The Religious Affiliation of
Curt Swan
comic book artist, known particularly for his decades drawing Superman

Above: Superman with artist Curt Swan. From: "I Flew With Superman!", published in Superman Annual #9, DC Comics: New York City (1983), page 7; written by Curt Swan, Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin; art by Curt Swan.

From: Curt Swan, "Drawing Superman," excerpt from Curt Swan: A Life in Comics (autobiography), 1986 (http://theages.superman.ws/swan.php; viewed 10 January 2006):

My family were serious, hard-working folk of Swedish stock. (Our name was originally Swanson, but some ancestor of mine, my grandmother, I think, decided to shorten it.) My father, John Swan, was born on a farm just across the Canadian border, in Saskatchewan. Later, he and his family moved back to Wilmer, Minnesota, a town about 60 miles from Minneapolis where the Swansons had originally settled before moving north. My mother grew up in a nearby town called Litchfield. She was a Hanson. Leotine Hanson. She worked for a while in a local hospital; my father was a railroad man. He repaired trestles.

We were raised Presbyterians, but my father could never quite make up his mind on a religion. I guess he was looking for something - or driven by something: the fear of the unknown, perhaps. He would drag us to a Methodist church one week, a Baptist church, the next. Since I was the youngest, he latched on to me and always took me along with him. I was a very religious person up until the age of 11 or 12, when my brother Lloyd and I began to lie on the grass out under the stars on long summer evenings, just talking about everything, deciding what we thought about things. I sort of lost interest in churches around that time. My brother was quite a philosopher.