Ontological fusion of reality and fiction: implicitly religious communication through comic strips

ABSTRACT Religious content may be communicated by means of a comic strip combining image- and text-based narration. The article focuses on the implicitly religious presentation of a completely profane image series through an analysis of a Czech comic strip about a club of five boys. As opposed to the interpretation of a comic strip as a fictive world with an ontological status of unrealised possibilities, this article prefers the category of a possible world realised through the reader’s experience. In this way, the distinctive world of comics provides a platform similar to the Platonic ideas or Jungian archetypes, linking the profane and sacred spheres. A completely non-religious comic strip created by an author indifferent to religion may thus be understood as a communication of the values and ideas of implicit religion.