Hostage - August/September 2025 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest
Also, Some Thoughts on NGOs
Hello, everyone! We had a couple of new people this month, which was great! We spent some time discussing our history as a group and how we choose what we read. Three of us turned out to be comic creators, so we traded information about our creative approaches and collaborators. We digressed for a bit to talk about movies, and Superman (2025) turned out to be quite divisive. Lol I’m looking forward to more people showing up now that summer is winding down.
In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on NGOs
I felt the need to apologize once again, as I didn’t realize how long this comic was when I originally selected it. Everyone finished it, though! Some people plowed through it in less than a day, whereas I found it too harrowing to read in one sitting. We all enjoyed it and found it an inherently compelling read, and some were prompted to seek out more of Guy Delisle’s work. All of us understood how impossible Christophe André’s situation was and agreed with every choice he made, as difficult as they were. The immediacy of the narrative with no greater context made it easier to relate to the roller coaster of emotions he experienced, too. His bravery at the end was astonishing! I joked that I learned a few things about Napoleonic military history, which led to each of us talking about what we would recall to stay sane under similar circumstances (some examples were Simpsons quotes, superhero comic storylines, and Bette Midler movies). Our theater devotees thought this would make a great play, but we also talked about what made this story unique for the comics medium, such as the depiction of time passing. The art style was cartoonier than expected, but that helped in making the protagonist relatable to the reader.
Our next meeting will be Wednesday, September 17 to discuss Gaytheist.
What We're Reading
September 17 - Gaytheist/Growing Up, and Getting Out by Lonnie Mann (and Ryan Gatts)
October 15 - Trese, Volume 1: Murder on Balete Drive by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo
November 19 - Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson
December 17 - Holiday break (tentative)
January 21, 2026 - Berlin by Jason Lutes (tentative)
Next month’s selection is absent on hoopla, but there are physical copies available from the library and it’s available in its entirety on Webtoon under its original title. I forgot to finalize the end of the year because I was so excited about having new people, but we’ve got time. We were able to read Hostage in the space of a normal month, so maybe we can squeeze in another 500-page comic after all. I don’t know if I want to subject anyone to that, though.
About What We’ve Read
Hostage was nominated for the Doug Wright Award for Best Book and was an Honor Book for the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, both in 2018. It was covered by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and NPR. Guy Delisle was interviewed by The Comics Journal and Smash Pages about his process and career.
I tried to find contemporaneous news accounts of Christophe André’s kidnapping, but that was more difficult than I anticipated. If you want to learn more about Doctors Without Borders, you can visit here and here.
The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, September 12.
Shameless Self-Promotion
My professional badge application for New York Comic Con was approved! I’ve never been to this convention and I’m excited to go. I’m looking forward to meeting people I’ve interacted with online and I’ll be reuniting with some old friends as well. This will be in October, so there will be photos per tradition.
I entered the Mad Cave Talent Search again after taking last year off. The deadline is tonight at 11:59 pm, and I barely made it. I got a lot of great feedback from friends on my submission but I know it’s a crowded field. Fingers crossed!
I submitted a pitch to an anthology looking for short cosmic horror stories. I may go ahead with my idea regardless of whether it gets accepted.
I have another speaking engagement coming up in November. I’m not sure how much I can share about this yet, but expect updates.
Rise of the Flightless is still running its campaign! It includes a four-page comic I wrote with art by Ryan “Dougal” Devine and letters by Luke W. Henderson. Luke put the whole thing together, and they did a phenomenal job. Check it out for an awesome preview! Pricing starts at only $1 and it helps raise money for the Antarctic Science Foundation. It’s only available in the United States for now.
The digital version of Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is available! I’ve seen the whole thing, and anyone who supported this campaign is in for a treat.
Prism is finalizing its printing, but it’s available for preorder.
The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It’s gone into a second printing!
Some Thoughts on NGOs
I often use this space to process my old ways of thinking as an evangelical. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are another seemingly innocuous topic about which the evangelical opinion might surprise some people. They are seen as bad, even insidious, despite for the most part being charitable organizations trying to promote better living conditions for people in need.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one can have about NGOs: how they can interfere with or undermine local efforts, how they can become beholden to the corporate interests of their donors, or how their public-facing representatives can become self-centered glory hounds in their own right. (That Wikipedia page for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières that I linked to above has a whole “Ethical concerns and criticism” section.) The main critiques of the evangelical church I attended had nothing to do with any of this.
The problem with NGOs that my church had was twofold: that they supplanted the work of the church and that they undermined the work of the church. The first was by providing charitable services that churches should provide, thus making people less dependent on them; the second was by making people’s lives better so that they felt no need to seek out the church in the first place.
The great irony of churches objecting to NGOs because they compete with the work of the church is that many of these churches are more focused on protesting abortion or dismantling LGBTQ rights than on materially improving the lives of their congregants or the public at large. The loudest protestors against the March of Dimes or the Red Cross are rarely from churches with soup kitchens or clothing drives, but they definitely see blocking access to a Planned Parenthood or disrupting a gay wedding as “the Lord’s work.”
Also, uplifting people who are struggling is hardly a zero-sum game. There’s no reason why a church and an NGO can’t work together to achieve the same goal, but this partly gives the game away. The church can refuse to do any difficult work while absolving themselves of this refusal by saying they don’t want to sully their Christian service by working alongside heathens.
This is all to obfuscate the deeper, worse reason why some evangelical churches object to NGOs: they don’t want to make people’s lives better. They adhere to a strict Reformational theology of Luther and Calvin that says human misery leads to salvation and anything that improves someone’s life runs the risk of distracting them from having a relationship with God. Much has been written about how “the cruelty is the point” in the current political climate; for these people, the cruelty has a divine mandate.
My church would probably insist that this is a misrepresentation and that, while desperate circumstances are what help a person become a Christian and therefore allows them to go to Heaven when they die, it is against Christ’s teachings to actively harm or immiserate someone. But their inaction is a pretty big loophole, and let’s not forget that the typical evangelical response to a tragedy is to blame the victims or gay people or feminism or whatever.
I know my old church is hardly representative of all of Christendom or even Christianity. The Night Ministry does good work here in Chicago (but if I’m wrong, please let me know!), although don’t get me started on The Salvation Army. I’ve told friends that I’m more of a follower of Jesus now than I was when I was a Christian, and this is one of the ways that’s true.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Have you ever worked with an NGO? What was the experience like? I created a whole sitcom based on my various nonprofit work. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Gaytheist/Growing Up, and Getting Out by Lonnie Mann and Ryan Gatts!