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.
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Well, at least the cardinal proposes that Catholics should “stand” for something…
And, now since “we all have benefited from the renewal of the Church ushered in by the Second Vatican Council”–and everyone and even the notorious Pelosi and Biden et al now files up for Communion as a prelude to coffee and donuts–why shouldn’t this be characterized as just another “procession?”
Talk about a cardinal “drawing attention to oneself…”
As a former member of the archdiocese the only comment i can make is “how dare you Cardinal” tell the faithful that they MUST stand receiving the Body Blood Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Apparently the cardinal does not believe bowing or kneeling before the King is appropriate, rather, stand there and just reach out your hands to receive Him. Seriously, this cardinal needs to be removed by the Pope while I pray that he comes to his senses and a true Catholic shepherd.
Didn’t someone once say, “Every knee shall bow”? . . . Oh, yes! St. Paul, but he was, no doubt, one of those rigid backwardists.
Es importante recibir la comunión de rodillas y en la boca y no de pie y no en la mano,las partículas que se desprenden contienen el cuerpo completo de nuestro Señor,el modernismo o la forma no implica ningún avance en la evangelización al contrario ,promueve una falta de respeto muy grave que recae en el sacerdote y en los fieles,y claro el que está impedido físicamente debe permanecer de pie pero no recibir en la mano la santa comunión este fondo es importante y no lo que bruscamente opine el sacerdote conciliar
That certainly won’t happen in this pontificate. The Pope only has his knives out for liturgical traditionalists.
Unfortunately, Cupich and Francis are of one mind in this.
Or lack therif!
Cardinal Cupich seems to have a need to make a pronouncement every once in a while to remind us he’s still around.
About processions and positions and such, the cardinal’s timing (Dec. 11) almost seems intended to distract American attention from further antics by the puppet masters in Rome, to improve the position, so to speak, of the LGBTQ lobby–with a Jubilee 2025 networking celebration of their own in the Church of the Gesu (also reported on Dec. 11):
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/260989/organizers-and-supporters-reluctant-to-discuss-planned-lgbt-jubilee-day-in-rome
My lay comment is that this is not an outstanding comment if it’s in regards to kneeling. When I see someone kneel, which I’ve never seen take more than a few extra seconds for the able bodied, it does not appear to be drawing attention to the Communicant but to the Risen Lord Jesus in the Eucharist. (that person is not afraid to acknowledge the Savior)
Perhaps the most charitable response to reception of our beloved Jesus in Holy Communion is to follow his commandment – love God and love others. At a chapel I often attend, those who wish to receive Holy Communion while kneeling move to the front pews and kneel down signaling to the priest that there is a kneeling communion line, and the remainder of communicants form a communion line by standing. It seems to work, and honors both.
I can’t kneel due to knee issues, and I must choose to stand in line. At other churches, I’ve had several instances of almost toppling over the person in front of me as they unexpectedly kneel down. Since my knees are not the nimblest I’ve had to make a quick step back so as not to step on the kneeling person, causing me stress and pain in my knees and interrupting my prayer just before reception. Since I can’t kneel, it makes me embarrassed that others think I choose not to kneel since the person in front of me just did so (i.e., my depth of reverence is less than the one before me).
Again, there are many ways to show our deepest adoration of God, but we need to do so also being mindful of those around us. Surely, we can find a path that honors both.
Good points Sir, but don’t worry about what others think at this apex of the mass. As far as I’m concerned, they can dim the church lights and shine them only on the Eucharist reception area during communion.
The last will be first.
You don’t need to kneel because the person in front of you kneeled. It’s not being done to make a personal comment on you and the other communicants. In general, people aren’t paying as much attention to us as we imagine.
As far as the knee problems, quite a few people develop knee and/or back problems by the time they are middle-aged, and younger people who are active in sports or dance can have them too, so I would not feel too self-conscious about that. It’s a good idea to allow a little extra space in front of yourself when moving forward in a line.
When I find myself feeling self-conscious about what the people around me at Mass may be thinking about whatever I am doing–and those moments do happen– I remind myself to redirect my attention to the Lord and whether I am pleasing Him. Now, it could be that when you see someone kneeling before receiving the Eucharist, you feel inspired to make an extra sign of devotion too, although kneeling on the floor won’t work for you, so a reverent bow or slight genuflection is better. That is common at the Masses I attend.
When the hand to mouth option came along, we were taught to do as you said, bow as you near or genuflect, then step to the side, face the crucifix and eat the host, make the sign and move along.
The problem of people in front of you unexpectedly kneeling is a very good reason to provide kneelers. They aren’t particularly expensive, they allow people who are older or in poor health to kneel if they desire, and most churches already have them.
They also make it clear what the person is about to do so that the tendency to leave only a foot or less between the person ahead of you in a line is naturally reduced. You don’t have to think very hard to refrain from crowding a kneeler. It also clearly signals to everyone, priest included, that kneeling is going to happen, without the people who intend to kneel needing to remember to segregate themselves.
I’ve seen this done, and it seemed quite effective.
Of course he did. He’s a Protestant who obviously doesn’t believe in the Real Presence. God save us from wolves…..in wolves clothing.
In my youth in the 1950’s we knelt and received on the tongue from the priest’s consecrated hands. Belief in the real presence was near universal.
We now have what one priest commentator called “grab and go.” Belief in the real presence is less than 50%.
Actions have consequences.
Yes, especially the VII liturgical reform that Cardinal Cupich so endlessly idolizes.
Once again the diminutive Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago seized the opportunity to remind everyone of how truly insignificant he is in the grand scheme of things.
I’m just thinking about the insensitivity of current hierarchy figures pronouncing controversial statements during the Advent/Christmas season when people and families don’t need more stress but peace. It was also last year the Vatican came out with the homosexual blessing thing during this time. Come on! I wish they be more sensitive and consider their timing, they know what things are going to stir controversy.
I don’t understand the Cardinal’s argument
about not drawing attention to yourself or not impeding the flow of the procession.
In the local parishes I attend, some people kneel and some stand to receive Holy
Communion. So, where is the problem? It works smoothly this way. If I may speculate,
from what I observe, many who kneel are very devout and traditional – the very people the
Vatican targets. Could this be another attempt not only to wipe out the Latin Mass, but
any practice which has been associated with it?
Another fuhrerbefel from the windy city! Wonder how the Magi would feel, given that they did the right thing: They presented their gifts and knelt before Him in adoration!
The reform called for by Vatican II was to take place by everyone being more deeply educated about The Mass and other parts of the Church’s Liturgy. We have the education provided by Scripture, Tradition, and the Saints…and then everyone else all over the place. Teachings by JPII, Benedict XVI, Mother Teresa are obviously authentic, while this red-hat-wearing walks and “leads” in the way of the world, hostile to God.
It brings to mind the great words of Mother Angelica, speaking against another very worldly creature, when she said to the world, “My obedience in the diocese would be absolute zero,” (properly understood – “Do what they say, not what they do”).
She paid the price for her loyalty to our Saviour. But God Himself showed who spoke His Truth, and spoke for His Son authentically, sending the All Holy Virgin to perform the miracle of her healing before all the world.
He spoke very loudly, but few if any of our “leaders” listened.
Do what they say. But, as our Dear Savior continued, “…do NOT do what they do.”
They (may) receive the greater condemnation, teaching as doctrines the mere precepts of men…
I think this is the first salvo of the “liturgical reform” of “synodality” for a “participatory church” yada yada yada…. The closing document opened this door but left it undefined. I think Cupich is trying to fill in the lines. In other words, more Bugnini-type “liturgy from above” imposed as supposedly the will of the people and of the Spirit (with little evidence of either)
No priest or bishop can deny a person Communion if said person chooses to kneel. Roman Rite Catholics (should) have the option to do both, kneeling or standing. In the Byzantine Rite though, standing is the norm when receiving the Eucharist. Kneeling is gently discouraged. Some people might interpret it as Romans kneeling before the Cross, and Byzantines standing with the Risen Christ.
When in Byzantium, do as the Byzantines. When in Rome, do as the Romans. Standing is not our tradition, and while I always appreciate hearing and seeing what the other Churches do, I rather object to their traditions being used as an argument against ours. (I know you did not do this).
When meeting the Risen Christ, St. Mary Magdalen is typically portrayed (at least in the Latin tradition) as kneeling, often holding on to His feet. The meaning of kneeling is not restricted to penitential or sorrowful themes for us.
Cardinal Cupich long ago became a caricature of the sixties priest. Its a new century with ample ecclesial experience under our belts. Time to release youthful deceptions.
Jesus Christ is Lord and we provide Him all praise, honor, glory and joyful submission. No one with any faith or perception need provide any impediment.
Do you all realize how ironic Bishop Cupich’s Advent Declaration is? He castigates those who have the temerity to kneel while receiving the Body and Blood of Christ because by doing so they call attention to themselves. Yet, in Bishop Cupich’s Declaration he has done just that – called attention to himself. He always seems to stir the ecclesial pot with some stupid and unnecessary statement that gets him all the attention he seems to crave. I’d describe him as ‘puerile.’ Time for the episcopal nursing home.
Cardinal Cupich turned 75 earlier this year, and formally sent his mandatory letter of resignation to Pope Francis, so hopefully the Chicago archdiocese will have a better shepherd soon.
In our small parish (Liverpool diocese in England) almost one in ten choose to receive kneeling, and some more standing on the tongue, disturbance to the flow is negligible. Much more delay is caused by the two people who need low gluten hosts. I cause most problem because I currently have a balance problem and have to clutch the arm of someone else, delaying them and having to stand there while they receive. Also, as we have a narrow centre aisle obstructing the flow all the while I approach and return.
CLAPTRAP or Gobble-de-gook if you prefer!
Cupich is just another petty tyrant promoted way beyond his skill and abilities by a Pope hellbent on imposing his will on the “backwardist” and “rigid” Catholics.