Oh wow! I'm definitely a bit jealous that you have a hard copy of ARTD—what a lucky first crowd-funding campaign! I'm sure the book is gorgeous.
And I don't mind the long comment at all; I really like hearing histories around internet communities & stuff like this, haha. I actually went in knowing that Lovely People was a very explicitly Christian comic (I think it's labeled more clearly on her website now), so I was braced for whatever that entailed—if I had been following her work for a long time, and I hadn't been braced for that, then I can definitely see being (understandably!) disappointed.
Coming in late to the game, without a personal stake in the matter, I was mostly just curious about the effect the conversion had had on her writing & art. I grew up in an evangelical community (though I haven't personally been any variety of Christian for a very very long time), and I'm sort of perennially obsessed with the question of, "why does so much evangelical art/literature/etc suck?" And there's a lot of reasons for that, but there's no inherent reason it couldn't be good. And I was curious if Sundberg would lean into the could-make-for-excellent-art elements of the faith, particularly since many adult converts I know have really interesting/unconventional ways of thinking about their faith. (Like, in terms of material: you basically have this trickster-god right here who shows up from nowhere, flexes on & bamboozles all the local authorities, cheats death, and disappears! You have all these beautifully-wrought passages where this all-powerful being is stanning for the most wretched, despised, and just plain broken people in this society—not just that but promising to make them mighty—that's so cool and interesting and radical, imho.) And these are all things that could resonate far more powerfully than the default "let's derail this plot with an instruction manual for salvation" thing that happened in Lovely People, and also in, like 99.9% of Christian bookstore output, haha. Like, I'm not inherently opposed to proselytization (people can peddle their religions if they want so long as I can ignore them, whatever), but at least don't go for it in such a boring, predictable, hackneyed way. (I guess it's a bit like leaving a fandom and still being salty that no one writes your fave properly, lol.)
But yeah, based on what I read, I'm unsurprised it caused a big schism in her fanbase, heh.
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Date: 2022-12-14 04:28 am (UTC)And I don't mind the long comment at all; I really like hearing histories around internet communities & stuff like this, haha. I actually went in knowing that Lovely People was a very explicitly Christian comic (I think it's labeled more clearly on her website now), so I was braced for whatever that entailed—if I had been following her work for a long time, and I hadn't been braced for that, then I can definitely see being (understandably!) disappointed.
Coming in late to the game, without a personal stake in the matter, I was mostly just curious about the effect the conversion had had on her writing & art. I grew up in an evangelical community (though I haven't personally been any variety of Christian for a very very long time), and I'm sort of perennially obsessed with the question of, "why does so much evangelical art/literature/etc suck?" And there's a lot of reasons for that, but there's no inherent reason it couldn't be good. And I was curious if Sundberg would lean into the could-make-for-excellent-art elements of the faith, particularly since many adult converts I know have really interesting/unconventional ways of thinking about their faith. (Like, in terms of material: you basically have this trickster-god right here who shows up from nowhere, flexes on & bamboozles all the local authorities, cheats death, and disappears! You have all these beautifully-wrought passages where this all-powerful being is stanning for the most wretched, despised, and just plain broken people in this society—not just that but promising to make them mighty—that's so cool and interesting and radical, imho.) And these are all things that could resonate far more powerfully than the default "let's derail this plot with an instruction manual for salvation" thing that happened in Lovely People, and also in, like 99.9% of Christian bookstore output, haha. Like, I'm not inherently opposed to proselytization (people can peddle their religions if they want so long as I can ignore them, whatever), but at least don't go for it in such a boring, predictable, hackneyed way. (I guess it's a bit like leaving a fandom and still being salty that no one writes your fave properly, lol.)
But yeah, based on what I read, I'm unsurprised it caused a big schism in her fanbase, heh.