Flipping through, I noticed that meant a tie-in issue to the 1996 Final Night crossover event and annuals from the "Legends of the Dead Earth" and "Pulp Heroes" theme years. 

I have at this point read almost none of this iteration of the Supergirl book; two issues for sure, maybe four at the most. (Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Database, I think I only read 1999's #38, a Zauriel team-up and a Day of Judgment tie-in, and 2001's #63, a Batgirl team-up and a Joker's Last Laugh tie-in, which was collected in last year's DC Finest: Batgirl: Nobody Dies Tonight. It's entirely possible I also read #36 and #37, which were part of a crossover with Young Justice, but, unlike the issues of Young Justice in which Supergirl appeared, I have no memory of them).

If I understand correctly, this Supergirl series started out being about the post-Crisis Matrix Supergirl, a being made of synthetic protoplasm with psychokinetic powers who took the shape of the dead, pre-Crisis Supergirl, a being who then somehow bonds with a dying human girl named Linda Danvers in the small town of Leesburg.

And that is about all I know, really. 

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I liked the Final Night crossover in general. The main, four-issue series was written by Karl Kesel and penciled by Stuart Immonen and the plot involved the threat of Earth's sun being extinguished by a Sun-Eater, something from a 1960's science fiction comic that had since become part of the DC Universe. Its name tells you what it does.

While the mini-series follows the superheroes' valiant efforts to save the sun, the day is ultimately saved by a bit of deus ex machina from Parallax Hal Jordan, who seems to expend all of the energy he has amassed in the previous years doing so...and gives his life, giving the character a noble (and ultimately rather temporary) death after his previous heel turn.

What was different about the storyline, and what made it of greater interest to me, was how hopeless things eventually got, with parts of the main series and many of the tie-in issues featuring not just the heroes trying to stop the Sun-Eater or deal with the threats of the sun going out and the Earth starting to freeze but also visiting their loved ones to say goodbye. For all the DC Comics stories about the world almost ending I've read, this was the rare one in which the actual end of the world seemed imminent enough for characters to react as if this was actually it (My favorite tie-in was Hitman #8, in which the only mildly super-powered Tommy Monghan and his hitman social circle barricade themselves in their favorite bar and tell one another stories as they wait for the world to either end or for the superheroes to sort things out as they usually do). 

DC released a collection of the main series, a Parallax one-shot tie-in and the issue of Green Lantern dedicated to Hal's post-event funeral in 2021. I enjoyed Final Night every time I've read it. The tie-ins haven't all been collected together before, and you're most likely to find them in trade collections of the title they appeared in. The Supergirl one, for example, is in this volume DC Finest. 

Now, it's actually not much of a tie-in. If this were a comic with the Crisis On Infinite Earths branding rather than the Final Night branding on the cover, we'd call this a red skies issue. Of course here, the sun has gone out, and so the skies are black...and snowy.

Given that this is only the third issue of a new ongoing series, however, I suppose we can forgive David for not completely committing to the crossover event, and instead doing the bare minimum to do so (Of course, if memory serves, David's Final Night issue of Aquaman was rather half-hearted in its connectivity to the crossover as well, with the cover depicting Aquaman's harpoon hand breaking through the ice of a frozen ocean, while the inside mostly had the characters going about the story David had presumably already written for them, likely altered to involve the sun temporarily going out and the ocean's surface freezing). 

Supergirl is in Leesburg and trying to keep the populace calm while everyone is understandably pretty freaked out. There are riots in the streets and fires everywhere. In the opening scene, Supergirl is in a church, facing a crowd that soon turns violent and, when she realizes one of her old powers doesn't seem to be working and it's not as easy to escape as she thought, many of them attack and start beating her (Don't worry, she's fine; her invulnerability is working as always).

Soon, her/Linda's father appears with some other cops in riot gear and calms the mob down.

Meanwhile, Linda's mom is driving slowly around town in a car with a loudspeaker on top, encouraging people to meet at the church for prayer and counseling. She's soon attacked by rioters.

Before long, it's clear that the rioting isn't the natural result of panicked people facing the literal end of the world, but that they seem to be...devolving...?

They are. This is thanks to a talisman called The Heart of Darkness, according to recurring character Buzz, who tells Supergirl its spell only works when there's an eclipse of the sun. Or, as here, when the sun seems to be in the process of being eaten. 

So that's the only real connection to Final Night. Were this not a crossover to the event, David might have only needed to change a line of dialogue here or there. Of course, as is, the sun going out provides a good fakeout for the rioting, with readers suspecting one rationale, before learning what's really behind it. 

On the final pages of the issue, Supergirl discovers who it is that has the talisman and is thus behind the madness afflicting her town, endangering her parents and the death of a friend's brother: Gorilla Grodd.

While I obviously was in the dark about the ongoing Matrix-and-Linda-are-now-one plot and this Buzz character and the off-panel, seemingly demonic entity he converses with in one scene, everything else was easy enough to follow and is as well constructed as one might expect from a Peter David comics script.

One could complain about the "red skies" nature, but, again, this is only the third issue of a new series, and David understandably prioritized making it more of a Supergirl issue than a Final Night tie-in. It might have been interesting to see what he might have written if Final Night fell on, like, the twenty-third issue of the series, or if DC had given him a story in a special Supergirl tie-in or an anthology to deal with her reaction to the sun going out/the world ending. 

I was quite surprised by how much I liked the art, as it was penciled by Gary Frank. When I think of his work, I tend to think of his many collaborations with Geoff Johns, on the likes of Superman various Superman books, and Batman: Earth One, the New 52 Shazam! and so on, where his work is very realistic, and quite full of fussy little lines that can lean toward what I personally perceive as a sort of ugliness. 

I suppose it's possible his style evolved between his work on Supergirl and his work on Action Comics a decade or so later, but I have to assume some of the difference comes down to the inking. This Supergirl art has all of the virtues of Frank's work, including his solid characters and realistic style, but it looks far smoother and cleaner than his later Johns collaborations. This issue of Supergirl, he is inked by Cam Smith. 

Of course, there's at least one point wherein that realism is something of a detriment. His Gorilla Grodd looks way too much like a real gorilla in this issue. In fact, it seems as if Frank used photos of real gorillas for reference, as this Grodd's face lacks the spark of intelligence, and he's missing his shaggy sideburns. He also doesn't have any attributes to suggest he's something more than the gorillas you might see in the zoo; he has no elongated skull, no big pot belly, no upright stance, no expressions. (I should note that Grodd looks more Grodd-y on the cover of the next issue, though.)

Oh, and he also looks really, really small, about the size of a real gorilla, I guess, rather than the towering brute he usually is (In all except one panel, where he seems to have suddenly grown about five times as big, and dwarfs a prone Supergirl, who was taller than him in previous panels). 

Having done years in the blogosphere and online comics news sites, I suppose it's also worth addressing the subject of Supergirl's skirt and shorts here, huh? This Supergirl costume, as Frank draws it, has a really, really small skirt. In fact, it's so short that I realized early on that I think it's meant to be more of a decorative element than a garment. That is, it makes sense to think of Supergirl's costume as a blue bodysuit with a skirt wrapped around it for a splash of red color, rather than the skirt being something meant to conceal what's beneath it (There's a panel early on, for example, where Supergirl plunges straight down from the sky, and her skirt naturally flies straight up and one sees that she's basically wearing a long-sleeved one-piece bathing suit, rather than a top and skirt over a pair of underwear or shorts.)

Er, except on the cover of this issue. There it looks like Frank just drew her bare ass under the skirt, and the colorist later added tiny blue shorts under it (The blue color is there, but there's no black line designating where the artist would have drawn the shorts ending and her legs beginning).

Now, how exactly Supergirl manages to save Lessburg from Grodd isn't revealed until #4, which I did not read, but I did flip through it pretty thoroughly, looking at the drawings of Grodd and Supergirl, and interestingly/depressingly, once Supergirl falls under Grodd's mental thrall and thus temporarily becomes bad, she naturally starts dressing in sexier clothes.

As you can see on the cover for #4, she changes into a crop top and leather pants with cut-outs along the sides. (Also, her hair suddenly gets much curlier and seems to have much more body than when she's in her normal "good" frame of mind, for some reason.) I suppose this is another example of the men who make superhero comics designating that a heroine has gone bad by having her start dressing sexier or in fetish gear (Hellfire Club Jean Grey, Sue Storm's Malice personality, Supergirl on Apocalypse in Superman/Batman, Countdown's Mary Marvel, etc.).

Again, I didn't read that issue, just flipped through it, so I don't know if Supergirl explains why she decides to change clothes (and tease out her hair!) now that she's being psychically dominated by a telepathic super-ape...or if Grodd made her change clothes and, if so, why, as it would be weird for Grodd to be interested in women in leather, wouldn't it...?)

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By 1994, DC had abandoned their summer annual events, in which each series' annual was part of a big crossover event storyline, and they had instead moved to doing standalone annuals all organized around a shared theme. The theme for 1996 was "Legends of the Dead Earth", explained thusly:

Earth is dead.

Those who once might have called it home are long scattered to the endless stars.

But in that scattering, on a thousand different worlds, by a thousand different ways...

Earth's greatest legends live on. 

What, exactly, did this mean...? I'm not entirely sure, having only read a single one of these 25 annuals (That would be Doug Moench and Vince Giarranno's Batman #20, purchased because I so liked Giarranno's over-the-top art; it was no great shakes, but it did let Giarranno redesign Batman and his supporting cast, giving us a furry version of Catwoman and a Scarecrow with the head of a crow. I wouldn't mind reading more of these now though, should DC decide to collect them into some DC Finest collections...although I would hope they would do Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and Bloodlines first).

It seems to be that all of the annuals were sort of Elseworlds stories ("Elseworlds" was actually the theme for the 1994 annuals), with the scope narrowed so that they had to be set in the far-flung future, which seems to have translated into science-fiction legacy versions of the heroes of 1996.

The Supergirl annual contained three stories, and thus three different versions of Supergirl...or, I guess, two different Supergirls and a story of a third. That translates to a 22-page lead story and two eight-page back-ups. (That's 38 pages total, for just $2.95!)

The lead story is "The Surrogate" by writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist Ron Wagner and inker Bill Reinhold, and it's the one that corresponds to the cover. It involves a sort of clever sci-fi mining operation, in which a scientist in the employ of a mining company straps unwilling human subjects into chairs and puts a special apparatus on their heads that allows them to control big, metal, shape-changing humanoid mining avatars in an incredibly hostile environment that no human being could possibly survive.

These are all big, squarish-looking entities that visually suggest more machine-like versions of Marvel's Mindless Ones, and the shape-changing is apparently limited from the wrist down, so they can turn their "hands" into whatever tools they might need. The scientist and mining people refer to them as "Tooljerks."

One such unwilling subject for the procedure is a young blonde woman named Cryssia, whose parents used to tell her stories of Supergirl when she was a little girl. Something goes wrong (or right, I suppose) with the procedure, however, and the machine that would allow her to control her Tooljerk loads too much of her into the avatar, and she is therefore able to control it more completely than she should be able to, and rebel against the safeguards put in place.

She immediately transforms it into the shape of Supergirl, drawing an S-shield over its breasts, and then attacks and destroys the whole mining operation before heading off into space (On the cover, this Supergirl is silver in color, while the one within the book is golden...and thus looks an awful lot like a prototype for Superman Kal-El as he appears in the 853rd Century in DC One Million). 

It's a fine and direct, if simple, story, and one that probably didn't need all 22 pages to tell, but Wagner's art is fun, and he makes good use of the extra space to draw cool stuff. 

The first back up is "The Legend Lives On", by writer Barbara and Karl Kesel, with pencils by Dick Giordano and inks by George Perez (That's quite an art team for a back-up in an annual!). Well, this is the first back up in this particular trade, anyway; on the table of contents for the annual, the back-ups are reversed.

This features four sexy space ladies in various skimpy costumes; two look human, one is clearly Tamaranean and another is orange with antennae, and thus appears to be the same species as that one guy from the Legion of Super-Heroes (She's referred to as half-Durlan at one point). 

They find the fifth member of their crew dead in the cargo hold of their space ship, and she seems to have been in the process of drawing an S-sheild on the floor when she died, which they assume means she was trying to identify her killer.

This leads to a discussion of the Supergirl legend, which is interestingly and amusingly garbled, no doubt the result of a centuries-long game of telephone in the telling. (The most interesting bit is a panel that refers to her being active until "the time of the Legion of Titanic Heroes", in which we see this story's gloved version of Supergirl amid a group that seems to consist of Robin, Nightwing, Donna Troy, Red Star and Starfire (and someone I don't recognize) wearing what look like matching, Legion versions of their costumes. Legion Robin looks pretty cool, actually!)

Anyway, the women quite paranoidly accuse one another of being a murderous Supergirl in disguise, laser blasting each new suspect until the whole crew is dead from one cause or another, and the Kesels give us a twist, stinger-style ending that explains what exactly happened in the story. 

Again, there's not much to it, but it's a solid bit of storytelling, with pretty much perfect art for a superhero comic.

Finally, there's "Shootout at Ice Flats," written by Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., pencilled by Robert Teranishi and inked by Stan Woch.

This is basically a Western, even if set in a small town on a distant planet, it's familiar-looking society full of familiar objects from our time that the characters don't seem to completely understand...or even recognize. Young, blonde schoolmarm/sheriff Eileen Garrett gets her butt pinched in a bar by a literal cowboy, a humanoid bull*, and she slaps his wrist and knocks him down with her weapon, a ruler.

He says his sister will get her, and Eileen and the bull-man's cow sister do indeed have a showdown. Eileen gets an unexpected surge of power from a good luck talisman that her mother gifted her the night before, a star with an S on it that she says came from Sardine Girl, presumably another joke about how the Supergirl legend has gotten garbled over the centuries. 

Again, nice art (I'm not familiar with Teranishi at all) and a light story. Probably the lightest of the bunch, actually, but it's not so bad as to cancel out the good that came before it. I didn't find any of the jokes particularly funny. The minotaurs in a western setting is probably the most inspired gag but, by this point, I had seen it before elsewhere. 

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After "Legends of the Dead Earth", the next year's annual theme was "Pulp Heroes", in which creators were apparently invited to put DC's heroes of 1997 into various "genre" stories from the pulps that preceded comics, like Westerns, romance, detective, action adventure and so on. They also all had painted covers.

Still a relatively poor college student, I didn't buy or read that many of these the year they came out that weren't attached to ongoings I was already reading (JLA, Hitman, Aquaman, etc.), but, in the years since, I have found several in back issue bins, and I don't think I've read any that weren't at least pretty good. (Looking over the list of 23 annuals now, I think I've read 10 of them; again, this line of annuals would make for a great set of DC Finest collection!)

("Pulp Heroes", by the way, was the last of the line-wide annual themes or crossover stories; 1998 and 1999 were limited to JLA and some of the ongoings starring members of the League, for the crossover stories Ghosts and JLApe. Then in 2000, there was "Planet DC", which introduced international heroes and characters, but there were only a handful of these annuals and, after that, DC seemed to have given up on the idea of annual events of any kind.)

Now, these stories weren't Elseworlds-like reimaginings of the title characters as pulp-style heroes, but rather in-continuity, DCU stories within a particular genre. For the most part, they tended to still be superhero stories, and the degree to which they embraced the assigned genre varied from book to book (Two of the "Weird Western Tales" books I recall, for example, were the Hitman and Robin annuals, in which writers Garth Ennis and Chuck Dixon sent Tommy Monaghan and Tim Drake West for adventures involving shootouts and other elements familiar to the genre).

Supergirl Annual #2 was a "Young Romance" title, but the men who made it—and yes, all of the writers and artists involved in the annual's two stories were men—basically just present us with superhero stories with elements of romance to them. Certainly the romance elements of the lead story, by Tom Peyer, Anthony Castrillo and Jordi Ensign, are more-or-less bolted-on, the nods to the genre coming on the cover, and a pair of splash pages of Supergirl and the time-lost Brainiac 5 kissing while melodramatic narration fills too many boxes with their thoughts.

The back-up, a 17-page story by Chuck Dixon, Greg Land and Prentis Rollins, is actually more romance than superhero, depicting as it does a pair of teenagers yearning after their respective crushes and ultimately becoming a couple, but it's still a superhero comic. 

The Peyer-written lead story is entitled "Secret Hearts" (Although the cover calls it the more confessional sounding "I Lied For Love!"). In it, Linda Danvers finds that things in Leesburg are going crazy in a very Silver Age-y kind of way, the precise sort of wackiness that, when seen in a Super-book in the '90s, generally meant Mr. Mxyzptlk was responsible.

For example, her mom is about to prepare dinner, and water shoots out of the stove top. Her dad puts his key in the ignition to start his car, and his car immediately starts shrinking. At the hospital and police station, things are just as weird: An IV bag full of hummingbirds, a cop de-aged to a child and so on. 

Linda eventually calls Clark Kent for advice (Having read so little of the book, I'm not clear on the pair's relationship, but Linda tells her she's "Mae" on the phone, which I guess was their name for Matrix when she wasn't Supergirl, "Mae" being short for "Matrix.").  She needs someone smart to help her figure out what's going on, and after demurring that "most of the geniuses that I've met are pretty nasty characters," Superman directs her to "the smartest person on Earth" at the moment, the Legion of Super-Heroes' Brainiac 5 (As you guys know, I'm pretty ignorant of the LOSH and their goings-on, but this seems to be during the point in the 1990s when a group of teenage Legionnaires were temporarily stranded in the present day DC Universe).

Brainiac, who Peyer establishes is already smitten with Supergirl, as he apparently a thing for strong blondes, is happy to help her investigate, but taps out when he realizes the cause seems to be magical rather than scientific (And, for the record, it's not Mxyzptlk).

Here's where the lying for love comes in. 

"I really hate to do this," SG narrates, before she lays her head on Brainiac's shoulder and says, "Oh, Brainy... ...what am I going to do?"

That seems to be enough seduction to get Brainiac to overcome his aversion to magic and continue to help her against his better judgement. The cause and solution to the madness is basically super-science gobbledygook with perhaps a shade of meta-commentary to it, but the pair ultimately save Leesburg, come clean with their feelings for one another and how they were both dishonest in an attempt to get what they want. And then they share a kiss. 

Again, not reading this volume of Supergirl, I'm not sure if anything ever comes of their apparent mutual attraction and the potential of a romance promised by sharing a kiss, or if this is more like the Batgirl/Superboy kiss in Batgirl #41 that seems to have never been referred to again. Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Book Database again though, it doesn't look like Brainiac or the Legion reappear in Supergirl for the rest of the run. 

The back-up, "Object of Desire," follows a pair of teenagers at a pizza place in Leesburg. The boy is a Supergirl-obsessed delivery driver with a terrible haircut reminiscent of that of Damage's (The story opens in medias res, within a daydream of his in which he's a dumb-looking, '90s Image Comics-esque superhero saving his girlfriend Supergirl from a giant robot). And the girl is a waitress who has a crush on him, despite the terrible haircut.

He happens to see Supergirl fly over on her way to deal with a dangerous emergency, and he follows...only to end up in deadly peril. In fact, he would have died...were it not for the fact that the waitress with a crush on him had also followed and was able to bring emergency workers to him in time to save his life. 

Having thus been saved by a girl he knows in real life, he henceforth only has eyes for her. A fact attested to when Supergirl again flies above him in the last panel, and he doesn't even notice.

Supergirl is in this, but it's not really a Supergirl story, so much as the story of the two pizza shop kids.

It's actually kind of cute, and not the sort of story I would have associated with Dixon. Also, this still being the '90s, Land's art still looks like something human hands might have drawn (although his style is growing increasingly more realistic, making this story look somewhat of a piece with that of Frank's art on the ongoing), rather than random photos found online and manipulated in Photoshop.

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By the way, the very next issue in this DC Finest collection following the second annual is Supergirl #14, the cover of which brands it as part of DC's Genesis crossover event series. Like Final Night, Genesis was composed of a mini-series, with issues of the publisher's various ongoings devoting tie-in issues to the storyline.

Shouldn't I also read and write about this issue too, then...?

Ha ha ha! No, of course not! There is a key difference between Final Night and Genesis, and that is that Genesis is not good. 

Written by John Byrne, this 1997 mini-series revolved around a "Godwave", a Source-spawned wave of energy that created gods as it passed over the universe and then, on a second pass, created superheroes...in a somewhat nebulous, ill-defined way, given that DC's scores of superheroes all have vastly different origin stories that an hardly share a retroactive root cause.

I read the main series and some of the tie-ins, but I was never really sold on this core premise, and some of the tie-ins with the Genesis-branding on top didn't really tie too directly into the events of the mini. For example, the Batman issue just had the hero dealing with a feeling of unease, as the Godwave not only bestowed particular super-powers, but also feelings of confidence and inspiration and faith that lead guys like Bruce Wayne to dress up in costumes and fight for justice, I guess...? 

So yeah, I'm not reading an issue of Supergirl that ties in to Genesis, but if that sounds like something you're into, feel free to do so and let me know what you think. 

*If you're wondering, as I did when I saw this, the Ryan Browne-created cartoon Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa debuted in 1992 and thus predates this.

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 11

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #43 (1986)
Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•This issue's cover by Mike Zeck and John Beatty is an interesting one, as it is maybe the first "symbolic" cover of the series so far, depicting a hooded skeleton with a machinegun blasting away (And, in that respect, looks a little like one that might have appeared on an old issue of DC's Weird War Tales, which regularly featured skeletons).

Having now read the issue, I see that the skeletal figure above is meant to be a Grim Reaper or Death-like figure, but, because its robe is colored red instead of the traditional black, that's not as clear as it could be. Also, because Larry Haman's G.I. Joe narrative includes red ninjas that dress pretty much like this, I assumed that the image might have been in reference to them rather than some sort of personified death. 

•The issue opens right where the last left off. In front of the Vietnam Memorial, the Cobra Crimson Guardsman code-named Fred II is holding Stalker and Snake Eyes at gunpoint, and he's just made a dramatic revelation: He used to be Wade Collins, a member of their Long Range Recon Patrol that they had left for dead during the Vietnam War. What a small world, huh?

Much of this issue is thus devoted to Fred/Wade telling the two captured Joes what happened between the time Stalker saw him take a machine gun blast to the chest in Vietnam and now, after he ushers the pair into his car, keeping his gun on them from the back seat while Snake Eyes drives. 

I found this all rather interesting, despite the rather preposterous coincidence (and there will be several more such coincidences revealed in the years to come, showing how various Joe and Cobra characters crossed one another's paths during Vietnam and its immediate aftermath). 

That is mainly because, as I've mentioned before, Cobra doesn't really have a clear, articulated reason for being, a shared goal of the sort one would think necessary to inspire so many people to join the organization. 

By this point in the series, we've only gotten a few vague hints of what binds Cobra together from Cobra Commander's occasional speeches and glimpses into his origins. So far Coba mainly seems to a pyramid scheme inspired by vaguely libertarian-sounding talking points, a pyramid scheme that somehow went from selling cleaning products to becoming an independent military whose budget must rival that of the United States and the Soviet Union...and has just become its own nation state.  

Fred/Wade's story is the first time we hear any member of Cobra explain how and why they joined.

Wade had a rough time of it after Stalker and the others left him for dead. He survived the AK-47 blast to the chest that Stalker had thought had killed him. He was found by "the NVA regulars" (there's no footnote here, oddly, but he's referring to the North Vietnamese Army), who dug out all the bullets ("They didn't have much in the way of anesthesia...") and held him captive for two years. 

When the war ended, he returned home...only to have a hippie spit in his face in a San Francisco airport, and his wife's lawyer meet him there with divorce papers. And it gets worse. He couldn't get a job ("I found out that the captains of industry weren't too keen on hiring vets," he says "We had a bad reputation, they said...")

This is the passage that deals with his discovering and joining Cobra, presumably in Springfield:

As you can see, it's pretty vague. Wade says he believed, but never mentions what about the organization, exactly, that he believed. 

From what little writer Larry Hama gives us here, it seems as if that what Cobra provided was acceptance and a sense of community, both of which he felt he had lost after the war. It's easy to imagine that someone who was a prisoner of war so long, or felt that his fellow soldiers had somehow betrayed him, might want a degree of payback against the United States and its army, and might therefore join a terrorist organization opposing the U.S., but he doesn't ever articulate that here. (Likewise, as a former soldier who we can assume was pretty damn elite—he did serve with Stalker, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, after all—Wade would have been an attractive recruit to a paramilitary organization, but, because this is Wade telling his own story, we never hear why it was that Cobra might have wanted him.)

•Meanwhile, several other storylines intersect, as various characters move towards Springfield. 

The fan belt in the stolen truck Candy Appel ejected Buzzer from has given out, and she accepts a ride from the guy with the spiked coffee who had dropped The Soft Master off in Springfield. When they realize "the little oriental fellow" left his suitcase in the car, they circle back towards Springfield in order to return it to him. 

Billy, still wearing a black gi with a white belt, has been riding towards Springfield with some nuns who drop him off ten miles outside of town. The spiked coffee guy ends up picking him up too. 

Candy has just called out the driver out for drinking and driving—"That coffee you've been drinking isn't just 'laced with brandy'--it's mostly brandy!"—and, as they argue, Billy has a vision of impending death, giving us an image of The Grim Reaper to echo that on the cover:

•As for Buzzer, after parting ways with Candy, he rode the rails back to Springfield, and there he runs into Firefly and Scrap-Iron, the latter of whom is making his first appearance in the comic and gets perhaps the most perfunctory introduction of any Cobra agent so far:

"Say hello to Scrap-Iron!"

Scrap-Iron was released as part of the 1984 line, and I recall him being a pretty cool action figure (Even if he didn't have too much to do in the cartoon). He's another figure that my best friend at the time had. He was Cobra's "anti-armor specialist" and was dressed in Cobra blue and red, although he had his own costume and gear that separated him from the masses. 

His action figure came with a little missile launcher with two red missiles. (You can see he and Firefly setting it up just after the 40 second mark of the opening sequence of The Revenge of Cobra mini-series, just before Mutt and Junkyard appear to knock them down and then Blowtorch sets it on fire).

•How fast is The Soft Master...? Well, previously, Destro had said he could move too fast for Destro to see. Here, after he discovers who it was that had really killed his brother The Hard Master, we see The Soft Master making for the exit as Cobra agents posing as Springfield's municipal police force enter the station, and Whigham and Mushynsky draw him not unlike the way someone might draw The Flash for the Distinguished Competition:

He even makes a "whiz" sound when he runs!

I've heard it said before that the G.I. Joe toys/cartoons/comics of the 1980s were a recruitment effort for the United States military. Maybe they started out that way, but, the longer I read the comic, the more it becomes clear that while, sure, they make the people who serve in the military seem pretty cool, they're still not nearly as cool as ninjas are.

If anything, I think the G.I. Joe toys/cartoons/comics of the 1980s were a recruitment effort for ninjas. 

•The various storylines finally intersect quite violently at the climax. The Soft Master is speeding out of town in a stolen police car, pursued by Buzzer, Firefly and Scrap-Iron, and he manages to lose them by maneuvering around a speeding train in the nick of time.

At that same moment, the car containing Billy, Candy and the drunk driver are barreling towards the train in the opposite direction. There's a struggle for the wheel, and their car ends up crashing into the railroad crossing signal, instantly bursting into flame.

The Soft Master goes back to save them, but Scrap-Iron has climbed up a telephone pole in able to survey the damage on the other side of the train and fires his missiles.

The first strikes The Soft Master directly; we know he's fast enough to dodge a missile, but he intercepted it in order to save the people in the burning car. 

But it was all for naught anyway, as the second missile takes out the burning car. The Cobra guys didn't know who was in it—and presumably wouldn't have blown it up if they knew Cobra Commander's son Billy was.

Now, characters in superhero comic books have a tendency to escape death and/or come back to life after actually dying on a fairly regular basis, but these seem to be some pretty permanent deaths, right...? Surely we've seen the last of The Soft Master, Candy Appel, Billy and The Drunk Driver in the pages of G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero. I can't imagine anything happening in future issues to contradict this at all. 

•There is one more scene after that of the civilian characters being blow up, though, so the issue doesn't end on a down note.

Rather, Wade-turned-Fred shows up on the doorstep of his house, with Stalker and Snake Eyes behind him. He gives a sincere little speech to his fake, Cobra-assigned wife and kids, telling them he is quitting Cobra and going on the run, and how much he enjoyed being a family with them. To his surprise, they feel the same way, and the four of them decide to go on the run and live the rest of their lives as a real family. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #44 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•This is the first issue of the series I had read when it was originally released since 1984's #2. I don't remember where or why I bought it, and it's certainly possible it was a gift because, as I've probably mentioned before, as a child most of the comic books I read were ones that my mom or grandmother bought for me to read when I was home sick from school. If eight-going-on-nine-year-old Caleb did buy this for himself, I imagine it probably had something to do with the Lady Jaye, one of my favorite characters from the cartoon (and something of a cartoon character crush of mine) being on the cover. That cover artist Mike Zeck drew her shirt unzipped below her breasts might have also been a factor. 

•Boobs! A motorcycle! Gunplay! A robot driving a semi! What grade-school boy could resist such a comic book cover!

•I can't tell you how many times I must have read this issue as a child, but I am assuming it was a lot, as rereading it 40 years later, I was somewhat surprised to realize I remembered it so well, including particular images, lines of dialogue and events that happened within.

•A very solid done-in-one, the issue features Lady Jaye taking a group of new Joes on one final training mission in the desert outside Las Vegas before they move from the "provisional" to "official" roster. Between the five of them, they are driving three different vehicles from the toy line which are here being introduced to the comics readers.

Meanwhile, a bald, buff, mustachioed, caped and monocle-rocking mad scientist is trying to convince Destro and The Baroness that Cobra should buy a couple of his inventions, robot soldiers and "creeper-bombs", the latter of which, when detonated, cause the instantaneous growth of thorny, entangling vines that further emit a strong pollen that works like a knock-out gas.

Coming across the Joes, the evil scientist decides to use them as test subjects. While they are knocked out by the pollen, he strips them and their vehicles of their weaponry, transports them to a maze of junked cars and then sics more robots carrying the spore bombs on them.

•As for the introductions, Jaye is driving the Silver Mirage motorcycle (sans sidecar). The new Joes are Bazooka, Crank-Case, Heavy Metal and Airtight, and they are riding in the AWE Striker (which stands for All-Weather and Environment) and the Mauler MBT (that's Mobile Battle Tank). 

The Crank-Case figure came packaged with the former, and Heavy Metal with the latter. Bazooka, as his name suggests, was a missile specialist who carried a bazooka in battle, and the green and yellow clad Airtight was a "Hostile Environment" specialist who came with a gas mask of sorts. (The latter two appeared more frequently on the cartoon than either of the former two; Bazooka seems particularly prominent in my memory. He was often paired with Alpine, who we haven't met in the comic book yet, and he was characterized as being very, very dumb.)

The mad scientist is Dr. Mindbender, who would go on to become quite prominent in both the cartoon and the comics, although amusingly it doesn't seem like his name was quite settled on by the time this issue saw print. Repeatedly he is referred to as "Dr. Brain-Wave", although he is referred to as Dr. Mindbender in two instances.  

Finally, his robot soldiers were B.A.T.s (Battle Android Troopers). Black and yellow in color, these had blank, T-shaped "faces", a clear chest revealing circuity within and their action figures came with interchangeable hands and weapons, including a claw, torch and gun. 

While androids might seem a little too futuristic for a military-themed comic book/cartoon/toy line, one of the franchises' occasional flirtations with science-fiction and fantasy, their utility was obvious, especially in the cartoon, where no one ever seemed to get very badly hurt, let alone killed. After all, being robots, these were enemy soldiers that could regularly get shot and blown-up...without any human beings being killed in the process (I always assumed this is why the Foot Soldiers in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series were robots, too). 

While the G.I. Joe comics rather regularly showed Cobra soldiers getting gunned down or blown up, here Hama realizes the military application of robot soldiers, and when we first see them in the story, they are performing a suicide mission, running straight into the Joes' vehicles while wearing creeper-bombs on their backs. (Hama also takes advantage of the Joes having robot foes to depict them being destroyed in ways that would probably have been too gruesome were they human soldiers, though; at one point, for example, the Joes manage to trick a tank piloted by a B.A.T. into a car-crusher.)

•This panel contains a musical reference, in case you needed evidence that this comic was indeed from 1986.

•This may just be nostalgia speaking, but the overall quality of this issue coupled with the fact that it is a standalone story makes me think this one would be a great candidate for a "best of" collection of Hama's Real American Hero. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #45 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Ace is flying a surveillance run over Cobra Island in his Skystriker, with Ripcord in the backseat (Here, his name is spelled "Rip-Cord"; like a lot of Joes with two syllable names, his seems to be spelled different ways at different points. According to the action figure packaging shown on thetoycollectorsguide.com, it's two words, "Rip Cord", whereas the text discussing the figure on the same site calls him "Ripcord," one word. Anyway, sorry if I misspell some of these guys' names constantly). 

One thing they see but can't quite make sense of is "a circular thing near the east shore." This is the Cobra Terror Drome, a circular base that was released as a playset as part of the 1986 toy line. In comics, the base was "modular" like the Joe base and could be easily transported and erected. The Terror Dromes would play a fairly sizable part in the ongoing comics storyline, as Cobra sold them to client states around the world for their own mysterious and nefarious purposes.

After recapping his whole deal to Ace in a rather natural sounding dialogue exchange—remember, he was kinda sorta dating Candy Appel, whose father turned out to be a Crimson Guardsman and who, as far as he knows, escaped Joe custody in the company of Buzzer—he ejects himself from the jet and parachutes down to Cobra Island. This was not part of the official plan.

•In a Wahington D.C. hospital, General Hawk is meeting with General Austin, who is still recovering from a heart attack...and what looks like a pretty bad case of Norman Osborn Hair:

(Speaking of hair, Hawk seems to have grown his flattop out, so he doesn't look quite so identical to Duke anymore.)

The pair were talking about what a hard time they were having getting intel on Cobra Island and, at one point, Austin wished aloud that they had a man on the island, despite having been forbidden by their higher-ups to insert someone.

Later, Hawk gets a phone call telling him that Ripcord had went rogue and parachuted onto the island...at which point Austin realizes Hawk had put Ripcord in that plane instead of any other Joe specifically because he expected him to jump out to investigate the Appels, given his personal investment (Also, as Ripcord's name suggests, he's the team HALO jumper and his specialty, conveniently enough, is jumping out of airplanes).

Hawk clarifies that he did expect Ripcord to jump, but not to do the surveillance himself: "Now that Rip-Cord has broken security, we are forced to sending a covert team in to bring him back and who knows what kind of nifty photographs and maps they'll bring back with them?"

•In the canteen they share with the chaplain's assistants at Fort Wadsworth, Flint introduces Snake Eyes and Spirit to two new Joes: Quick-Kick and Alpine, whose areas of expertise are silent weapons and mountaineering, respectively. Both of these guys would play pretty big roles on the cartoon, bigger than they do in the comics.

The pair, still dressed in generic army guy dress-up clothes rather than their eventual Joe uniforms, comment on Snake Eyes and Spirit's attire. They will shortly adopt their own personalized uniforms, of course, but it's interesting to hear Quick-Kick of all people commenting on anyone's uniform. The most scantily-clad of all the Joes, Quick-Kick's uniform was a pair of pants, a sash, a headband and...that's it. 

Speaking of fashion, that first panel above is the official debut of Snake Eyes' new costume, accidentally previewed on the cover of #41. There's a better look at it later on this same page, which you can see below:

I like this costume a lot. It's definitely my favorite of the...four (?) different costumes Snake Eyes would wear at various points in the series. 

Of all the characcters who get new costumes throughout the series, I'm pretty sure that, following The Baroness' upgrade, this is the last good redesign. (I'm on the fence about Hawk's new costume, as both it and his original costume are both so generic and boring.) Most of the others—Roadblock, Cobra Commander, Destro, Storm Shadow, Stalker, Scarlett—would get new costumes ranging from not-very-good to godawful in the years to come, but I guess that is to be expected, as Hasbro would continually redesign the characters in order to sell new action figures of them.

•If you read the dialogue of the chaplain's assistant that Snake Eye's snatched that paper from, he was in the middle of complaining about the "motor pool guys" (G.I. Joe is, of course, a secret team, and their cover is that they work in the motor pool...although Snake Eyes' get-up sure doesn't look like that of a mechanic). Specifically, he's noting the way they dress and that they are always armed. I guess it is weird that Snake Eyes is wearing a bunch of grenades in the cafeteria, huh...?

•Oh, as for the unusual message he was talking about that caught Snake Eyes' attention...? It was apparently a coded one meant for Snake Eyes, sent out by The Soft Master in Springfield and naming the killer of The Hard Master. Snake Eyes takes it and rushes directly to Storm Shadow's NYC water tower hideout. 

•The pair of ninjas borrow a Rattler from a nearby safehouse and make their way towards Cobra Island. During the flight over, Storm Shadow reveals the killer's identity to the reader. I know it's been 40 years since this issue came out, but, if you haven't yet read the series and don't want to be spoiled, stop reading until you read this issue, okay...?

Here we get the reveal...

It was Zartan...!

•While it might look coincidental within the context of the book, Hama was no doubt intentionally foreshadowing this reveal when he had Zartan pick up his old bow and start stalking the island, looking for the intruder who parachuted in. 

There's an extremely intense confrontation between Zartan and Ripcord, as they try to pick one another off from afar. Zartan has a compound bow with a listening apparatus to help him locate the camouflaged Joe in the dark, while Ripcord has a starlight scope on his gun.  

Eventually, both resourceful men resort to trickery, with Zartan using his "chameleon" abilities to disappear while Ripcord has him in his gun sites. That's followed by a cool scene of an invisible Zartan stalking through the mud, in which the artists draw only his footprints appearing and we get the sound effects of footfalls, and the there's a hand-to-hand battle. 

On the very last page, we see Ripcord triumphant...or do we...? His melodramatic dialogue is just vague enough that it's not clear if this is meant to be Ripcord or Zartan-disguised-as-Ripcord.

•What an awesome issue.

•Oh, but wait! Even more stuff happens! 

Back in D.C., General Austin promotes Hawk, giving him a couple more stars and naming him the "Commander in Chief of the G.I. Joe team!" 

And then the Joe team that Hawk had previously alluded to sending to Cobra Island to rescue Ripcord (and maybe do some unofficial recon on the way) inserts. This team includes Flint, Spirit, Alpine and Quick-Kick, the latter two now dressed (or, in Quick-Kick's case, undressed) like their action figures. 

Here are some non-comics books I've read recently:

The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books; 2024) I've never really understood the concept of Christian fundamentalism, the idea that the Bible is literally true, and its contents accurately present the inerrant word of God. Even as a child, I realized that there was a plethora of different versions of the Bible available, and that the earliest scriptures weren't written in English, and that therefore before we had ever gotten our first English Bible, someone had to translate the Hebrew and Greek into Latin and then into English. 

When I most recently visited Barnes and Noble, I checked, and I saw that there was a whole section of Bibles, with some two sets of shelving units full of versions to choose from. 

Still, I don't think I had any conception of just how many times the Bible has been translated before reading Bruce Gordon's The Bible: A Global History. Our English Bibles didn't simply evolve (I can use that word, right?) from one language to another, but they have been translated hundreds of times, into pretty much every language you can think of (and probably some you might not think of), and even the translations into particular languages might be one of many multiple translations, or scores of translations, from various, differing sources. 

"Scribes were not simply copyists," Cameron writes at one point early on, before the printing press enters his history. "They participated in every aspect of preparing the Bible and frequently made editorial choices." And these choices didn't just occur in the Classical or Medieval ages but have continued throughout history. 

Certainly, mistakes were made (One particularly amusing one Cameron notes is the existence of "The Wicked Bible", a 1631 version of the King James Bible that left a "not" out of the Ten Commandments and thus reads "Thou shall commit adultery"). 

At other times, political agendas played a role, as monarchs promoted translations that seemed pro-monarchy and this shading of the text continues today. In his chapter on the Bible in China, Cameron writes, "President Xi Jinping has also shut down many of the autonomous churches and announced plans to have the Bible rewritten to harmonize more favorably with Communist tenets."

Historically, a great deal of care and controversy seems to have gone into what words or names have been used to refer to God, particularly when the Bible first enters new lands in Africa or Asia with their own long-lived spirituality; sometimes, translators would adopt the name of a local deity and you can certainly imagine how that might color the Bible to those early readers.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting when I picked this book about the history of the Good Book up. I loved the cover, and the copy on the book cover flap promised "the astounding story of the Bible's journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers' radically different needs."

That story—dealing with the impacts of the Bible on different parts of the world throughout recorded history—would obviously take more than the book's 440 pages to tell and, in fact, Cameron's book is focused on the history of the Bible itself: Where it came from, how it changed, who changed it and why, and how it was received in new places and in new eras. (And thus it's also a kinda sorta history of the the world over the last millennia, and the history of Christianity, but the focus is on the Bible itself). 

Now, as a casual reader with an interest—but no expertise—in these subjects, I am not the best person to tell you about this book. In all honesty, I sort of struggled with it, reading 10 pages at a time here and there over the course of months. I wouldn't say that it is a slog—Cameron's prose is strong, clear and engaging—but it is an academic work, closer to a text book than a novel, and it is accordingly a bit on the dry side.

I enjoyed the bits of trivia I learned throughout (Did you know Charlemagne had a grandson named Charles The Bald? Or that there's a version of the Bible called The Devil's Bible because it features a portrait of Satan in it, and is rumored to have been written by a monk in a single night after he sold his soul to the devil for the ability to do so...and the promise to include the Evil One's picture? What about the Bug Bible, or the Treacle Bible, the latter so named by people making fun of their specific word choice?*).

The story is compelling enough, but I don't know that I would be quick to recommend the book to anyone...not even the Caleb of a few months ago, who pulled it off the library shelf. 

Among all that trivia, I marked a quote about how awesome books are and hard writing is made by a scribe. Cameron seems to have taken this quote from Stephen Fussel and company's 2016 Taschen book The Book of Bibles: The Most Beautiful Illuminated Bibles of The Middle Ages.

O, you lucky reader, before you touch a book, wash your hands, turn the pages carefully and keep your fingers well away from the letters! For someone unable to write cannot imagine what an immense labor it is.

I mean, I don't think it's that immense a labor—It beats digging ditches! And/or any other job I've ever had!—but then, I started with pencils, pens and paper, before moving on to a word processor and computer, and never had to deal with ink, quills and vellum. That said, I'm all for respecting books (also, telling someone to wash their hands and turn pages carefully sounds like what I would tell my nieces or nephews before I let them touch a comic). And non-writers valuing the work of writers.

Then there's this bit:

Oh how hard is writing; it blurs the eyes, squeezes the kidneys, and tortures every limb. Only three fingers write, but the whole body suffers.

 I mean, my kidneys seem fine, but then, I am pounding this out on a laptop in a coffee shop lit with electric light, rather than gripping a quill or stylus and writing by hand. 

You know what would torture every limb and make the whole body suffer even more than transcribing the Bible? Drawing comics. Ask any cartoonist how their, neck elbow and wrist feels at the end of the day.

The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin's Essentials; 2025) This book's format makes it an interesting, useful and rather easy read. After an introduction and a chapter entitled "How Did We Get the Bible?", briefly explaining how the collection of diverse ancient writings gradually, eventually came to be regarded as a single book, The Bible Says So is broken up into eighteen relatively short chapters, the subject of each telegraphed by its mildly provocative title. 

These include chapters like "The Bible Says the Bible Is Inspired", "The Bible Says God Created the Universe Out of Nothing", "The Bible Says God Lies" and so on. Author Dan McClellan then addresses whether or not the statement in the chapter name is true or not. Those answers tend to be counter-intuitive, generally involving a "Yes, but" or "Yes, and" (Or "No, but" or "No, and") sort of answer than anything too terribly simple. 

The back-flap bio refers to McClellan as "an award-winning public scholar of the Bible", and he seems to be something of an academic-turned-social media influencer. He previously worked as an adjunct instructor of ancient scriptures at Brigham Young University and a scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although the bio starts with his social media follower count ("more than a million") and mentions his Data Over Dogma podcast (The cover refers to "TikTok's Data Over Dogma...I don't know, I only listen to a single podcast and have so far managed to avoid ever looking at TikTok). 

This bifurcated background apparently helps him to speak with a great deal of authority when it comes to talking about the original scripture, which often means referring to the definitional meanings of the Hebrew or Greek words the authors of particular passages chose to provide insight on what the English translations now say and why, as well as engaging with folks that aren't Biblical scholars themselves. 

In other words, The Bible Says So is very much written for a general audience, but the book makes clear that McClellan would also be fine in a discussion with academics, rather than arguing with people on social media about what the number of the beast from the Book of Revelation might mean, and whether or not the makers of Monster energy drinks have hidden it in plain sight on their cans (Um, they did not, at least according to chapter 18, "The Bible Says to Beware the Mark of the Beast"). 

As for the particular subjects, McClellan seems to have chosen them because each seems to be something that would likely be of interest to believers as well as non-believers. There are a few rather heady theological chapters ("The Bible Says There is Only One God", "The Bible Says Jesus is God"), a few that address Christian precepts as they've been understood over the last millennium or so rather than what the Bible actually says on the matter in question ("The Bile Says Satan Is God's Enemy", "The Bible Says Sinners Will Be Punished Forever in Hell") and a few that are just there because they sound so intriguing ("The Bible Says God Has a Wife", "The Bible Says God Has a Body").

Perhaps the most compelling chapters are those that address the way society has used the Bible to address various issues, like "The Bible Says Slavery Is Wrong", "The Bible Says Rape Victims Must Marry Their Rapists", "The Bible Says You Should Beat Your Kids" and so on.

Let's look at what are probably the two biggest subjects covered in the book that are currently impacting modern American society, "The Bible Says Abortion Is Murder" and "The Bible Says Homosexuality Is an Abomination." 

If you came of age at in the 1980s or at any point since, there's a good chance that all you know of modern American Christianity is that it's 1.) anti-abortion and 2.) anti-gay (Perhaps especially if you weren't raised within a particular religious background). Afterall, in the cable news era (and, later, the social media era), the only "Christians" who ever seem to be given a mic have used whatever national attention they received to inveigh against one of those two things, and the politicians who have most loudly declared themselves Christians only seemed to care about these things...and perhaps the occasional dumb culture war issue, like whether Christmas was being celebrated correctly or not.

Of course, even a passing familiarity with the Bible will reveal that abortion and sexual orientation—the latter of which McClellan convincingly argues would not have been understood to even exist in the ancient world in which the Bible was composed—aren't things Jesus offered an opinion on. Nor were they even on his radar, as he never mentions either in the four gospels (He does talk an awful lot about helping the poor and oppressed though, and about how one should treat others—including, presumably, gay people—as one would like to be treated themselves, not that his loudest modern followers ever seem to mention the things Jesus actually says). 

If you want to find passages of the Bible addressing abortion or same-sex intercourse, you have to go looking to ancient Old Testament legal codes like those in Leviticus (most of which Christians choose to ignore, generally just cherry-picking the parts that they think justify them being mean to gay folks) or the letters of Paul (who another book in this post stresses is not Jesus), letters that also say a whole lot of things that many Christians choose to ignore (Like, McClellan says Paul thought the world was ending so soon that no one should bother having children and should instead practice celibacy; marriage, Paul thought, was only for folks who couldn't properly control their sexual urges, and was merely a socially-acceptable way to have pressure valve-like sexual intercourse to keep one from becoming a sex maniac).

The chapter on abortion begins with McClellan discussing the origins of the Christian Right in the aftermath of 1973's Roe v. Wade ruling. In his brief telling, evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich spent years travelling the country and "ginning up outrage" over abortion, part of a plan to make evangelicals a political force in American politics, with the ultimate goal of preventing the government from forcing evangelical universities from accepting Black students...! (Is this true? McLellan's verbiage is a little careful here, as he writes, "Scholars have unearthed documentation that seems to indicate..."). 

Anyway, in his telling Falwell and company needed to find a Biblical argument about abortion in order to oppose it, as there didn't then exist a religious tradition of opposition. 

McClellan then addresses an Instagram post from 2021 (there are a lot, perhaps too many, references to social media arguments in the book), that read, "Abortion is only mentioned once in the Bible—Numbers 5:21—where it provides instructions on how to perform one." McClellan examines the passage but knocks down the suggestion that it's actually referring to an abortion. 

As for abortion being wrong, its opponents seemed to settle on a line of argumentation that murdering or killing an innocent person is wrong, a fetus is an innocent person and is murdered or killed during an abortion and therefore abortion is murder. 

Of course, that all hinges on when a fetus is considered "a person" and here McClellan visits several Bible quotes and stories abortion opponents have frequently used, as well as laws in the Bible regarding miscarriage. As he often does in the book, he doesn't merely consult the Bible but also refers to other writings and beliefs in the time and place of the Bible's writing, and the answer of whether or not abortion is murder basically comes down to when a soul inhabits a fetus, and here we're getting pretty philosophical...more so than any authority in the Bible ever did. 

McClellan concludes that the Bible does not actually say that abortion is murder. The Hebrew Bible (that is, what Christians would call "the Old Testament") seems to indicate that a fetus becomes a person at birth, he says, and that, under the influence of "Greco-Roman society and Greek philosophy", that position shifted, so that, by the time of the New Testament writings, people believed "human ensoulment" began at "the quickening", or when a mother can start to feel the baby moving around. This, according to Google and a few mothers I texted, is somewhere between 16 and 22 weeks.

Okay, maybe that was enough of a rabbit hole, but there's no word limit on blogging, so let's look closely at the chapter on whether homosexuality is an abomination or not, too.

This chapter is a bit more complicated, and involves translations from Greek (including a term that Paul, or whoever wrote particular letters under that name, invented) and repeated reference to "the insertive role" in sex.

The bottom line, though?

Writes McClellan: 

The problems are even bigger if the English word "homosexuals" is understood according to the word's primary sense as a reference to people who identify as having a homosexual orientation. That would expand the scope even further, roping in people who may identify as homosexual who have only ever had heterosexual intercourse, or who have never had any type of sexual intercourse at all. That's clearly not what Paul is saying. He couldn't have been saying that. The concept of a sexual orientation as we understand it today has only developed since the nineteenth century CE. In the ancient world, they organized their understanding of human sexuality far differently, so the notion that Paul was referring to people with a homosexual orientation is a flagrantly anachronistic category error. Rendering "homosexuals" in this passage [1 Corinthians 6:9] is pure and utter nonsense.

So, we already have part of the answer to the question in the title of this chapter. The Bible cannot possibly be saying homosexuality as a reference to sexual orientation is an abomination because the concept of sexual orientation didn't exist at the time in any way that remotely resembles the way we think about them today. But the Bible does have things to say about same-sex intercourse. Does it say that's an abomination? That's a longer discussion. 

Now, as I've mentioned here and there over the course of the last 20 years, I was raised Catholic and actually attended Catholic schools from kindergarten to college. While I've gotten all my sacraments, whether or not I "practice" (that is, go to church) has varied over the years, often depending on what's going on in my personal life, what the Church is up to itself and sometimes something as simple as my work schedule. 

In the '80s and '90s, we didn't really discuss homosexuality in my school's religion classes (which tended to focus on Jesus and his teachings...you know, Christian stuff, rather than random lines from Leviticus or Paul's letter to the Romans), but I do remember at one point understanding the official line was that being gay wasn't a sin, but acting on that orientation was; that is, if you were born gay, there's nothing you could have done about it and that isn't wrong, but if you have gay sex? Well, that's a different story.

Reading this chapter, that was on my mind a lot, as it's not hard to see how many smart Christian thinkers could come up with that argument, and feel like it was a compassionate resolution to what they found in scripture.

McClellan here discusses sexuality vs. the practice of sex, why two men having sex with one another might be considered a deviation of the natural order among people who also thought a woman being on top of a man during intercourse was wrong, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the half-dozen references to same-sex intercourse in the Bible (Again, mostly in Leviticus and in some of Paul's letters). 

He doesn't mention it in this chapter, but personally, I've always thought it weird to put too much stock in what the Bible might say about sexual relations anyway, given that women were considered barely human in Biblical times, the patriarchs practiced polygamy, adultery was a grave sin (note that cheating is covered in the Ten Commandments, but not same-sex intercourse), that Jesus forbade divorce and lust, and the very concept of the modern Christian marriage, of one man marrying one woman out of romantic love in order to produce children in a family unit, is every bit as foreign to the Bible as the idea of two gay people getting married is. 

But again, I grew up being taught that Jesus was a radically non-violent teacher preaching care for the poor and oppressed and treating others as you yourself would want to be treated.

Anyway, while I didn't always appreciate McClellan's framing of the topics he covered—too many, I thought, seemed to revolve around arguments he's had online, suggesting he was using his book to retroactively win those—and I didn't usually find his newspaper editor-style glib "joke" headings funny (I'll give an example below), this is a very engaging read. 

The many short chapters, and how efficiently McClellan addresses the topics, make it a very easy read, the sort of book you can put down and pick up at will without missing or losing anything. And if you want weightier scholarship, more pointed attacks on the modern misuses of the Bible or to go deeper into the scriptures and stories, well, there are plenty of books on the Bible out there; this one is, I think, a great starting point for anyone interested, though.

I should also note that McClellan doesn't get too crazy with his subject matter, generally addressing the more relevant questions about what exactly the Bible says (In this regard, the questions of God's body or wife are probably the only real outliers).  He doesn't, in other words, get into the really crazy stuff, like if there are unicorns in the Bible (there are in the King James version, but not later ones), or UFOs in the Bible (I don't think so, but UFO believers have favorite passages), or dinosaurs in the Bible (Again, I don't think so, but there are lines to cherry-pick), or if fallen angels or other gods mated with humans before the flood (It sure sounds like it, but non-canonical writings offer the most detail).

But keep reading this post, and we'll get to a book on one of those questions...!

Oh, and I was a little surprised to find that there was actually a comic book connection in this book. The chapters, short as most of them are, often get further broken up by bold headings, signaling a sub-section on the main topic. Sometimes these headings are purely descriptive ("A Brief History of the Bible", "Can the Bible talk about the Bible?", "The Other Serpent", etc.). Often, they are allusions to pop culture, complete with an asterisk explaining the reference.

So, for example, the chapter "The Bible Says God Has a Wife" includes a heading that reads "Yahweh's Got Nards!*", and, along the bottom of the page, it reads, "With apologies to the creators of The Monster Squad (1987)." Or in the chapter on abortion, there's a heading reading, "More Human Than Human*", and the note reads, "With apologies to White Zombie." And so on.

In the chapter "The Bible Says You Should Beat Your Kids" (Aside: Do not beat your kids), there's a heading reading "This Is Going To Hurt You A Lot More Than It Does Me*", and at the bottom of the page, it reads, "With apologies to the creators of Batman #427."

Those creators are, of course, writer Jim Starlin, pencil artist Jim Aparo and inker Mike DeCarlo, and that issue, you will likely recall, was part two of the seminal "A Death in the Family" story arc. The "This is going to hurt you..." line is what The Joker tells Jason Todd before he picks up a crowbar and proceeds to beat him with it. 

The Real Story of Dinosaurs and Dragons: Science Sets the Fossil Record Straight (Feral House; 2025) Dinosaurs. Dragons. Mythology. The Bible. Creationism. Cryptozoology. The idea of human beings and dinosaurs co-existing. These are some of my favorite things to read about, so Philip J. Senter's book, a slim, 230-ish page volume that demolishes the "creationist fantasies" that there are dinosaurs in the Bible and that dragon legends are all based on real-life encounters with living, fire-breathing dinosaurs, could hardly be more up my alley. 

If I have a criticism of Senter's book, it is that it lacks an introduction, where he might have laid out precisely what the book is about: The problem it is addressing, why doing so is important and how he intends to attack it...and I personally wouldn't have minded hearing a little bit more about Senter, his interest in the subject matter, his expertise in the relevant subjects and how exactly his book came about. 

Instead, it starts immediately with chapter one, "Dawn of the Dragon", a quick four pages devoted to where dragons came from (they were initially snakes in ancient Greek and Rome, one of the Greek words for snake being "drákōn" using the Roman alphabet). And then chapter two, "Monsters Unearthed", about 18th and 19th century efforts to make sense of the fossil bones of dinosaurs and other extinct, prehistoric reptiles. It is therefore not until chapter three, "A Twisted Roar," about 30 pages into the book, that its subject actually begins to take shape.

If, like me, you just saw the book's cover and started reading, it would therefore take a few chapters before you knew exactly what you were going to be reading about (Although, if you read the back cover copy, I suppose that wouldn't be an issue; me, I just saw the words "Dinosaurs" and "Dragons" and started reading, as those are two things I like to read books about, regardless of the exact take on the subjects). 

It is at this point that the book takes shape though. 

Around the time that Sir Richard Owen was coining the term "Dinosaur", and European scientists were confronting ideas like extinction, deep time and eventually evolution, there was obvious friction between these concepts and Christianity. 

Creationism is the idea that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and every word of it is therefore literally true, including the myths of Genesis like God personally creating the world, the seven-day timeline for him doing so, the simultaneous emergence of all land animals, the deluge and, extrapolating from the later genealogy of Jesus and other clues, a 6,000-ish year total lifespan of the Earth.

By chapter five, we're in the 1970s and the emergence of modern Creationism (there's nuance within Creationism, but Senter doesn't spend much time on that, and I won't do so here either). Essentially, there emerged a movement among some religious fundamentalist to prove the reality of the stories in the Book of Genesis, believers perhaps thinking that if they could offer incontrovertible evidence of their veracity, it would therefore serve as proof for the whole Bible, which I guess, in this line of thinking, would thus prove Christianity a more compelling faith to skeptics and non-believers...? And simultaneously cause everyone to throw out scientific concepts of geology and evolution...?

For some reason, the Holy Grail of this movement is evidence that dinosaurs and humanity lived side by side, as they surely must have if a) dinosaurs were real and b) Genesis is literally true. 

I honestly don't really get this line of thinking—if we found a living dinosaur in the Congo tomorrow, I can't imagine scientists declaring the theory of evolution suddenly null and void or mass conversions to Christianity—but I've long been fascinated with it anyway, mostly because the idea of relict dinosaurs is awesome.

And so, Creationists have interpreted various mentions of serpents and monsters in the Bible as references to dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures, as unlikely as such a reading might be, and they  also looked to worldwide folklore about dragons as additional circumstantial evidence that dinosaurs and humanity must have once co-existed...and gone so far as to suggest that maybe some dinosaurs even breathed fire, as a way to explain why the dragons of legend did so (This is why it was important for Senter to note that the concept of the dragon gradually emerged from that of the snake or serpent; similarly, the idea of their breathing fire emerged from the venomous nature of many snakes or the ancient idea of "breathing fire" as a metaphor for causing harm).

And they've also glommed on to any ancient art they can find that might seem to suggest someone somewhere had once seen a living dinosaur, like the presence of the sirrush on the ancient Babylonian Ishtar Gate alongside other, inarguably real animals. ("Evidence" of the co-existence of dinosaurs and humanity that I was familiar with from reading about cryptozoology in the past.)

Here, Senter basically sets-up various suggestions, theories and supposed evidence of the Creationists, and then immediately knocks them down, and does so for the rest of the book. Some of this honestly gets a little tedious. 

There's a section on chemically dating fossils that was far more science-y than I was interested in, for example. And chapter eight, "Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?", discusses the biological impossibility of a living thing producing fire without badly burning and/or blowing itself up in the process. It does so by running through six different "fire-production" hypotheses and four different "functional morphology" hypotheses, which all fall into a predictable, repetitive formula of a) Here's what they say b) Is it possible? c) No. 

I found the last few chapters, in which Senter looks at particular passages from the Bible and explains what they were actually referring to, as opposed to accounts of living dinosaurs, much more compelling. Similarly, I enjoyed the survey of history and folklore on the idea of dragons, and the examination of dinosaur-like creatures in ancient art. 

Senter has an amusing habit of mentioning the profession and credentials of various Creationists while discussing something they have said, noting that one is an electrician by training, for one example, or that another has a doctorate...but it's in dentistry. This can seem a little like a passive-aggressive way of dismissing their supposed expertise in matters of biology and geology. 

Of course, Sentel is, according to the back cover copy, a professor of zoology at Fayetteville State University with degrees in biological sciences and theology. He therefore seems well credentialed to write on the subject of how no, there aren't actually dinosaurs in the Bible and that of course humans and dinosaurs never co-existed, and I can't really blame him for wanting to twist the rhetorical knife that he sticks in what are essentially interested amateurs with agendas when they attempt to interpret areas of his expertise. 

While I can't honestly say that I loved every chapter and every paragraph of his book, I'm glad Sentel wrote it, and I was happy to read it. In fact, I fairly devoured it.  

Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds (Avid Reader Press; 2025) I was giving a work friend a ride home one night, and she saw this book sitting on my passenger seat. She asked if I listened to author John Fugelsang's podcast, as she recognized his name. Apparently, her mom is a fan. 

I do not. I had no idea who Fugelsang was when I picked up the book. Instead, I was drawn in by the clever title (which I'm actually kind of surprised hasn't been used before), the bold colors and the great cover design. That was enough to interest me in a book on a subject that I am obviously already interested in (see the The Bible Says So above, which covers similar ground, albeit in a less acerbic—and less funny—way). 

As I would later discover, Fugelsang is a comedian, actor, broadcaster, host and all-around media personality. This explains why there were so many blurbs from so many diverse celebrities on the back cover (Willie Nelson, Nick Offerman, Patton Oswalt, Jon Cryer, etc.) and, of course, why so much of the book is so funny.

The long-ass sub-title explains the gist of the book. It is fifteen chapters each devoted to a fairly broad subject of a true or real form of Christianity (that is, following the words and teaching of Christ) vs. what passes for "Christianity" in politics and the media these days. The titles of these give you a pretty good sense of what Fugelsang covers:  "An Inconvenient Jew", "Paul, Jesus's PR Man, Who Is Not Jesus" and "Master-Race Christians Of The Twenty-First Century, And How To Debate Them". 

Most of them take the "Thou Shall Not" form of a commandment, though, such as "Thou Shalt Not Take All Of This Too Literally", "Thou Shall Not Hate The Gays", "Thou Shalt Not Kill People Who Kill People To Prove Killing People Is Wrong" and so on, with only one of them be a "Thou Shalt" imperative rather than a "Thou Shalt Not"; that is "Thou Shalt Let Go Of Thy Hang-Ups.")

The book begins with a great 18-page introduction in which Fugelsang tells his own story, which gives him a degree of authority to speak on matters of organized religion...and makes for a decent argument about following the spirit of the faith more than the rules. 

"I'm here because two people broke a promise to God," is the first sentence of the book. He then goes on to explain that his mother became a nun and his father a Franciscan brother, both of them pretty much right out of high school. Despite their plans for their respective lives, they met, became friends, fell in love and eventually left their vocations to marry and have kids.

They didn't leave their faith, however, and Fugelsang writes:

I was taught—relentlessly—that Christianity was about the things Jesus prioritized: Service to others. Forgiveness. Caring for the poor, the sick, the stranger, the prisoner. Fighting injustice with nonviolence, like Dr. King and Gandhi. Standing up for the less fortunate, like Dorothy Day and Catholic Charities. Love. Empathy. Compassion. And go wash your hands, we're leaving for Mass in five minutes.

Of his parents, he wrote that, "My parents presented as Republicans, identified as Independents, and lived like closeted Democrats."

While I was raised in the Catholic church, my parentage was nowhere nearly as dramatic as his. But there is a point in his backstory that resonated with me.

After noting that, while growing up, he had no idea what Roe v. Wade was, nor that abortion was "splitting and redefining American Christianity", he eventually found himself exposed to many interviews with men on the news who were introduced as "Christian leaders."

But these Christians didn't talk about helping the poor, welcoming the stranger, or fighting injustice. They never mentioned the evils of racism. They didn't quote scripture to justify the need for all of us to take care of the least of us.

...

These right-wing Christian media stars preached the virtue of forcing poor pregnant women to give birth against their will, that they might experience substantially greater poverty and greater risk to their health. They warned us that any government programs that actually helped the poor were "communist." They expressed outrage at protests against racism, while never denouncing actual racism. They always punched down—always attacking the poor, the addicts, the migrants at the border, and a gay minority they assured me the Bible condemned, somewhere.

...

Watching TV news was the first time I became aware of Christianity as a political force in my country, but it was a Christianity I couldn't understand. I didn't have the words to express it, but it was awkward to be told I was the same religion as these men. 

I didn't start paying attention to the news until some years after Fugelsang, in the later nineties and much more intensely in the '00s, but I had pretty much the same reaction. The public Christianity in the national discourse was anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-poor, completely aligned with the Republican party...and deeply embarrassing. At least as reflected through the national media, Christianity sure as hell didn't look like a club any decent person would want to be a part of.

It was weird, because pretty much all I was taught about at school and from the pulpits of my church was Jesus and what he said and did, and if all you knew about Christianity was the Golden Rule—"Do unto others as you would have done unto you"—that it was pretty obvious there was something wrong with the version of Christianity on the news. 

It wasn't until I was much older that I understood where things like opposition to homosexuality came from, cherry-picked by bigots from Old Testament law books like Leviticus, every other rule of which those same people conveniently ignored, and the letters of Paul (ditto). The right-wing Christianity of my lifetime seemed to have a lot more to do with the Old Testament, the letters of Paul and, occasionally, the Book of Revelation than what one might expect to be the heart of Christianity, based on the name—you know, Christ.

Fugelsang's chapter on Paul, which, again, is called "Paul, Jesus's PR Man, Who Is Not Jesus", makes that point well. And, like all of the book, does so with a clarity and wit. Though something of a primer on Christianity, how (and sometimes why) it's been perverted by the national far-right and how to successfully argue about particular subjects with friends, co-workers, relatives and anyone else you might wish to engage, Separation of Church and Hate is a fun, funny and overall light read.

I was frankly a bit disappointed that the entire book didn't read exactly like the introduction and some other passages of the book did. Fugelsang is a pretty great writer and is good at telling a story. Still, the book is repeatedly broken into what look like Internet-friendly pieces, like "Five Basic Jesus Facts That Sunday School Missed" (Number three is "Yes, Jesus was a liberal," while number four is "He's kind of conservative, too") or "The Top 3 Right-Wing Arguments About Jesus". There's a lot of parts that begin with a section labeled "The Claim" and then answers it. There are pithy section headers. There are lots of sidebars. And there are some perhaps too-cute pages, which are nevertheless true.

Of this last, one example that come immediately to mind is a page with a border distinguishing it as a sidebar in the chapter "Thou Shalt Let Go of Thy Sex Hang-Ups".

Along the top of the page is a big, bold heading reading, "Everything Jesus Ever Said About Premarital Sex, Birth Control, Gay Sex, Any Form of Sodomy, And/Or Masturbation"

The rest of the page is filled with blank lines (see, he didn't say anything about any of that stuff!), save for the middle, which quotes Matthew 7: 1-2, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

(This bit actually reminded me of The Wisdom of Lobo, which was packaged in a 1993 slipcase with Lobo: The Last Czarnian and Lobo's Greatest Hits. It was a completely blank book; an effective gag, but no doubt annoying to those who preordered it, I imagine. I remember hearing a conversation between the guy who ran the Ashtabula comic shop at the time talking to a customer and giving him a discount, as he felt badly about the blank book being included).

I am writing this some months after first reading it, which is not the ideal way to discuss a book. Current Caleb sees that Past Caleb has bookmarked several pages though, so those must be things Past Caleb thought a future Caleb should mention.

•In the chapter on Paul, there's a heading that says simply "God-Breathed", and discusses the fact that since "Jesus doesn't really allow his followers to get away with homophobia and misogyny the way Paul does", "a particular kind of right-wing Christian" needs to find "detours around Jesus" in the Bible, and they landed on giving Paul's letters about Jesus the same authority as the words of Jesus. They do so thanks to passage in one of those letters, 2 Timothy 3:16, which states that "All Scripture is God-breathed." Of course, that introduces a bit of a logic problem, as when Paul wrote those words, his letter wasn't yet considered scripture by anyone. "It's like saying Roger Ebert's review of The Godfather is now officially part of The Godfather's script," Fugelsang writes.

•In the chapter "Master-Race Christians, And How to Debate Them", Fugelsang writes that "the two most dominant forces within right-wing Christianity are fundamentalism and Christian nationalism." Of the latter, he writes that it is "like marching the Bill of Rights and the New Testament out into the woods, at gunpoint, together, and digging two holes." That's some colorful symbolism!

•In "Thou Shalt Not Take All of This Too Literally," Fugelsang shares a quote from author and theologian Keith Giles, one of the many more-expert-than-him-experts he consults throughout. Says Giles: 

We're called to follow Christ, not the Bible. In fact, please understand this: the Bible does not tell us to follow the Bible. The Bible tells us to follow Christ. But Biblical Christians follow the Bible. They do not in fact, attempt to follow Christ

That's a pretty important distinction. 

•From "Thou Shalt Not Hate the Gays":

You'd think that teachings like "Judge not, lest you be judged," or "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you," or even "Love your neighbor as yourself" would pretty much cover "don't be a total dick to gay people." But not to Christian homophobes.

...

There are less than ten references to homosexuality in the Bible have been twisted to serve a prejudice that's directly at odds with the teachings of Jesus. And yet, Christianity has allowed the homophobes to set terms that Jesus himself clearly rejected.

If anyone's trying to use the Bible to justify any meanness to LGBTQ people, they've always got to go around Jesus. Being gay is natural, hating gays is a lifestyle choice.

•"Thou Shalt Not Hate the Gays" also includes something from Matthew 19 I don't recall hearing before...certainly not at Fugelsang explains it. Matthew 19: 4-6, which is often used to justify marriage as being between one man and one woman (Um, forget all that polygamy in the Old Testament, I guess). 

Later in that same chapter, Jesus discuses "three different types of men who will not be marrying women", for whom he uses the umbrella term "eunuch:

Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The ones who can accept this should accept it" (Matthew 19:11).

The second and third types of eunuchs seem pretty obvious, but what of that first type? Fugelsang says Jesus isn't referring to "those astronomically rare boys born without genitals" but "the men who, since birth, are clearly never going to be marry women."

So, is Jesus saying that there are men who will never marry women, and, further, that they were born that way...?

"The one chapter used to argue that Jesus opposed gay marriage is the same chapter where Jesus says, calmly and matter-of-factly, that gay men are born that way," Fugelsang writes. "Jesus asserts some boys are born who will never be interested in girls, that they are the minority, and that God made the that way. And nobody bats an eye at this...Jesus then leaves it at that and moves on to pray with some kids. Because Jesus knows that, hey, some guys aren't into women, and it's not that big a deal. Because Jesus, time and again, refuses to be a dick."

This makes me want to consult a couple of different Bibles to see the exact language they use for this passage. I'm also curious about the use of the word "eunuch", and I wonder if it is always the particular word that is used, or if it differs in different Bibles, and if it has changed over the years...

This chapter also talks about two examples of what look suspiciously to modern eyes like gay relationships in the Bible, that between David and Johnathan from the Book of Samuel and the story of the Roman centurion and his servant from Matthew and Luke. As a comics reader familiar with fandom, this reminds me a bit of shipping. That is, the text doesn't say either pair is actually a romantic couple, but if you want to think there are, well, it also doesn't explicitly say they are not, and there's some evidence to marshal, if one is so inclined. 

•Did the Jews kill Jesus? In "Thou Shalt Not Hate Jews, Muslims, Or Even Atheists", Fugelsang says sure, but not just the Jews. The Romans did the dirty work. And there were plenty of others involved, too.

[A]fter the Romans killed Jesus, they took over his operation, and eventually the Holy Roman Empire rewrote the Jews as the real bad guys. And you've probably never heard anyone try to blame the Italians for killing Jesus. And they shouldn't. I've got relatives who would have heart attacks.

The truth behind the story of Jesus's death is that there were many different participants in his killing—the government, the military, some of the religious bosses, the citizens—even his own friends who denied him and sold him out.

I've always thought the death of Jesus was like a spiritual game of blackjack. When the hand came down, the Romans hit, Judas doubled his bet, Jesus surrendered, the apostles just stood, and Peter split.

Me, I don't know anything about blackjack.

"The point of the story is that everyone killed Jesus; all of them," Fugelsang concludes. "And then Jesus comes back and forgives everyone." 

Okay, that's enough bullet points from Past Caleb's bookmarking.

Read straight through, the book can feel a little disjointed and even a bit repetitive. That said, one need not sit down and read it straight through. Because Fugelsang organizes the book so that each chapter tackles a different subject, it's a very easy book to pick up, read for a bit and set down for a while before picking up again, if one is so inclined. It's a great book for casual reading and it also works as a sort of reference book. 

For example, is someone on Facebook or at your Thanksgiving table talks about how Jesus would be opposed to gun control? Well, you can pull Separation of Church and Hate off the shelf, consult "Thou Shalt Not Hate Gun Control or Worship Warrior Bro-Dude Jesus" and then explain the rest of the chapter and the full story around the verse about swords they have probably cherry-picked to make their point.

*So-called because its version of Jeremiah 8:22 is "Is there no treacle at Gilead?", which doesn't sound quite as right as the more familiar "Is there no balm in Gilead?", does it...?