Soulfinder: Demon’s Match
By: Rj Carr
Tags: Comic Books, Catholic, Writing Life, Independent Publishing, Comics

I spoke with Douglas Ernst about his project and learned that the world of good priests who fight bad spirits is not one the comic book industry wants to enter.

“I want to write a comic book that shows what I wish the comic book industry would return to. Heroes with a functioning moral compass, that are good men. I wanted to actually have priests in the book where it did not turn out that they were the bad guys. They were not that twirling mustache villain who hurts people.”

He found he has a form of pariah status in the comic book industry for his criticism of the prevailing moral relativism. He says that now the good guys are actually more like bad guys that do good things instead of the traditional aspect best described in the old superman series “Truth, Justice and the American way.”

Crowd funding the first outing of this project, he sought out to create a dramatic, visual, glossy comic book style of spiritual adventure.

This is not the St. Francis comic published by Marvel in the 1980’s that told the story of that popular saint, but more like Fr. Retter meets the Cobra and fights demonic forces for salvation of the people of Steepleton, Maryland.

“First and foremost I am writing,” Douglas explains. “I want to tell an entertaining story that is wholesome, but I want to put stuff in there that they want to mull it over and will say: ‘Is that real about the Catholic church?’and then go to Google and see those are actually exorcism prayers.”

The story is theologically dead on accurate. Granted, I am not an exorcist and do not want to be one, but the theory is real.

“The modern society is ‘we don’t like Christians’ but instead of going all atheist it is ‘we like the crystals, we like astral protection and we like the spiritual but not religion kind of thing’,” Douglas explained. “They have that yearning in their hearts of this subconscious understanding that we are not just sentient carbon and water creatures or something by accident. They are replacing it with these things in which they dismiss ‘Oh, it is innocent and it’s a joke’ but that is how this stuff starts.”

He purposely puts coded messages in the story to deepen the comprehension of spiritual warfare that is often not understood, even by church leaders. The priest suffers a reprimand by his bishop who is happy to have an exorcist in his diocese in Fr. Retter as long as he does not do exorcisms. His name: Randolph Herbert Beige the name on the diploma on the wall in his beige office.

Douglas explains: “Bishop Barron talks about beige Catholicism where you go to these churches and you do not know if it is Catholic and they have these beige walls. It was watering down the Church and trying to make inroads in the culture. If you look at the back at the diploma in the frame, I think actually it was in the University of Bovine where he got his degree, his last name is Beige so anyone who is looking closely at that if they read Bishop Barron’s work that is my nod to Bishop Barron and his teaching on beige Catholicism.”

Douglas also uses a library as a backdrop to a black mass.

“We held that black mass in the library for people for whom that search for knowledge becomes an idol.” He explained that learning and seeking to learn more, of course, is good, but when it becomes so encompassing it becomes too much which is a bad thing.

Again, this is not far from the truth. There is a university course where the professor teaches budding community organizers Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals even though Alinsky praises Lucifer in the dedication. Catholic graduate students absorbed the book without thinking of its impact on their own spirituality. Learning that it was being used as a playbook to organize against the Catholic Church, I warned that the university will see some demonic manifestation on that campus somewhere. Later the administrators had a PR battle on their hands when other students decided to hold a black mass at a campus pub. University officials admitted in their struggle to deal with free expression that the black mass is historically about denigrating the Catholic Church. The event was eventually canceled but not before other Catholics held a Eucharistic procession to a Catholic Church outside the walls of the University.

It is this principle that Douglas and his team portrayed so well in Soulfinder: Demon’s Match: people opening themselves to dark forces thinking they are harmless.

Fr. Retter becomes a protégé of an old hand at exorcism, a former Army Catholic priest chaplain, Fr. Reginald Crane, who dealt directly with the demonic in Vietnam. He shares his experience with the young exorcist as he struggles with obstacles to his work freeing the town of its manifestation activity.

The story seems to be a new type for the genre of comic book and clearly has an entertaining story and a message for those who think of Catholicism as just another philosophy among many.

The series will actually be coming out in the future when Douglas creates and publishes the next chapters publicly. The next episode will center on the Eucharist in a powerful race between good and bad forces. In the meantime, it seems that a new genre of evangelism is coming to the Catholic world, the Catholic Adventure Story in comic form.

You can find more information on Douglas Ernst work on his youtube channel embedded above and his patreon channel linked here.

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