Denver Newsroom, May 5, 2020 / 02:52 am (CNA).- Pope St. John Paul II, who led the Catholic Church from 1978 until his death in 2005, is perhaps one of the most compelling figures of the 20th century.
Born nearly 100 years ago on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, Poland, Karol Woytila— the future pope— endured the loss of most of his family, clandestinely studied for the priesthood while his country was under Nazi rule, and rose through the Church hierarchy while never ceasing to encourage his Polish countrymen to keep the faith while resisting Communist pressure.
He participated in the Second Vatican Council and, upon his election as pope, became the most widely-traveled pontiff ever and likely the most-seen person in the history of the world. He was an academic, and widely regarded as a genius, but also a man of simplicity and humility.
He survived a brutal assassination attempt in 1981, crediting Mary’s intercession for his survival and extending forgiveness to his attacker.
“He’s the exemplar of the fact that a life wholly dedicated to Jesus Christ and the Gospel is the most exciting human life possible,” George Weigel, John Paul II’s biographer, told CNA.
“This man lived a life of such extraordinary drama that no Hollywood scriptwriter would dare come up with such a storyline. It would just be regarded as absurd.”
His compelling life story has been told and retold many times, including on the big screen.
But did you know that John Paul II’s life story was once the subject of a Marvel comic book?
Printed in full color and featuring dramatic, stylish visuals, the 1982 comic chronicles the pope’s life, from his childhood in Poland all the way up to the attempt on his life by a would-be assassin.
Marvel, which Disney purchased in a multi-billion dollar acquisition in 2009, is one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, and the purveyor of such iconic characters as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Captain America.
So what persuaded the Marvel executives to green-light a comic book about the then newly-elected pope?
‘Marvel’s Man in Japan’
It all started with Gene Pelc— a New Yorker and Marvel representative living in Japan.
Pelc— whose wife is Japanese— had moved to Japan in the 1970s in order to report back to Marvel on how the comic book company could adapt its products for a Japanese audience.
Pelc was tasked with licensing Spider-Man to play on Japanese television, and was largely successful at what he did, earning the moniker “Marvel’s Man in Japan.”
Pelc told CNA that he and his family went— and still go— to Mass at the Franciscan Chapel Center, a community of English-speaking priests in Tokyo.
Japan was then— and remains today— a very non-Christian country, with Catholics comprising less than half of 1% of the population.
One day, a priest named Father Campion Lally approached Pelc at the Franciscan Chapel Center with an unusual proposition. The eight-hundredth anniversary of St. Francis’ birth was coming up in 1982, Fr. Lally said…what if, to commemorate it, Marvel produced a comic book about the life of St. Francis?
Pelc liked the idea, and wondered whether it would prove popular amongst Catholics in the US. Fr. Lally was adamant, however, that the comic be marketed to non-Catholics as well.
“The real reason I want this done is to reach an audience the Church doesn’t normally reach,” Pelc remembers Fr. Lally saying.
“’I want to take St. Francis out of the birdbath’ was his exact comment.”
Pelc called up Stan Lee— a legendary Marvel comic book publisher— who apparently liked the idea. But when Pelc pitched the idea to the higher-ups at Marvel, they weren’t quite so supportive at first.
“They all said: Gene, you’ve been in Japan too long. No one wants to hear about that. They want to hear about superheroes,” Pelc remembers the executives telling him.
Pelc was able to appeal to the financial sensibilities of the executives to help his case, however— the Paulist Press, a U.S.-based Catholic publisher, had expressed interest in purchasing some 250,000 copies of the comic upon its release.
Needless to say, the prospect of a minimum of 250,000 copies sold— when a popular comic at the time could be expected to sell around 150,000 copies— was enough to sway the executives to approve the project.
Father Roy Gasnick, a Franciscan priest and director of communications based in New York, helped Marvel writer Mary Jo Duffy to write the story of St. Francis’ life for the comic. Fr. Gasnik was, by all accounts, a massive comic book fan himself.
Then the artists at Marvel did their magic, and produced the comic entitled “Francis: Brother of the Universe,” which hit stores in 1980.
Helped by the Paulist Press’ large order, “Brother of the Universe” proved to be a hit, both critically and commercially.
A new project
“The next step was pretty obvious to me, being Catholic and being Polish,” Pelc said.
“Pope John Paul II was extremely popular in the world at the time; he was traveling much more than the old popes did previously. And he was actually coming to Japan.”
John Paul II was the first pontiff to visit the country. The pope arrived in Japan in February 1981, to a small but enthusiastic welcome.
The pope’s visit galvanized Pelc, who was still riding high on the success of the St. Francis comic. He began looking into the possibility of producing another religious-themed comic for Marvel.
A friend of Gene’s introduced him to Father Mieczyslaw Malinski, who was a friend of the pope’s back in Poland during the war. Fr. Malinski apparently consulted with the pope himself about what he thought about the idea of turning his story into a comic.
According to Pelc, John Paul II was supportive of the idea, as long as Fr. Malinski himself worked with the comic book team on the project.
So, the Marvel team was off to the races yet again. The first step? Research. And a lot of it.
Most of the information came from Fr. Malinski, but the story still had to be adapted to fit into the panels and speech bubbles.
That task fell to Steven Grant, a young freelance comic book artist who at the time was living in New York and working for Marvel. He had heard that Marvel was producing a second religious-themed comic, but he didn’t think much of it— he assumed that Mary Jo Duffy would be tasked with writing this one, too.
Instead, Marvel’s editor-in-chief called Grant into his office and asked him to take on the task of writing the John Paul II comic book.
“I got involved because I was expendable at the time,” Grant told CNA.
“I wasn’t one of the artists they particularly wanted writing the Fantastic Four that month,” he laughed.
“And they knew I was Catholic— that was my big credential.”
For Grant, working on a comic book about John Paul II— which the team always referred to as “the Pope Book”— was both ordinary, in the sense that the writing process was not markedly different than other comic books; and extraordinary, given that the subject matter was not only a living person, but also the leader of a 1-billion strong worldwide religion.
“No one was worried about offending him, but there was a lot of room to offend a lot of people if we did a bad job with it,” he said.
Bumps in the road
The project experienced two major roadblocks the year before it was released, the first of which was the attempt on John Paul’s life in May 1981, in the midst of the comic’s production.
Instead of dropping the project, the Marvel team wrote the events of the assassination into the book itself.
In addition, communicating with Fr. Malinski would prove more difficult than the team at Marvel had expected.
On Dec. 13, 1981, a general named Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on television sets throughout Poland. In a video message repeated over and over again, the general declared martial law, and ordered troops to suppress the Solidarity movement, a trade union rooted in Catholic principles that opposed Communism.
Many striking Solidarity workers would die in the next few days, as Polish troops fired into groups of them.
After John Paul’s visit to his native Poland in 1979, it would be another decade before the Solidarity Party in Poland, with the pope’s encouragement, would finally gain a majority in Parliament, and, largely peacefully, the country would shrug off the shackles of Communism.
To make matters worse, the turmoil in Poland was taking place in the middle of the comic book’s production schedule, and the Marvel team needed Fr. Malinski’s insights in order to get the comic book written.
The Communists restricted much of the communications in and out of Poland during that time. Pelc said he remembers receiving smuggled communications from Fr. Malinski, which he brought to his father in New York to have translated from Polish to English.
Apart from Fr. Malinski’s contributions, Grant says he simply put his nose to the grindstone and read up on as much as he could about the pope’s life.
“It was a little pre-internet,” Grant chuckled.
“I figured anything I found three or four references to was probably accurate.”
His total research spanned about two months, he says, but the actual writing process was only a couple of weeks long, spurred on by Marvel’s tight production schedules.
Legacy
Finally, in 1982, the comic book hit the shelves. Thanks in large part to Catholic agencies buying up the edition, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million copies made their way into the world.
For a young comic book artist, it was quite the windfall. Grant said he was able to pay off his student loans when he received the royalties for the comic the following year.
So, did the pope himself ever get a chance to see himself as a Marvel hero? According to Pelc, he did. A Marvel executive flew to Rome and presented the pope with a leatherbound edition.
The success of the first two religious-themed comic books led to a third, this time about another future saint— and friend of John Paul’s— Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Although Pelc was not able to assist with that project, that comic also proved successful, though it was the last of the major religious-themed comics that Marvel produced. That comic even won a Catholic Press Association award in 1984.
In the four decades since the John Paul II comic book’s release, several members of the team that worked on it, including the artist who created the drawings, have died.
Pelc and Grant have gone their separate ways. Grant is still a freelance comic writer, and does writing work for Marvel “once in a blue moon” when they call him up.
Though the “Pope book” remains just one of the hundreds of projects that Grant has worked on over the years, he said he remembers walking into his local laundromat in New York a few months after the comic’s release, and being surprised to see the comic’s cover framed and hung proudly on the wall.
Though Grant never told the owners of the laundromat— clearly devout Catholics— that he was the author of the comic, he said it brought him pride that they valued it so highly.
Pelc, who still lives in Tokyo, owns a company that sells merchandise for musical artists. He said he still gets asked to this day— mostly by parishioners at the Franciscan Chapel Center— about Marvel’s religious comics, he says.
On the side, Pelc still has a passion for telling compelling Catholic stories. He is currently working on a book about the late 16th-century 26 Christian martyrs of Japan, and hopes eventually to adapt the story into a screenplay.
For his part, Pelc says he thinks it unlikely that a company like Marvel would produce something like this again. But he’s glad that by means of the “Pope book,” he and Grant and the entire team were able to tell a good story, in a world inundated by bad stories.
“That man deserved to be known by more than just people who go to church. He was an everyman pope, and I, being Polish, loved him,” he reflected.
Note: This story was adapted from an episode of Catholic News Agency’s podcast, CNA Newsroom. Click here to listen to the full story.
[…]
When Haley gets trounced in South Carolina- the State where she was governor – she will finally be consigned to the dustbin of history and seen as the fraud she was and the tool of the Wokes in the Republican Party.
But she will have served the unintended purpose of making Donald Trump a hero in the eyes of that many more voters who hadn’t totally lost their minds.
Trump owns the GOP. The religious right regards him as some sort of messianic figure, which is laughable but strangely true. The Republican Party has become a cult, much like the Peoples Temple with their very own Rev. Jim Jones.
The old guard Republicans like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are gone, replaced by sycophants who are almost robotic in their devotion to Trump. It’s bizarre how the GOP has become a personality cult like North Korea.
I don’t disagree. But the exact same thing could be said, say, for the Democrats and Obama, who was undeniably viewed as a sort of messianic figure (“which is laughable but strangely true”). Further, it could be argued, I think, that this messianic aspect has long been more pronounced in the Democrat party (FDR, anyone? JFK, anyone? Bill Clinton, anyone?). Meanwhile, that same party is surely controlled and populated by sycophants who are entirely robotic in their devotion to abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism. So, certainly, keep on beating on the “Trump is X, Y, Z” drum, but bear in mind that the real problem is not This Party or That Party, but what has become the basic American approach to politics.
Let’s not assume that because a voter supports Trump that he’s looking for a messianic figure. I have but one Messiah. He alone is the Christ. I have no illusions about the foibles of candidate Trump or anyone else for that matter. If a candidate promises to go after Deep State and dismantle it, he or she will get my vote every time. The same goes for those political pundits online who call out Deep State. They get the most traffic on their sites. The problem as I see it is out of control bureaucracies that conspire to tred on the inalienable rights of the citizenry.
I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans. I do not regard either of them as messiahs. Indeed, the best thing that can be said about Joe Biden is perhaps (not certain) he might be the classic “lesser of two evils.”
Perhaps we need to be a little cynical about politicians, you are correct,the Democratic Party is too beholden to gays, transgenders, abortion, etc. unfortunately, that is where they get much of their funding. The Republicans have been a little too welcoming to white supremacists, Neo fascists and others who do not deserve respect.
I wish that I had an answer, but our politics are a mess and neither party really represents the vast majority of the people. So, we are forced to hold our nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
Name a single white supremacist or neo-fascist for whom the Republican Party has ever “welcomed”. Just one single individual in any town, state, or public forum. Just one. Are you even aware of the hard core left-wing reality of fascism, or do you simply accept left-wing projections of their own evil, reinforced by a subservient media and academia?
Will, go forward and vote once more for your abortion-loving Biden.
“The republican party has become a cult”???? LOLOLOL!!!Thats just hysterical. Meanwhile, by my observation, it is the democrats and the left who are attempting to impose DEI, have tacitly approved anti-semitism in our colleges to witless students,have tried to eliminate the use of gas stoves and gasoline cars by average citizens, and allowed open borders to a flow of burdensome illegals who threaten to collapse our cities one by one under the financial burden they represent. In Bidens US, illegals come first. To the point of recently forcing NYC high school students to vacate their school so it could be used to house illegals who dont belong here in the first place. What about those crickets you hear from the Dems about the problem of more than 100,000 annual American fentanyl deaths and the sex trafficking which accompanies the wide open border? What about the needs of veterans and American poor in Chicago who are forced to the end of the line for services being prioritized for illegals. The bogus ploy of blaming republicans for this problem of illegals is an outright lie, since Trump managed to greatly reduce the problem while in office and in the face of DEM opposition who refused to fund the wall. BIDEN rescinded those rules and STOPPED building the wall on his FIRST DAY IN OFFICE. Every fentanyl death, every sex trafficked child, every homeless American denied services, every poor American aced out of a job in favor of an illegal has Biden and the dem party to thank. The blood is on their hands. It is a FACT that life was better when Republicans were in charge. Trump put AMERICANS first, as should every US President who is not bought and sold to the globalists or on a chinese payroll. And finally, it is always LEFTISTS Who feel a need to delete history and tear down statues and change history to suit their own new narrative. And to destroy those who refuse to go along. Think Hitler, Stalin, Mao. And , under WHOSE influence was the statue of Teddy Roosevelt removed from the Museum of Natural History for being “offensive”??? Average Dem voters should think long and hard about how their personal vote has damaged the country, our history and our national security and suppressed the freedoms we have been able to have—until now. Oh honey, if you think the Republicans are a cult, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
I seem to have hit a nerve. Quite a parade of right wing claptrap.
Log. Splinter. Eye. Etc.
Most of the posters seem to think that Trump should be canonized. Really?
The polarization and extremism on both ends of the political spectrum predates Trump by decades. Trump, in many ways, is only possible because of what the radical Dems (known now simply as “Democrats”) were doing for many, many years. That’s not a pro-Trump statement, but simply a fact. If Trump didn’t exist, he would have to be created, because the Bushes, Doles, and Romneys of the world proved that they were not going to ever doing anything to push back in any real sense.
Clap trap?? REALLY? Please provide any facts or proof of which item I mentioned is untrue. I won’t hold my breath. Leftists always limit their bomb-throwing to accusations or innuendo. They never HAVE any facts. Its too bad that so many Americans are gullible enough that they are sucked in by such tactics.
Will,
Is it that all “claptrap” is equal, but that some claptrap is more equal than others?
My own view of broad-band claptrap is shaped by the Spring of 2020 in Seattle when protesters seized several blocks of central Seattle for several weeks, even occupying a police precinct station. Fire and emergency aid trucks were unable to break through and there was at least one shooting, and a few deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest
During the first morning in Seattle, the ultra-liberal mayor was heard over the radio likening the insurrection to a “block party” and appealing to the mobbed client group: “We gave you free college education; what more do you want?!” (a reference to free junior college in Seattle for all high school graduates, except those from Catholic schools).
Our Entitlements culture? And worse? A microcosm of the Liberal mindset as at least half of our national polarization?
In several liberal-mayor cities all hell broke loose in the Spring and Summer prior to January 6, 2021 in DC. My QUESTION is this: without these media-splashed precedents in liberal-mayor America, would January 6 even have been thinkable? As Congress then began its investigation of meltdown America, Speaker Pelosi ruled-out a broad-angle vision on the big picture and, instead, isolated January 6 for deserved but narrow-band attention.
Regarding candidate personalities, however, I do largely agree that what’s left of our Nation is faced with the choice—as Russell Crowe explained in “Master and Commander”—between “the lesser of two weevils.”
So you don’t like claptrap? Why not take the trapdoor out? Cannot find it? Try glasses. Watch for the twinkle of sense and glimmer from God above. Read Aquinas and grow.
Will, please. The anti-religious left embodies a robotic cult-like faith in inevitable progress and demands that every depraved idiocy they present as a “new idea”, leading to a greater liberations of humanity, for their betterment, thanks to their presumed superior insights. So presumptuously superior they believe themselves to be, every opponent to their elitist conceits becomes a target of unrelenting mendacious propaganda until all domains of human culture are forced into submissiveness, a tyrannical drama that has demonstrated original sin on a large scale for thousands of years. Trump, an anti-elitist and threat to their conceits, is currently a convenient target. For the religious left, evil is not personal. It is not sin. Leftists cannot conceive of the thought of their own sins. So they demand that everyone accept schemes of eliminating evil from the human condition through social engineering, not through religion. And many religious pretenders there are, who are robotically willing to side with them and join their cult.
The old GOP was not a really party of the working class and that’s what’s changed. The Establishment GOP is trying to hold on with a death grip but voters just aren’t buying it.
Party of the working class? They still push for more tax cuts for the rich. Oh, they beat up immigrants and gays to placate the populist right, but the primary goal is tax cuts for the rich.
The populist right gets bamboozled again and again by the GOP. The GOP is clever. Rant about transgenders, gays and immigrants, but be sure to cut taxes for the rich before anything else.
The culture wars are a bright, shiney object meant to distract the working class from the fact that their pockets are getting picked by the billionaires. So go ahead, rant about transgenders and Confederate statues and other distractions, but see how wages have stagnated fir 40 years and billionaires continue to get richer and richer. You fell for the big con.
“You fell for the big con.” And you have not?!?!? How do you not see both sides of a bigger picture? How old are you? Are you a Catholic?, Pro-life?, Believer in the Real Presence??
In three paragraphs you repeat the propaganda, five times, contrived to exploit hatred and¬ economic illiteracy regarding roll backs of unconstitutional confiscatory government taxation of employers and investors as “tax cuts for the rich” whenever those who already pay most of the taxes are not excluded from tax cuts for everyone.
Those who the willfully ignorant malign and slander as “the rich” ignore that they pay most of the taxes, but in the thought of amoral Marxist banditry this is never enough, even while it forces numerous businesses into bankruptcy. The slothful always conceive of employers as among “the rich”, even when the middle class and lower middle class who are employed by business and invest in them, along side “the rich”, are economically damaged as well by ever expanding economically crippling government tyranny.
Yawn. Nice DNC talking points. At least Republicans aren’t the ones grooming kids in our public schools, for one example.
Working class people understand there are more important things than money. And they understand disrespect and spin whether it comes from Democrats or the Establishment GOP.
With Trump one need separate the narcissism, bluster, insults from the incredible effectiveness in getting the job done as it should be. Our alternative is the continued corruption of America’s morals, life under antiChristian fascist despotism, death of a constitutional republic.
Furthermore while the incumbent is a disjointed bore, Trump is at least entertaining.
St. Donald of Mar A Lago, pray for us….Amen. “Incredible effectiveness?” In your own words you confirm the cult like status of the GOP.
Obviously, you’re a pro-abort. Were you not, you would not have allowed your thought to be so willfully ignorant of the simple reality that it does not require a deification of a personality to recognize the indisputable facts that the actions of Donald Trump, in court appointments, and fiscal appropriations, both domestic and foreign, including extensive reapportionments of existing expenditures, had the effect of saving more lives than the actions of any individual in human history. It requires moral cowardice to allow one’s self to be manipulated by the constant drumbeat of disinformation that characterizes Marxist pro-abortion legislation as child welfare legislation and moral opposition to them as “attacks against the poor.”
Trump is entertaining for a fact. So is Boris Johnson.
US politics are very changeable but some objective perspectives, from a non-US friendly observer, that will sustainably lend some balance, can be offered and be put in order.
The Democrat party has become one thing very exclusive and fixed; change here is for all practical purposes, not happening in time for the election or any time soon thereafter.
They feel both justified and adamant about this because it “represents” what they would say is “the great majority” and “the nation’s best interests”. Maybe they mean “the best majority”.
An earlier vision the Democrats would have had in its most ideal form, would have many laudable just aspects; however, these do not stand any chance with the party the way it is now.
Overlaying and inter-penetrating everything with the Democrats is the entrenched socialized policy of death-dealing in general along with abortion in particular; and inculturating of anarchism.
They are shielding death activists and anarchists.
Change-ups are possible in the Republican circuits and this party offers possibilities for representing many sides effectively. Can it make this into an good reality?
Trump’s public presentations set up instability. He conciliates homosexualitas privately at Mar-a-Lago but he can throw away Haley and dump on McEnany, at the drop of a hat, in public.
Trump had earlier ruled out Christie and got Pence as VP. Pence brought down the House in one fell swoop. Christie has now decided that homosexualistas are his group buds, just like Trump’s.
Some will thus always have an advantage with Trump knowing when to bow in or act and others will always be suffering slights and setbacks still not seeing where the blows will come next.
He wants to be credited with vanishing the Roe bogeyman but the result so far is that States rights have been confirmed yet still with no criminality on abortion -not even mentioned in Dobbs.
Not normal.
Kellyanne Conway is a formidable politician yet Trump has only ONE like her -her. What does he do? He attacks her husband.
There are many formidable politicians like her, men and women; but they are dumbed down among the Republicans. So it seems as very obvious. Glaring.
Conway is not pro-life but she excelled under Trump. If there is to be a true pro-life agenda these types of men and women must be pro-life and they must populate everything.
The ones I am talking about are pro-life and they come in great numbers. Where are they?
It’s true that it might not be possible to codify abortion into a federal law. At least not right now. But so what? What are you waiting for, for them to codify abortion!
In general, huge chunks of US policy are how they go because of a for-profit military complex, enormous debts, a monopolistic federal reserve structure, an established abortion complex. Etc.
Abortionistas.
And according to President Biden, because everyone should be Zionists. Zionistas.
Republican consensus of the recent past hasn’t proven to be CONSISTENT, even under President Trump. Or, there is some formidable consensus but even Trump ends up squandering it.
It could be he gets into such a dizzy centrifuging everything off from his place of conditioning, that he can’t identify the strong and weak points he has to capture from the real threats.
This morning I discovered that the REPUBLICANS in the South Carolina General Assembly were seeking to appoint James Smith, a Democrat and a friend of Biden, as circuit judge. You read that right, Republicans. At one time in South Carolina Republican meant prolife. No more. Mr. Trump made the Dobbs decision, which reversed Roe v. Wade, possible and for that reason I will vote for him in the SC primary and in the general election.