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Established Oct. 7, 1999
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eNewsletter
No. 26
An occasional source of information about
legendary artist and writer Will Eisner
Watch for publication of the new authorized biography, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, by Bob Andelman, debuting in limited galley pre-release at Book Expo America (BEA) in New York City June 3-5, at San Diegos Comic-Con International July 14-17, 2005 and in bookstores on September 9, 2005 from Dark Horse Comics M press. But in the meantime, this newsletter and the official web site, http://www.aspiritedlife.com (which includes graphics) -- delivers the latest news about Eisner, his projects and his press clippings.
IN THIS ISSUE:
• Comic-Con International Tribute to Will Eisner: Complete Schedule of Events
• Peter David in CBG: Potential Pulitzer for Eisner?
• First Review of A Spirited Life
• The Education of a Comics Artist: New Book Features Eisner Interviewt
• More Reviews of Eisners Final Graphic Novel, The Plot
• Will Eisner in the News
• Whats in Will Eisner: A Spirited Life?
• Subsidiary Rights Information for A Spirited Life
• Will Eisner Links
COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL TRIBUTE TO WILL EISNER: COMPLETE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
The organizers of this years Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, promised that this years convention would honor the late Will Eisner and they werent kidding. More than 15 hours of Eisner-centric programming is on the schedule, as well as several more hours focused on people who began their careers working for Eisner. Heres a comprehensive look at all the Eisner events scheduled:
Thursday, July 14
1:00-2:00 Will Eisner: The Spirit of An Artistic PioneerPremiering a 45-minute preview of Andrew and Jon Cooke's documentary on Will Eisner. The film chronicles the brilliant innovator's astonishingly prolific life, beginning with his modest upbringing in Depression-era New York City, into his burgeoning career at the birth of comics in the mid-1930s, and all the way up to the completion of his final graphic novel, The Plot, shortly before his passing in January. In interviews with such luminaries as Stan Lee, Denis Kitchen, Kurt Vonnegut, Art Spiegelman, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and Gil Kane, and with previously unseen home movies, audio tapes (with Jack Kirby, Milton Caniff, Gil Fox), and newly uncovered archival photographs, the documentary honors the true master of sequential art as never before. Room 8
2:30-3:30 Will Eisners The Spirit: The MovieWill Eisner's The Spirit was created in 1940 and is the story of a masked detective, believed to be dead, who operates out of his grave site in Wildwood Cemetery and who fights crime in Central City with his fists, cunning (a tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd), and unbelievable threshold for pain. And now hes headed to the big screen! This panel will include a moderated discussion and Q&A with the film's writer Jeph Loeb, whose other writing credits include the graphic novels Batman: The Long Halloween and Batman: Dark Victory (both of which won Eisner Awards), and a supervising producer on Smallville. Odd Lot Entertainment's Deborah Del Prete (Green Street Hooligans) and Batfilm Productions' Michael Uslan (Batman Begins) are producing the project and will be participating in the panel, along with Eisner's longtime comic book agent Denis Kitchen and acclaimed comic book artist Darwyn Cooke (DC: The New Frontier). Room 6CDEF
5:30-7:00 Will Eisner Documentary: Master ClassPart one of the three-part screening of the award-winning Brazilian TV documentary series on the late Will Eisner. Director/producer Marisa Furtado focuses on comics instruction, with live demonstrations at Will Eisner's drawing board. Added clips include Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Denis Kitchen, Jerry Robinson, academicians Lucy Caswell and Thomas Inge, and top Brazilian, French, and Belgian artists. English with selective dubbing/subtitles. All three episodes will be screened tonight. See below for more details. Room 8
7:00-10:00 Will Eisner: Profession: CartoonistThree DocumentariesA special nighttime screening of all three of the incredible Brazilian television documentaries on Will Eisner by filmmaker Marisa Furtado. These lovingly crafted films are a tribute to Eisners life and career and a must-see event for all comics fans and professionals. This special nighttime screening allows those busy on the floor during the day to see all three films in one sitting. The films are:
7:00-8:00 Will EisnerProfession: CartoonistThe DreamThis episode focuses on Will Eisner and his creation of the graphic novel genre. Among those interviewed are Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Denis Kitchen, Jerry Robinson, academicians Lucy Caswell and Thomas Inge, and top Brazilian, French, and Belgian artists. English with selective dubbing/subtitles.
8:00-9:00 Will EisnerProfession: CartoonistSpiritThis part of director/producer Furtado's film focuses on Will Eisner and The Spirit, with clips from Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Denis Kitchen, Jerry Robinson, Ann Eisner, academicians Lucy Caswell and Thomas Inge, and top Brazilian, French, and Belgian artists. English with selective dubbing/subtitles._
9:00-10:00 Will EisnerProfession: CartoonistMaster ClassDirector/producer Marisa Furtado focuses on comics instruction, with live demonstrations at Will Eisner's drawing board. Added clips include interviews with Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Denis Kitchen, Jerry Robinson academicians Lucy Caswell and Thomas Inge, and top Brazilian, French, and Belgian artists. English with selective dubbing/subtitles. _
All three films screen in Room 8.
Friday, July 15
1:30-3:00 Spotlight on Jim WarrenHes the publisher behind Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the magazine-sized revival of Will Eisners The Spirit, just to name a few. Jim Warren is a legendary figure in comics, reigniting the horror comics genre with his groundbreaking black-and-white magazines in the 1970s. Comic Book Artist editor Jon B. Cooke (The Warren Companion) interviews this publishing visionary. Room 4
3:30-4:30 Eisner Documentary: The DreamContinuing Brazilian filmmaker Marisa Furtados series of documentaries on comics legend Will Eisner. The Dream chronicles his creation of the graphic novel genre. Among those interviewed are Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Denis Kitchen, Jerry Robinson, academicians Lucy Caswell and Thomas Inge, and top Brazilian, French, and Belgian artists. English with selective dubbing/subtitles. Room 8
4:30-6:00 Golden/Silver Age of Comics: Working with Will EisnerMark Evanier talks to five artists who knew and/or worked with the master storyteller and discuss what life was like in the Will Eisner Studio. With Murphy Anderson, Lee Ames, Bob Fujitani, Nick Cardy, and Jerry Robinson. Room 8
8:30-11:00 Will Eisner Comics Industry AwardsThe gala 17th annual Will Eisner Awards ceremony will feature special tributes to the late comics giant, including a retrospective slide show. Celebrity presenters will be handing out Eisner Awards in 26 categories. Other awards to be presented include the Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award, the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, the Bill Finger Excellence in Comics Writing Award, the CBLDF Defender of Freedom Award, and the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award. The MC for the evening is Eisner Awards administrator Jackie Estrada. Seating is open to everyone with a Comic-Con badge. Doors open at 8:15. For more details, see page 8. Room 20
Saturday, July 16
11:30-1:00 Alley Oop DocumentaryMax Allan Collins, the mystery novelist/comics scripter who created Road to Perdition, presents the national premiere of Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop. Shot in part at San Diego Con 2001, the documentary charts the life and career of the innovative creator of the famous caveman comic strip, featuring interviews with Will Eisner, Russell Myers, Denis Kitchen, Trina Robbins, Sergio Arragons, Mark Schultz, Stan Sakai, William Stout, and other top cartoonists. Following the screening, writer/director Collins with be joined for Q&A by Chris Christensen (his Seduction of the Innocent band mate), who provided the film's lively rock score. Room 8
2:00-3:00 Eisner Documentary: SpiritThis final episode in director/producer Marisa Furtado's film series focuses on Will Eisner and The Spirit, with clips from Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Denis Kitchen, Jerry Robinson, Ann Eisner, academicians Lucy Caswell and Thomas Inge, and top Brazilian, French, and Belgian artists. English with selective dubbing/subtitles. Room 5AB
3:00-4:30 Tribute to Will EisnerWe take a moment to remember a legend with those who knew and worked with him. Among those appearing will be publishers Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Jim Warren, and Mike Richardson, cartoonists Scott McCloud and Batton Lash, movie producer Michael Uslan, and Ann Eisner. Mark Evanier moderates. Room 5AB
Sunday, July 17
10:30-12:00 Spotlight on Bob FujitaniMeet a Golden Age great whose career included a stint in the Eisner/Iger Studio, who drew The Hangman and other great MLJ characters, and who drew Gold Keys Doctor Solar and the Flash Gordon newspaper strip. Dave Stevens co-hosts, along with Mark Evanier, this first-ever convention interview of one of his (and your) favorite artists, Bob Fujitani. Room 8
1:30-2:30 The Sequential Art: A Documentary About ComicsOn the menu is censorship, taboos and the industry. Join Roberta Gregory (Bitchy Bitch), Chris Wisnia (Ojo), Jim Mahfood (Grrl Scouts), Denis Kitchen, and the director Espen Jrgensen for a Q&A, and a sneak peek at the film featuring, amongst others, Will Eisner, Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Daniel Clowes. Room 3
1:30-3:00 Spotlight on Lee Ames and Sy BarryLee Ames worked in the Eisner-Iger Studio and for Fiction House, Timely, and many other major Golden Age publishing houses, then went on to create popular "how to draw" books. Sy Barry helped set the style for DC Comics in the fifties and went on to do the Phantom newspaper strip. Two great artists in one great panel joined by moderator Mark Evanier. Room 8
PETER DAVID IN CBG: POTENTIAL PULITZER FOR EISNER
In his monthly Comic Buyers Guide column, But I Digress (September 2005, #1608) comic book author and novelist Peter David makes the case for Will Eisner deserving Pulitzer Prize consideration for The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The magazine isnt online, but heres an excerpt that sums up Davids argument:
Its the most important graphic commentary on Judaism since Maus and certainly, like that seminal work, deserves the Pulitzer for its accomplishment.
(For more David, check out his blog.)
FIRST REVIEW OF WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE
"At the Book Expo we picked up an advance galley of A SPIRITED LIFE, the Will Eisner biography by Bob Andelman. It's a text only galley that lacks all illos, but if the illustrations are one-quarter as colorful as the text, it's going to be quite illuminating.
"Andelman goes far beyond the Eisner most of us knew, the tireless supportor of comics as an artform. That Eisner is here, but it's the actual man we learn about, from such well-known aspects as his poor childhood to his partnership with Jerry Iger to his years in the Army, to some less well-known anecdotes and events -- Eisner's early romantic exploits (including Iger's hiring a prostitute for him, unbeknownst to Eisner), the death of his daughter at age 16 from leukemia, and the many failed businesses that went along with his triumphs. This is a rich real life narrative that everyone interested in the history of comics should read.
"Although the book is somewhat episodic, Andelman also ties in various figures to comics historical tapestry -- George Bridgeman, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, and a teen-aged Neil Gaiman all have unexpected roles to play along the way, as do countless others. (I was amused to encounter the ex-boyfriend of a close friend of mine in the narrative -- I had no idea he knew Eisner.) Unusual characters like Jim Warren and Cat Yronwode emerge. Through it all, though, we begin to learn where Will Eisner really came from, and how he got where he ended up. Eisner was fortunate to stay around long enough to experience the dawn of comics as an artistic medium -- although its something he dreamed of for a long time, the time had never been right until the 70s. Luckily for us all, really." -- Heidi MacDonald
"Must reading, due in September."
Posted by THE BEAT at June 6, 2005 09:27 PM
THE EDUCATION OF A COMICS ARTIST: NEW BOOK FEATURES EISNER INTERVIEW
"I'm happy to inform you that "The Education of a Comics Artist" has been published by Allworth Press, and it includes eight pages devoted to Joel Priddy's in-person interview with Will Eisner, conducted last summer. The piece leads with a page from "to the Heart of the Storm," thanks to the permission of Denis Kitchen.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd let people know about our book on your fine "Spirited Life" site. It's available at all the usual stores and online sites. Further information can be found at the publisher's Web site" -- Michael Dooley
MORE REVIEWS OF WILL EISNERS THE PLOT
Every book has its share positive and negative reviews and Will Eisners final graphic novel, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is no different. Some reviewers love and admire it, some arent as crazy about it. But it continues to be reviewed in major publications around the world, most recently showing up in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and many, many others.
Poison, penned
By Jonathan Dorfman
Boston Globe
Until his death at 87 last January, I had never heard of Will Eisner. But ask anyone familiar with comic books, and you quickly find that Eisner is the Babe Ruth of what is now called the graphic novel.
I didn't read the funnies as a kid. As an adult, even after Art Spiegelman won his awards for the ''Maus" books about the Holocaust, I stayed away. Time is short, and I couldn't quite take the genre seriously. But Eisner's obituaries told of his significance, and I decided to read ''The Plot," his last book, a history about the forgery used by bigots to frame Jews with a plot for world domination.
You can read this book in about 40 minutes. It is a testament to Eisner, and his skill in the genre, that he packs so much historical narrative into so few pages. ''The Plot" tells the story of ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with a wallop, and makes you writhe in disbelief at how this rubbish has served as a justification for so much political and human wreckage.
But as Stephen Eric Bronner, a political science professor at Rutgers University, writes in the historical afterword, the medium of comic books forced Eisner to abbreviate the complex history of ''The Protocols." The effect is not unlike watching the best of PBS documentaries: You learn about serious subjects painlessly, even enjoyably, if not always with the knowledge that comes from reading traditional books. Still, Eisner is not a man to dismiss, and I now take the genre seriously.
To learn more, I visited a number of comic book stores and asked the salesmen to tell me about Eisner. The reaction was not unlike speaking to a classically trained record store proprietor, who sells Britney Spears to stay in business, about the glory of J. S. Bach. Asking experts in comic books about Eisner meant I was interested in the good stuff, not the junk they are forced to carry.
And I saw what makes him special. If you place Eisner's work alongside that of other comic book artists, what strikes you are three things. First, the man could draw -- so much so that his word balloons often aren't necessary to advance his narrative. Second, he was a cultivated man whose work bears the impress of thought and learning. And third, his artistry used comic books not for intergalactic superheroes, but serious topics -- loneliness, suffering, Vietnam, the personal encounter with God, and now ''The Protocols."
The idea of ''The Protocols" was hatched in the 1890s -- the decade of the Dreyfus trial -- when advisers to Czar Nicholas sought to block the liberalization of Russia, especially the granting of political and human rights to Jews. To do this, the czar's secret police in Paris took an 1864 screed by Maurice Joly against Napoleon III's ambitions for world conquest, and rewrote it as a document purporting to be the plans of Jewish elders to control the world through political and financial manipulation.
It worked. ''The Protocols" not only helped to freeze the czar's hesitant steps to liberalization, but also incited a new round of pogroms. And the influence of ''The Protocols" spread beyond Russia. Eisner reproduces a 1920 article about the Jews by Winston Churchill, staunch Zionist and philo-Semite, who still failed to disavow ''The Protocols." Yet when The Times of London in 1921 exposed it as a hoax, no one imagined that it could survive so conclusive a refutation.
What is astounding -- and what Eisner skillfully shows in his book -- is how ''The Protocols" has became part of the tool kit for Jew haters ever since. In the 1920s Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent serialized ''The Protocols." Translated in 16 languages, in 1922 it sold over a half million copies in America alone. In the 1930s the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem adopted it as a reason to expel Jews from Palestine. In ''Mein Kampf" and elsewhere, Hitler also used it to justify the Nazi reign of terror.
Yet ''The Protocols" did not end with the Nazi defeat. In this book, Eisner shows the front covers of editions of ''The Protocols" from Italy, Argentina, Egypt, Japan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Russia, Spain, India, and the United Kingdom -- editions that are being published to this day, decades after The Times first demonstrated their inauthenticity.
Does anyone today, apart from cranks and political nut cases, take ''The Protocols" seriously? Since it has been so thoroughly refuted, the odds of its being revived as a historical document should be about as likely as the mission statement of the Flat Earth Society hitting the bestseller lists. But there is reason anew to marvel at its perdurance.
For one, in Syria, ''The Protocols" is indeed a bestseller, according to MEMRI, the Middle East media research group. And recently, Arab television broadcast ''Knight Without a Horse," a 41-part drama based on ''The Protocols" and sponsored in part by Egyptian state television. As Eisner notes, the Egyptian weekly Roz Al-Youssuf praised the series for revealing that ''The Protocols" is the central line that dominates Israeli policies.
Why even a thuggish state like Syria, much less an Egypt that is kept afloat by billions of dollars in aid from the United States, would use so crude and discredited a device to stir hatred of Jews is beyond me. Even now, ''The Protocols," preposterous as it is, remains a thing to be reckoned with, and still has consequences -- a situation evident to all except those who advocate appeasement of bigotry, and other ostriches hell-bent for a sandpile.
Comics and Graphic Novels
Masked marvels, child stealers and tantalizing tea talk: His Spirit Lives On
By Joey Anuff
Washington Post
The two major professional awards in the comic book industry are named for the two most worshipped creative artists in early comic book history: the Harveys, named in honor of Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, and the Eisners, named for Will Eisner, whose work is catalogued and analyzed in The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel , by N.C. Christopher Crouch and Stephen Weiner (DC Comics, $19.95). Eisner, famous for his creation of "The Spirit," a masked crime fighter who appeared weekly in a newspaper supplement during the 1940s and early '50s, is also hailed as the godfather of the modern graphic novel. To the pioneering misfits who founded comic fandom in the '60s, Kurtzman and Eisner were real-life supermen. To the modern fan, though, they tend to be as exciting as multi-vitamins.
It's easy to see why they've left such lukewarm legacies: Whereas today's comic fans make heroes of artists and sometimes writers, Kurtzman and Eisner were something more elusive, closer to Hollywood directors than any role we typically associate with comic creation. Kurtzman directed his team of Mad artists chiefly as a writer and layout artist, jobs that largely hid his contributions beneath the panels. During the run of "The Spirit," Eisner employed similar working methods, but with an even larger team of assistants and a more prodigious output. Somewhere amid the many thousands of "Spirit" pages produced between 1940 and 1952 is the work upon which Eisner's towering reputation was built. Although several publishers have reprinted selections from its run, notably Kitchen Sink in the '80s, the bulk of "The Spirit" has not been in print since its original publication. Only in 2000 did DC Comics commence the massive task of reprinting the original sections in color hardcover volumes,
Ironically, the full reprinting may make classic Eisner harder to find than ever. There's just too much of it to sort through, and the quality isn't even remotely consistent. What's more, with so many assistants contributing to the project, the stylistic variability is bewildering. In the entry for "Eisner's Studio" in The Will Eisner Companion , Crouch and Weiner list 31 assistant artists. Bafflingly, few of them appear anywhere else in the book. The authors offer up a primarily textual presentation of Eisner, alphabetically listing characters and, occasionally, literary and artistic themes from his major projects. The entry for "Splash Pages," his trademark opening pages that famously combined the Spirit name and story title while spectacularly setting the scene, shows a single specimen, standing up lonesomely for some 600 other potential examples. Likewise, the entry for "Signs" presents one of Eisner's unmistakably baroque pieces of illustrative signage, reproduced at silver-dollar size.
To be fair, Crouch and Weiner's character-driven breakdown of Eisner's career does give each of the artist's lovely vixens, such as P'Gell and Sand Saref, a moment to shine. His incidental characters, fascinating and numerous as they were, likewise benefit from their thumbnail profiles. And perhaps, as publisher Denis Kitchen suggests in The Eisner Companion 's afterword, expecting a true "Eisner Encyclopedia" is unrealistic. But once you've seen what Eisner was really capable of, it's hard to settle for anything less.
Now that DC Comics has published volumes 14-16 of Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives ($49.95 each), we finally get to see what the fuss is about. Volume 16 includes work done during the first half of 1948, the year the Eisner gang began to get it right.
From their layouts and linework to their lush color schemes, these stories are true miniature marvels ("El Spirito" and "Life Below" are especially gorgeous.) More surprising, though, is Eisner's consistent gift for satire, which came into focus by 1947 and only tightened thereafter. In the caricatures of Truman Capote, Orson Welles and Joseph McCarthy, the parodies of "Dick Tracy" and "Li'l Abner," the take-offs on radio and comic advertising, and features such as the recurring "Fairy Tales For Juvenile Delinquents," Eisner pioneered comic satire with a sophistication often mistakenly said to have started several years later in Kurtzman's Mad. If you've ever suspected the Eisner legend was perhaps a touch overblown, Volume 16 is an indispensable reality check.
If Eisner deserves more credit for bringing adult humor to the comic form, Kurtzman rarely receives proper acknowledgment for an equally momentous undertaking: the marriage of journalism and comic storytelling. First with his meticulously researched war comics and then with his first-person cartoon journalism for Esquire in the late '50s, Kurtzman was the first to realize that this new technique of comic book storytelling was as well-suited to the art of fact as it was to fiction.
After a few decades' worth of semi-autobiographical musings on the Jewish immigrant experience in America, Eisner embraced the same conclusion. In The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Norton, $19.95), his last project before his death earlier this year, Eisner tells the true story of how one of the most notorious forgeries of all time, the inventively anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," purportedly the minutes of a Jewish planning meeting for world domination, came to be fabricated and promulgated by late-19th-century Russian Czar Nicholas II's invidious spooks.
The theme of The Plot is frustration, both Eisner's and that of his characters, as the 1905 hoax, though conclusively discredited by the London Times in 1921, was deathlessly translated and reprinted (by American, Nazi, Egyptian and even Japanese publishers) throughout the 20th century. Unfortunately, readers of The Plot may find themselves equally frustrated. Most of the characters are writers or reporters expounding over drinks or typewriters, making, as you might expect, for less than action-packed storytelling. Though it's tempting to believe, as Eisner always did, that comics might enlighten where words alone failed, the truth is that, like much of his later graphic novel work, his intentions may have again outpaced his execution.
Summer books
Whether you're looking to break a sweat with some heavy lifting of the nonfiction kind or lie back with breezier beach-worthy prose, the "endless" season promises a seemingly infinite array of options.
By David L. Ulin
Los Angeles Times
When I was a kid, I considered it the height of luxury to lie on the couch in the living room with a stack of comic books and while away a summer afternoon. It's not that I was a comics geek; I just loved the idea of reading that wasn't, somehow, authorized. Back in the early 1970s, the term "graphic novel" hadn't been invented yet, and one of the appeals of comics was that they stood outside accepted culture.
Thirty years later, comics have become part of the mainstream, a quintessentially American popular art. This summer brings some particularly vivid examples of the genre, beginning with Will Eisner's "The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a work of "graphic history" completed not long before the artist's death in January, which takes apart the anti-Semitic hoax "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in a direct and accessible way.
Protocols story
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Readers who fell under the spell of MICHAEL CHABONS Pulitzer-Prize winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" couldnt help wondering about the real-world counterparts in his story about the rise of the 20th-centurys comic book industry.
But because Chabons novel is fiction, a one-to-one relationship with any living person isnt possible. And yet, theres more than a little of WILL EISNER (1917-2005) in the story.
Will Eisner created the first graphic novel, "A Contract With God," in 1978, illustrated comic strips in the 30s and 40s and gave his name to the comic industrys top award, The Eisner Award.
A month before he died at age 87, he finished his last project, "The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (Norton, $19.95), a graphic novel about one of the greatest deceptions of modern times, the hoax that Jewish leaders are planning to take over the world.
Traced back to the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) when a Jewish officer was accused of betraying military secrets, the idea grew that a secret Jewish cabal was plotting world domination. It continues to be used by various groups and governments today to foster anti-Semitism.
The czar of Russia, Hitler and Henry Ford used it to legitimize their anti-Semitism. So did the KKK and Islamic fundamentalists.
Even though the hoax has been debunked several times (the first being in 1921 in the London Times), it continues to resurface.
Today, Protocol pamphlets are still being published on the Internet and around the world, one recent example being the free copies distributed in 2003 by workers of the Prime Ministers party in Kuala Lumpur.
With an introduction by UMBERTO ECO and an afterword by a historian STEPHEN E. BRONNER, "The Plot" caps Will Eisners career as little else could.
Part of the graphic novel tradition, its an important document.
As a statement about the core of ethnic hatred that continues to burn at the center of so many world cultures, its a disheartening historical footnote.
Hoaxed by hate
By MARTIN LEVIN
The Globe and Mail, Toronto
(Requires Subscription)
When Albert Einstein was appointed to the faculty of the University of Zurich in 1909, the dean thought it worth mentioning that it would "not be appropriate to disqualify a man merely because he happened to be a Jew," despite the tribe's "disagreeable character traits.
Plot Heavy: How two books about conspiracy theories get it wrong.
BY PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI
NextBook
"Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart." This epigraph, written by the great satirist for his tombstone, is a reminder that the live wire of outrage snaked through his best, most entertaining, work. Perhaps the lack of this sort of animating passion is one reason why two new books that take aim at Jewish conspiracy theories Joshua Neuman and David Deutsch's The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies and Will Eisner's The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zionare neither fun nor transformative.
It's not that these authors don't mean to challenge or provoke readers. In the case of Eisnerthe pioneering cartoonist who completed The Plot a month before his death in January at 87the urge to fight hatred was strong from the start. Raised in New York City during the 1930s, he was shaped by the era's radical politics, rampant anti-Semitism, and vogue for literary realism. While other artists created fantastical crime fighters with otherworldly powers, Eisner made his mark with The Spirit, a colorful but ordinary masked man (Eisner called him a "middle-class superhero") who is not above the fray and tensions of everyday life. So it's not entirely surprising that Eisner hoped The Plot would "drive yet another nail into the coffin of this terrifying vampire-like fraud," as he explains soberly in the preface.
For their part, Neuman and Deutsch, co-editors of Heeb, obediently state their satiric intentions in The Big Book's introductionone practically senses the nervous figures of the publisher's legal team hovering just abovebut otherwise avoid staking out any position that might infringe on their fun. Instead, they recycle Borscht Belt jokes and half-baked plotlines to concoct explanations for two millennia worth of conspiracy theories. Thus we get the conspiracy behind the Exodus story in "Let My People Go...On Longer Lunch Breaks," while "Blood Brothers" depicts the baking accident behind the medieval blood libel. Like many gimmick books or Saturday Night Live spinoffs, The Big Book is long on clever concepts but short on execution. Much funnier are some of the Photoshop illustrations; one puts a pair of Groucho Marx glasses on the grotesque Jewish serpent from the English edition cover of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly the logo for a motorcycle gang.
That The Big Book's illustrations stand out above the text makes a lot of sense. Ever since its launch in 2002, Heeb's mix of lefty politics, hip-hop language, and DIY Judaism has found its most effective form in the magazine's visual presentation. (I was a Heeb editor for two years.) The debut issue's cover featured a round matzoh resting on a turntable, with a bejeweled black hand hovering over it. Whether or not such imagery actually evokes the sensibilities of more than a fraction of hipsters is beside the point. The photo hints at longstanding flashpointsblack-Jewish relations, money, Jewish ritualeven as it perfectly encapsulates the magazine's madcap irreverence.
Meanwhile, The Plot charts the secret history behind the most infamous Jewish conspiracy of modern times. It begins in 1864, when a French pamphleteer named Maurice Joly attacked the reign of Napoleon III in a satire called A Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The book languished in obscurity until 1894, when Mathieu Golovinski, a talented forger for the Russian secret police, rediscovered it. While liberally plagiarizing whole passages, Golovinski altered the earlier work just enough to recast it as a master plan for Jewish world supremacy.
One of Eisner's most enlighteningand tediousdevices is a side-by-side comparison of the Russian and French texts. In one bizarre twist, Golovinski's "Jewish" plot includes a bizarre homage to the Hindu god Vishnu. Of course, the point here is that if we understand history, we won't be condemned to repeat it. Sadly, this has been disproved again and again; Eisner himself observes that in 2002 Egyptian state television sponsored a series based on The Protocols.
In the amusing caricatures of Russian apparatchiks, there are flashes of the quiet impishness that marks Eisner's vintage work. But the lack of more humorous touches in The Plot, along with the absence of any psychological nuance (as compared with, for example, the four stories in A Contract With God), suggests that Eisner was simply too driven by his agenda to be inspired. Rather, in his quest to pull back the curtain on a century's worth of nefarious obfuscation, he creates an earnest, convoluted story that, for long stretches, drags.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to be notes stolen from the 1897 Zionist Congress, still manages to sway the nave as well as the malicious. That fact alone sparks the sort of savage indignation which, effectively channeled, might have lifted The Big Book and The Plot beyond the pedestrian. Either way, the comparison to Swift is instructive. To the unsophisticated reader, the Protocols' phony backstory functions a lot like the "mask" in the satirist's greatest works. After years of being unable to convince his fellow countrymen to be more responsible for their own welfareIrish landlords were practically cannibalizing their own kind with their exorbitant rentsSwift stumbled upon a brilliantly simple solution: Assuming the mien of a perfectly reasonable gentleman, he outlined a ghoulish recipe for eating Irish babies.
Golovinski's pretense of stolen notes only reinforced vicious stereotypes, while Swift's clever mimicry eventually led the intelligent reader toward some larger truth. It's hard to imagine how "A Modest Proposal" would go over today. We live in an irony-drenched culture, yet are so fearful about giving offense that we avoid genuine satire, as The Big Book's introduction makes clear. Yet it's useful to consider whether the clarifying force of Swiftian logicrather than earnest entreaty or slapstick ironymay just be what we need to keep vampiric Jewish conspiracies from rising again.
Panel Discussion
Eisner: Going against Protocols
by David L. Ulin
Village Voice
Will Eisner, who died on January 3 at 87, essentially reinvented comics as an art. Although his 1978 book A Contract With God is widely considered the first graphic novel, he was pushing the boundaries long before that, with his 1940s crime fighter strip The Spirit. But Eisner's final effort, The Plotfinished shortly before his deathmay be his most groundbreaking: a work of "graphic history," in which the author deconstructs The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fraudulent 1905 text that purportedly reveals a Jewish plot to take over the world. Eisner's visual style didn't change much after the 1940s, which gives The Plot a familiar, even conventional, look. Yet the book is less a traditional narrative than an illustrated catalog, tracing The Protocols' nefarious influence across geography and time. This is tricky territory for a comic because Eisner's material is essentially non-imagistic; the key visual sequence is a 17-page passage juxtaposing extended excerpts of both The Protocol and the 19th- century French tract from which it was plagiarized.
Still, if that makes The Plot a little choppy, it raises important issues, beginning with the tenacity of a work that has been exposed repeatedly as a hoax. For Eisner, this is not just history, but a call to action. As he writes, "[T]here is now an opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible language. It is my hope that, perhaps, this work will drive yet another nail into the coffin of this terrifying vampire-like fraud."
Tearing hatred apart
New works further discredit an old, anti-Semitic book but it hardly matters to some,br>
By JEFFREY WEISS
The Dallas Morning News
Last week, the Palestinian Authority made headlines in Israel when it deleted from its Web site a link to a notorious anti-Semitic tract.
The same century-old tract is the target of the last major book by the late Will Eisner, the inventor of the graphic novel. It's the subject of a documentary that debuted this year at the Sundance Film Festival. And it's inspired a new satire of anti-Semitism by two editors of Heeb , the Jewish humor magazine.
What is it about an old, bigoted screed that merits such attention?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been the Jew-hater's main manifesto for more than100 years.
The Protocols purports to be the minutes of a clandestine meeting of Jewish leaders near the end of the 19th century.
The book claims that these Jewish conspirators are planning to take over the world through secret control of the media, manipulation of the money supply and domination of all governments. (Plus, they're going to institute such "ultramodern" reforms as universal suffrage, a minimum wage, part-time legislatures, and a mandatory retirement age of 55 for judges. The conspirators would also ban drunkenness and use sports and entertainment as wildly hyped distractions.)
The book is a total fraud. First published in 1902, it was plagiarized, scholars say, from sources that originally attacked the Masons, Jesuits and Napoleon III of France.
Even though research debunking The Protocols is almost as old as the book itself, the danger it poses is absolutely current, said David Cook, an assistant professor of religious studies at Rice University. Dr. Cook, who has spent the past four months in Africa studying Islam, has found The Protocols to be "wildly popular" there.
"Because liberalism and democracy are essentially the targets of The Protocols (the Jews being the scapegoat) societies that are coming out of a long history of authoritarian rule are particularly vulnerable to their influence," he wrote this week in an e-mail from Nigeria.
The Protocols was publicly exposed as a forgery by The Times of London in 1921.
But that didn't stop Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, from publishing and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies in the early 1920s (though he later apologized). Or Adolph Hitler from giving the book a place of honor in Mein Kampf and using it to bolster the Nazi case for killing all Jews.
The modern anti-Israel terrorist organization Hamas cites The Protocols as proof that "the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates."
The Protocols can be found on dozens, maybe hundreds, of Web sites based in the Middle East, Europe, America and Australia. (The Palestinian Authority removed its link only after a complaint by the Anti-Defamation League.)
Decades of scholarly debunking haven't prevented new translations from being produced and sold a new Arabic edition came out in Syria this year.
The book was on sale last fall at a Hamas book fair and "martyr's exhibit" in Israel's West Bank, said Scott Atran, an anthropology researcher for the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.
"One professor told me with an embarrassed smile (pointing to The Protocols) 'but this book is controversial,' " Dr. Atran wrote in an e-mail.
The professor meant to show that he was being fair. But because he knew The Protocols is bogus, Dr. Atran said, the professor's tolerance of the book was an example of the same "banality of evil" ascribed to the Nazis.
Even some Muslim leaders publicly acknowledge that The Protocols is a fake. But the truth is that many fans of the book's message simply don't care whether it's an actual record of an actual meeting.
Hitler addressed that issue more than 60 years ago. Even if untrue, The Protocols is real, he wrote:
"The important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims."
The true story of The Protocols is a compelling tale. Historians say it was created around the turn of the 20th century by a propagandist hired by Russian monarchists.
The monarchists were afraid that Czar Nicholas was about to modernize the country, which would have eroded their power and stature. They figured that if it could be proven that "the Jews" were behind the movement toward freedom and democracy, the anti-Semitism of Nicholas and of many in Russia would do the rest.
After all, what right-thinking Russian would want to join a movement that was actually created by and for Jews?
In a forward to Mr. Eisner's graphic novel, the Italian scholar Umberto Eco traced the process that produced The Protocols:
It started with two books written in France in the mid-1800s that suggested that the Jesuits were trying to conquer the world. The theme was borrowed in 1864 by Maurice Joly, a French political essayist and caustic critic of the emperor, Naploeon III. Mr. Joly used the anti-Jesuit books as the basis for The Dialogue In Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satire that accused the emperor of betraying the ideals of the French Revolution.
A few years later, a German anti-Semite swiped some of Mr. Joly's material for a novel that made Jews the enemy. He added a plot twist: a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in a Prague cemetery.
When the Russian monarchists were looking for ways to demonize the Jews a few years later, they turned to Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian agent working in Paris. He took the German novel and some of Mr. Joly's original material and turned them into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he claimed was a nonfictional account of a real meeting of Jewish conspiracists.
A careful reading of The Protocols side-by-side with Mr. Joly's satire turns up passage after passage of stolen material. The plagiarized stuff even appears in the same order in both books.
"It was surprising that Golovinski was so lazy," said Christopher Couch, a comparative literature professor at the University of Massachusetts who helped Mr. Eisner with his book.
The mishmashed provenance of The Protocols explains why parts are so incoherent, or improbable.
Why would Jewish leaders, for example, compare their work to the Hindu god Vishnu? Why would Jews, in particular, be against backing money with gold?
In any case, dissemination of The Protocols back in Russia failed to protect the czar and his court from revolution and assassination.
Since then, the book has provided fuel for generations of conspiracy-seekers, and justification for brutality toward generations of Jews worldwide.
The popularity of The Protocols has waxed and waned over the years in response to the politics of the day, said Stephen Eric Bronner, a political science professor at Rutgers University and author of A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
When people need a conspiracy to explain hard times, or when Israel's policy toward the Palestinians seems particularly harsh, the default answer for some people has been anti-Semitism and The Protocols, he said.
Even so, some people today still hope that exposure can limit the damage The Protocols can inspire.
"You can inhibit it, you can cage it," Mr. Bronner said. "The way you can contain it is by government and organizations and people of moral persuasion marginalizing it.
A new book by the two editors of Heeb tries flat-out, sometimes sophomoric, ridicule.
The authors, David Deutch and Joshua Neuman, watched the World Trade Center fall. Then despite a mountain of evidence implicating Osama bin Laden they heard wild tales that "the Jews" were responsible.
Their magazine offers an irreverent take on Jewish culture, so their reaction may have been inevitable.
"We realized if it weren't so insidious and sinister, this would be funny," Mr. Neuman said. "And then we thought maybe it is just funny."
The result was their satirical volume, The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies.
Explaining their idea to a literary agent was interesting.
"Nothing quite prepares someone for the sentence 'It's a humorous look at Jewish conspiracy theories,' " Mr. Neuman said.
The documentary shown this year at Sundance, Protocols of Zion, tries confronting real supporters of The Protocols on camera, Michael Moore-style.
Filmmaker Marc Levin said he was inspired to make his movie after he was told by an Egyptian cab driver in New York City that the global conspiracy foretold in The Protocols explained why no Jews were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks a lie still in wide circulation.
"From my perspective, light is the great disinfectant," Mr. Levin said.
Mr. Eisner's graphic novel, The Plot, is an easily absorbed retelling of some of the intricate real history of The Protocols, how it was debunked and how it has been used.
Plenty of scholarly works written by and for academics had failed to kill The Protocols, Mr. Eisner wrote. He decided to try using the format he had pioneered: a graphic novel basically a grown-up, supersized comic book.
"With the widespread acceptance of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature, there is now an opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible language," Mr. Eisner, then 86, wrote shortly before he died this year.
One question that's vexing to scholar and satirist, filmmaker and illustrator alike: Why do modern anti-Semites persist in relying on The Protocols?
Some agree with Hitler that The Protocols is true even if it isn't real. They connect the dots of history to find imaginary patterns, much as the ancients found bears and archers in random groupings of stars.
"Does the authenticity of The Protocols matter? Absolutely not," wrote Michael Haupt, Web master of ThreeWorldWars.com, one site that features The Protocols. "Does it matter that there exists a plan for world domination and that that plan includes the control of our hearts and minds? Absolutely yes!
"It's my personal belief that The Protocols, or some guide similar to The Protocols, whether real or imagined, is the blueprint for the war. ... And this war, for the control of our hearts and minds, is the real crux of the matter not whether The Protocols exist."
That kind of circular reasoning the forged book is true because it confirms the world as we see it, and the world as we see it is real because of the evidence in the forged book means The Protocols may never be discredited out of existence.
"Seeing conspiracies and Jewish cabals at every turn will, if left unchecked, kill off any chance of a different future," said Dr. Cook of Rice University.
"Why bother to change anything when reality is just controlled by a small group of malevolent Jewish elders, anyway?"
Amazon.com Editor
'The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is the late, great comic book pioneer Will Eisner's last work. This pick is another nonfiction gem, with Eisner diving into the sad, bizarre history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda that continues to show up around the world. Eisner tells the origin of this destructive document and brings to life history in a compelling, graphic novel form.
Illustrated factoids about a historical hoax
BY MATT TERL
The Virginian Pilot
WILL EISNER, who died this year, was a comic book innovator and pioneer . He was the first to combine techniques from prose fiction and filmmaking into the comic book form and to explore the shape of the panels and the page.
The very terminology that underlies comic book scholarship, phrases like "graphic novel" and "sequential art," were coined by Eisner. His life served as a primary inspiration for Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay," and his name graces the comic book industry's top award.
So it is something of a pity that his final published work is such a disappointment. "The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is, as the title suggests, a recounting of the true history behind the notorious work of anti-Semitic propaganda.
The "Protocols," a deliberate hoax created to malign Jews, have been held up time and again over the past century as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. This belief persists , as even the most cursory Internet search reveals.
Eisner, the child of Jewish immigrant parents, became simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the "Protocols" and found himself especially distressed at their refusal to disappear, no matter how often they were ruled to be forgeries. So he decided to do his part to discredit the phony document.
"With the widespread acceptance of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature," he writes in his preface, "there is now an opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible language."
There can be no doubt that Eisner is a master of this "more accessible language." His artwork is beyond reproach. His characters, especially the ones who do nothing but provide some color in the background , all hint at full lives beyond the page. The level of detail in clothing, architecture and facial expression is remarkable. Eisner's art moves from harsh pen-and-ink lines to gentle washes to opaque blacks, but there is always the sense of a guiding hand and a strong vision .
Eisner's research and scholarship seem sound, but his book often degenerates into little more than a litany of factoids about the "Protocols." For example, he spends 16 pages showing side-by-side excerpts of the "Protocols" and one of the books from which he believes it was copied, "The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu."
These pages represent a microcosm of the strengths and weaknesses of the work as a whole: the dry historical excerpts run across the top of the page in twin columns of type, while two of Eisner's remarkably expressive characters smoke, gesture and respond below. It's a shame he wasn't able to incorporate his fascination with this topic more organically into his drawings.
Much of the rest of the book is only slightly less awkward. There is no spine to the narrative, no character or event holding it all together.
We wander from 19th century Paris to czarist Russia to modern-day America without ever really meeting any characters. Historical figures wander onto the page, spout their portion of the story of the "Protocols" and disappear. Every so often, one court or another will rule that the documents are a forgery and a sympathetic character will say something like, "Well, that puts an end to the 'Protocols' forever!" This attempt to illustrate the persistent nature of the propaganda falls flat and feels repetitive.
Eisner knew the power of the comic book to teach - he created instruction comics for the U.S. Army in the 1940s and '50s - but fulfilling his goal in "The Plot" appears to have been beyond even his remarkable abilities.
New offering will keep fans from fighting over Crumbs
By CLIFF FROEHLICH
Arts and Entertainment Editor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
EC's impact on subsequent cartoonists shouldn't be underestimated, however. The company's influence was perhaps rivaled only by Will Eisner's "The Spirit," the headlining feature of a unique comic-book insert in Sunday newspapers of the 1940s. Eisner's cinematic storytelling and baroquely inventive splash pages set the gold standard in comic art for decades. DC is currently reprinting the strip's entire run in "The Spirit Archives," and the current Vol. 12 begins a mid-'40s run of astonishing vitality.
Eisner drifted out of mainstream comics after "The Spirit" ceased publication in the early '50s, but he returned in 1978 with "A Contract With God," one of the first graphic novels, and he continued producing a prodigious amount of work until his death in January. Regrettably, his final book, "The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (W.W. Norton, 148 pages, $19.95), is a disaster. Eisner's intent is noble -- to combat anti- Semitism by marshaling the overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the notorious tract was a fraud -- but the book proves maddeningly repetitive, and the material defies graphic treatment. In one agonizing 17-page stretch, Eisner actually reproduces side-by-side sections of the "The Protocols" and its original source, "The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu," with the characters at the bottom of the pages providing brief commentary as they read. Deadly.
Graphic novels or "comix" - a genre that continues to draw wider recognition
By Eric Hanson
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
The last work of comics great Will Eisner, who was a pioneer of the graphic novel and who died in January, is "The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (Norton, $19.95). It's a worthy (if somewhat Byzantine) final piece in a career that began in the 1930s, continued through World War II and was fully recognized in 1988 with the establishment of the Eisner Awards, one of the industry's two prestigious prizes. In "The Plot," Eisner traces the evolution of anti-Semitism in 19th- and 20th-century Europe by looking at the history of a weird piece of racist propaganda and pseudo-history called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which purports to be a document tracing a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
Eisner's effort a fitting legacy
JONATHAN P. KUEHLEIN
METRO TORONTO
**** (out of five)
Will Eisner was the godfather of comic books and a master storyteller.
With both his traditional hero work like The Spirit and his more modern work such as the pioneering graphic novel A Contract With God, Eisner showed an ability to engross his audience with his skills as both a writer and illustrator.
For several years prior to his death on Jan. 3, Eisner had been working on a very personal story, one that broke the mould, even for this pioneer.
The result is his first and sadly last work of historic non-fiction: The Plot: The Secret Story Of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.
Eisner traces the history of this text, from its original creation as an anti-imperialist story written by Maurice Joly in 1864 to its adaptation by the Russian secret service into an anti-Semitic one around the turn of the last century and its use by the Nazis and many others as a propaganda tool.
Eisner's exhaustive research, compiling numerous newspaper reports, historical papers and even a point-by-point comparison between Joly's story and the Protocols revealing the fabrication all done in illustrated form make an irrefutable argument against this hateful tome.
The Plot delivers its message powerfully and convincingly, making the final work of Eisner's career as important a read all the fiction work he did before it.
Setting fire to a stubborn myth through comics
By TED S. STRATTON Staff Reporter
Cleveland Jewish News
In January 2005, renowned author and artist Will Eisner unexpectedly died while in the midst of trying to expose a centuries-old fraud: that a cabal of Jews was planning to take over the world. It was, he thought, an almost futile task. What could a single comic book artist do to reverse a lie that had survived, cockroach-like, over decades of discrediting, he often wondered?
"For me, this book represents a departure from pure graphic storytelling," wrote Eisner in his preface to The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his attempt to describe in comic book form the history behind the original Protocols. "It marks an effort to employ this powerful medium to address a matter of immense personal concern." Namely, the rising antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
A pernicious lie
The Protocols were written in 1898 by Matheiu Golovinsky, an operative of Tsar Nicholas II who was living in exile in France. An expert propagandist, Golvinsky was asked to write the piece to prove that the Jews were behind the growing revolutionary movements in Russia.
Supposedly taking place behind the scenes at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the work details how a secret group of Jewish "elders" planned to dominate the world financially and politically.
In 1921 a correspondent for the Times of London printed a revelation that the Protocols were a fake, plagiarized and paraphrased from an earlier French work that didn't even mention Jews.
But even the tremendous worldwide influence of the Times couldn't kill the beast that was the Protocols. Hitler used the book as inspiration for his burgeoning Nazi movement, mentioning it in Mein Kampf. Henry Ford serialized the text of the Protocols in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, later recanting the story.
The book was translated into many languages. Recently, it has become extremely popular in Middle Eastern countries such as Lebanon and Iran.
For an established fraud, the Protocols have proved to be extraordinarily long lasting. As Umberto Eco writes in his introduction to The Plot, "It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth."
A work of graphic history
The Plot follows the style of Eisner's other graphic novels. As in a Disney movie, the villain is always recognizable with a sinister expression or wispy mustache. The heroes, on the other hand, are square-jawed and well groomed. Realistic depictions were never Eisner's strong suit.
Neither was dialogue, which is sometimes so stilted and clichd it would make George ("Star Wars") Lucas cringe. Characters from the 1870s talk like seedy characters out of a 1940s film noir.
But the dialogue advances the plot quickly, and Eisner excels at storytelling and a smooth, fluid movement of panels. The eye is naturally drawn to the robust outlines on top of ink-washed backgrounds.
The only break in an otherwise riveting story is a 17-page section where Eisner compares the text of the Protocols to the text of the French work from which it was plagiarized. But even this device is used skillfully and cleverly through the eyes of the Times reporter.
At the end of the book, Eisner himself appears as a character, discovering evidence of the Protocols around the country while conducting research on the text. On a San Deigo college campus, Eisner is shocked to find students extolling the tract, and tries to convince them it is a forgery.
The students don't believe him, and Eisner returns home disillusioned, baffled at the ignorance that still exists in the world.
For a former denizen of the funny pages, Eisner had serious motives in much of his work. The desire to end ignorance and stereotypes may have been his greatest goal. Even though he died before his last work was published, his legacy lives on in this stimulating view of one of history's greatest fallacies.
Grand old man' of comics
Will Eisner was to comics what Picasso was to painting, a man who explored the limits of the art form and took it outside preconceived boundaries.
A child of Jewish-American immigrants from Vienna, Eisner learned about art from his father, a scenery painter for the Yiddish theater in New York.
In the late 1930's, at the height of the "comics" boom when Superman and Batman were just beginning, Eisner went to work in the industry. He started out writing a weekly black-and-white superhero strip for newspapers called "The Spirit."
Eisner soon discovered that he was more interested in the supporting characters than in the Spirit himself. Thus the inspiration for the first-ever "graphic novel," Eisner's 1978 A Contract With God, was born. The book is composed of four full-length stories in comic strip form about Jews and other immigrants living in a run-down New York apartment building.
Eisner's incongruous pairing of superhero-style drawings with serious, human subject matter led to a revolution in graphic storytelling. Later cartoonists like Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) built on Eisner's idea and created award-winning books. Cartooning's major industry awards were later named after Eisner.
The Palm Beach Post
THE HIGH FIVE
1. 'The Job.'
A hilarious comedy series about New York cops that proved Denis Leary is one of TV's underrated assets. Few people saw this antidote to NYPD Blue when it was briefly on ABC; don't make the same mistake now that it's on DVD.
2. 'King of America,' The Costello Show.
Elvis Costello's roots masterpiece, reissued with a CD of extras (including some intriguing duets with T-Bone Burnett) and, best of all, another excellent liner notes essay from the King himself.
3. Kelly Clarkson's 'Behind Those Hazel Eyes' video.
We love watching Kelly leave her American Idol past in the dust, especially on this goth girl gone mild video, where she gets all Amy Lee, writhing in mud and leaves in a white wedding dress.
4. 'The Plot,' by Will Eisner.
The "grandfather of graphic novels," who died in January, goes out on a high note with this serious look at how the fraudulent anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has blasphemed the Jewish people for over a century and continues to this day. Hoping to educate new readers through the comic book form, the longtime Broward County resident only proves how he transcended it. After all, it's not every graphic novel that gets an introduction by Umberto Eco.
5. Blogcritics.org
After you've perused our own Blog Squad, check out this "sinister cabal" of bloggers who post lucid and offbeat daily missives on music, movies, TV and more. We read a review of a Burger King salad here that was unbelievably entertaining. Really.
Fitting last work for a comics great
By Wil Moss
Nashville City Paper
Will Eisner is to comic books as Walt Disney is to animation: the grandfather of an art form.
In the 1940s, Eisner created The Spirit, a hugely influential newspaper strip about a back-from-the-dead crimefighter, that shaped the grammar of comic book art through its innovative sense of design and storytelling.
In the 1970s, Eisner's A Contract with God helped usher in the graphic novel, an original comic story thick enough to have a spine like a book. In the late-1980s, the comic book industry created its version of the Oscars and named them the Eisners.
Eisner continued to create comics until his death in January at the age of 87. He was always much more interested in telling stories of the average man than of any super man, with books like The Dreamer, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue concentrating on real people in real situations. That concentration deepened in his later works in an attempt to battle anti-Semitism.
In 2003, Eisner created Fagin the Jew, told from the point of view of the antagonist of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Whereas Dickens presented Fagin in a less-than-positive light, Eisner attempted to balance out Dickens' negative portrayal of Jews with a more accurate rendering of Fagin's life.
A month before he died, Eisner completed his last work, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (W. W. Norton & Company), his first nonfiction graphic novel and his most direct attempt to address anti-Semitism. In it, Eisner chronicles the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent work that tarnishes the Jewish name and that has been used for over a century by Adolf Hitler and the Klu Klux Klan.
The Plot details how, in the early 20th century, members of Czar Nicholas II's court hired Mathieu Golovinski to forge a book that would influence Nicholas and persuade him to turn against modernization and the granting of rights to Russian Jews. The book that Golovinski used to create The Protocols was a 1864 French book called The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu written by Maurice Jolly. Jolly wrote the book to parody France's then-ruler, Emperor Napoleon III, with Machiavelli's ruthlessness standing in for Napoleon. Golovinski rewrote Dialogue to make it appear the Jews were secretly plotting and scheming to take over the world, playing up to the prejudices of many.
Even after The Times of London revealed the book to be a forgery in 1921, The Protocols continued to spread to other countries, fueling the wave of anti-Semitism that helped make it possible for the atrocities of World War II to occur (Hitler cites The Protocols in Mein Kampf). Even Henry Ford serialized the forgery in a Michigan newspaper he owned in the early 1920s. Today, despite numerous continual debunkings, The Protocols is still out there spreading lies.
Eisner takes all this information and structures it into a loose narrative covering the time from when Jolly wrote The Dialogue in 1864 up until present day where he shows himself gathering research for this book, amazed that The Protocols continues to spread despite widespread knowledge of its fraudulence. All of the times, characters and events are clear and easy to follow thanks to Eisner's mastery of the craft. Using black-and-white artwork, Eisner depicts honestly and emotionally the cruel hoax of The Protocols.
At 87, Eisner had done it all. With nothing to prove, he took on the task of helping to reveal one of the most deceitful forgeries of the 20th Century. He sets the tone in the preface.
"With the widespread acceptance of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature, there is now an opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible language. It is my hope that, perhaps, this work will drive yet another nail into the coffin of this terrifying vampire-like fraud," Eisner wrote.
So once again Eisner leads the way for the comic book medium, using the newfound success of the graphic novel to explore relevant and important issues like dispelling the myth of The Protocols - a pioneer to the last.
Denis Kitchen sent in this additional selection of review excerpts:
"Eisner's The Plot is a fiery torch of a book: A righteous light shone on an outrageous lie, at the hands of our art form's truest friend."-Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics
"When Will Eisner died on January 3, 2005, at age 87, the comics world lostone of its towering figures, a man who had earned every superlative that comics creators and commentators could offer."-Library Journal
"THE PLOT may do for the PROTOCOLS what MAUS did for the Holocaust in bringing the truth out to a wider audience. It is a fitting capstone to the career of one of the greatest pioneers of the graphic form or as Eisner dubbed it, 'sequential art.' Highly recommended for all graphic novel collections."-Baker and Taylor
"Will Eisner, superb draftsman of comic-book superhero fame, here turns to a real-world tale of deceitful fantasy and creeping evil: his graphic novel, "The Plot," relates the actual history of a pernicious century-old Czarist fabrication, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the hate-mongering anti-Semitic hoax that continues to proliferate among neo-Nazis, white-power websites, and, most egregiously, all across the Middle East. In his powerful art and shocking narrative - designed to expose, once and for all, this corrupting world-wide lie - Eisner is the true superhero of our time."-Cynthia Ozick, author of Heir to the Glimmering World
"Spectacular... [N]othing less than a revelation... [Eisner's] most important work ever."-Scoop
"[D]ares to go where few, if any, have gone before ...It has achieved a status for visual-verbal narrative that, like most of Eisner's work, shows the way for others to follow."-R.C. Harvey
"[G]enerous and even heroic. ...Eisner's parting gift to his current and future readers... is nothing less than the best attempt ever made to eradicate the lie of "Protocols," and to rescue future generations from the horrors that the text has occasioned."-Josh Lambert, Forward
"Eisner's effort belongs in every school library."-Marcus Eliason, Associated Press
"Though Eisner finished the book in his mid-80s, there's no sign of declining skill here. As always, his art combines the grit of realism with the emotional impact of the cartoon." --Lewis Shiner, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"With painstaking clarity, he depicts the world in which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion-supposedly a real Jewish plan to conquer the world-was actually forged in Russia in 1905 as a political gambit. Though repeatedly discredited, the myth of the document's authenticity survives, and this is Eisner's compelling documentation of its true history." -Maggie Thompson, Comic Buyer's Guide
"This intriguing study closes with suggestions for rectifying racial inequality, but its strongest merit is its subtle recalibration of a crucial piece of American history." -Publishers Weekly
WILL EISNER IN THE NEWS
Mexican Postage Stamps Get Seal of Disapproval in U.S.
July 11, 2005
By Michael Browning
HispanicBusiness.com
With all the friction-filled issues dividing Mexico and the United State -- illegal immigration, drug smuggling and NAFTA -- you wouldn't think a few postage stamps would create such a ruckus.
But they have. Mexico has issued a set of five postage stamps commemorating a comic-book figure most Americans had never heard of until a week or two ago: Memin Pinguin, a jolly, sweet-tempered, stupid little fellow with an Aunt-Jemima-like mother. Both characters are drawn with exaggerated Negroid facial features: Huge lips, flat noses, bug eyes.
Memin Pinguin is a much-beloved fixture in Hispanic humor. He dates back to 1945 and was originally created by a woman cartoonist, Yolanda Carlos Dulche, after she returned to Mexico from a visit to Cuba, in 1945. Originally Memin Pinguin was inspired by the black Cuban street waifs Dulche saw on her trip. He was drawn by Alberto Cabrera until 1972, and by Sixto Valencia since then. He is extraordinarily popular, south of the border.
Mexicans are lining up to buy the stamps, willing to wait up to two hours in line. Full multiple sets are going for as much as $800 on eBay. There is an expectation that the stamps may be withdrawn, because of the fuss they've stirred up. That would increase their value exponentially.
Mexican President Vicente Fox said last week that U.S. activists who have called a new Mexican postage stamp racist do not understand the issue and should read the comic book on which it is based.
"They don't have information, frankly," Fox told The Associated Press. '`All Mexico loves the character,'' Fox said, adding that he himself was fond of it. The stamps have been condemned by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, as well as activists such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, said the government ``emphatically rejects these complaints, which are the products of lack of knowledge or people who want publicity.''
``By no means is Mexico considering the possibility'' of withdrawing the stamp, Aguilar said, accusing critics of being ``people who want to take advantage of this . . . to seek publicity within American society.''
The stamps have also drawn fire from Mexico's tiny black community. The Asociacion Mexico Negro, which represents some 50,000 blacks living on the Pacific coast, said in a letter to Fox that they were stereotypical and racist.
Political correctness is practically unknown in Mexico, where there are few black immigrants. Caucasians are commonly addressed as Guero ("Whitey") and dark-skinned locals are nicknamed Morenito or "Negro" without causing offense.
Lost in the storm of American outrage is the strong probability that Memin Pinguin was, in his own way, born in the U.S.A.
He is the visual twin of "Ebony White," a black comic character who was the taxi-driving sidekick in cartoonist Will Eisner's enormously successful "Spirit" strip, which ran from 1940 to 1952. It is very likely that Cabrera was familiar with Eisner's "Ebony White" and modeled Memin Pinguin after him, visually. The two are almost identical, facially.
``I was never apologetic for the way I depicted Ebony,'' Eisner said, in an interview in "Just Comics and More." ``As a matter of fact, I was very comfortable with the way I did it. Remember, Ebony was created in the '40s and, at that time, you still had 'Amos 'n Andy.' That sort of humor was prevalent and acceptable at the time.''
Still, many Americans and not just black Americans, are sensitive to blatant racial stereotypes like Memin Pinguin. He has been preserved, like an embarrassing fly in amber, south of the border, as a vivid reminder of the way we were.
Eisner's Ebony White wasn't alone. Captain Marvel had his loyal "valet," Steamboat, a huge-lipped, bald-headed servant who helps the hero fight the Nazis in World War II. In Walt Disney's original 1940 animated feature, "Fantasia," white female centaurs are waited on by a black chambermaid centaur to the strains of Beethoven's Sixth symphony. The footage has been deleted from modern prints of the movie, causing hiccups in the Beethoven score.
With its immense global reach in the arts and entertainment industry in the 1930s and 1940s, America did more to spread racial stereotypes than any country on earth, though Britain ran a close second.
The British humorist P.G. Wodehouse depicts blacks as clowns. His brilliant butler, Jeeves, gets rid of an offensive pair of lavender socks belonging to his boss, Bertie Wooster, by giving them to a black elevator operator. The elevator operator pays tribute to "Misto Jeeves' " generosity.
As late as the mid-1980s, "Darkie" toothpaste was sold in Hong Kong and throughout the Far East by the Hawley Hazel Co., a subsidiary of Procter & Gamble. Showing a grinning black man wearing a top hat on the label, Darkie was phenomenally popular until American protests forced the name to be changed to "Darlie," and the black man to disappear. Back in the States, Jack Benny was accompanied, on radio and on television throughout the 1940s and 1950s, by his raspy-voiced servant "Rochester," played by Eddie Anderson. Originally a Pullman porter, Rochester was portrayed kindly, even if he was always subservient to Benny's main character. He often one-ups his boss in arguments. Anderson was himself black.
Memin Pinguin is, in many ways, our own pigeon, come home to roost. America cannot blame the Mexicans overmuch, if they have absorbed a lesson we practiced and preached singlemindedly for decades. More than modern political correctness is driving America to lecture Mexico over this goofy black waif. There is a certain what-have-we-wrought shock at seeing him rise up and remind us of our own past.
We feel guilty. We should.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The stories that follow appeared in Brazil, announcing the American debut of Marisa Furtados wonderful documentary, Will Eisner: Profession: Cartoonist (view a clip here ) at Comic-Con International in San Diego this week:
CARTUN
Eisner brasileira chega aos EUA
Aps enviar uma cpia da fita San Diego Comic Con, maior evento de quadrinhos dos EUA, Will Eisner Profisso Cartunista ser exibido em conveno
J se vo seis anos desde que o documentrio Will Eisner Profisso Cartunista, estrelado, visto e aprovado pelo prprio pai de Spirit, foi lanado. Produzido pela brasileira Marisa Furtado, o filme j foi exibido em festivais de quadrinhos e em TVs a cabo de 36 pases. Mas nunca nos EUA.
Pois a ''resistncia'' dos compatriotas de Eisner, que morreu em janeiro aos 87 anos, chegou ao fim. Aps enviar uma cpia da fita San Diego Comic Con, maior evento de quadrinhos dos EUA, que acontece de 14 a 17 de julho, Furtado recebeu o OK da direo e exibir o documentrio pela primeira vez na conveno, que neste ano prestar homenagem ao criador da ''graphic novel''.
''Tenho agentes internacionais freqentando as feiras e, at hoje, os americanos nunca tinham demonstrado interesse'', afirmou Furtado. ''Fico feliz que tenha conseguido agora, mas, por outro lado, lamento que Eisner no possa mais estar l para v-lo com os seus amigos.''
Um desses amigos Denis Kitchen, artista underground da gerao de Crumb e Shelton e atual controlador do esplio de Eisner. ''Para ser honesto, os americanos tendem a descartar as coisas em lngua estrangeira, e isso no algo de que devamos nos orgulhar'', disse Kitchen.
Personagem do documentrio, ao lado de outros grandes nomes da HQ americana como Jerry Robinson, Art Spiegelman e Bill Sienkiewicz, Kitchen diz estar negociando com ''uma grande companhia'' os direitos para uma verso dublada em ingls do filme.
''Will estava empolgado quando me falou do documentrio pela primeira vez'', comentou por telefone Bob Andelman, autor da biografia Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, que ser lanada em setembro pela Dark Horse e trata inclusive da relao de Eisner com a documentarista brasileira, que, durante oito anos, visitou diversas vezes o quadrinista. ''Pessoalmente, Will e [sua mulher] Ann gostavam muito da Marisa.''
Para Andelman, Profisso Cartunista ainda ''mais completo'' que ''Will Eisner: The Spirit of an Artistic Pioneer'', outro filme sobre Eisner que est sendo rodado pelos irmos John e Andrew Cooke. ''No h competio. Os dois tm um objetivo comum, que tornar Eisner mais conhecido. E, nisso, acho que ambos podem se ajudar'', contemporiza Kitchen. (da Folhapress)
WILL EISNER DOCUMENTARY @ SAN DIEGO
Will Eisner - Profisso Cartunista will be shown at the San Diego Comicon next July, taking part of a series of homages to the Comics author [and creator of the Spirit character, amon inumerous graphic novels] who died early this year.
directed by Marisa Furtado and Paulo Serran, the documentary was praised by Eisner himself and has been aired in 36 cable stations around the World. the cartoonist former editor, Denis Kitchen, is responsible for taking the movie to the nerdfest and is in talks to take an English dubbed version to the US.
Bob Andelman, author of the soon to be published bio Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, said Profisso Cartunista is the best documentary about the author. in 99 Profisso got the HQ Mix Award for best comic adaptation to other media [even though it wasnt originally a comic]. source:
IGN FilmForce Weekend Shopping Guide: More Cowbell
By Ken P.
Now that he's passed away, the conversation between Will Eisner and Frank Miller captured in the book Eisner/Miller (Dark Horse, $19.95 SRP) is even more precious, as it gives the kind of insights into the creative process that only a talk between creators can illuminate. What's equally as special, though, is just how entertaining that conversation is. Highly recommended.
The Arts:
A Graphic Coming of Age
Panel by panel, a fresh storytelling art is gaining attention and respectand many of these tales turn to the Jewish experience, ancient and modern, for inspiration.
By Leah Finkelshteyn
Hadassah Magazine
Walk into a Barnes & Noble bookstore. Go to the Science Fiction/Fantasy aisle, skip the shelves full of manga (Japanese comics) and there, flanked by pow-and-zoom superheroes and villains, are sophisticated, innovative gems of art and literature.
Stories about pre-Nazi-era Berlin; images of rain-drenched rabbis crying out to the divine; pictorial biographies of American Jewish working-class intellectuals; histories and morality tales and biblical narratives, all laid out in the evolving storytelling style called graphic novels. Though some writer-artists prefer to call the genre sequential art, others insist on comix. Art Spiegelman, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus and more recently In the Shadow of No Towers, calls them comic books that need a bookmark.
Whatever their ultimate name, the medium is experiencing an American renaissance. Over the past five years, graphic novels by artists and writers worldwide have increasingly been showing up in regular bookstores. Libraries stock books like Marjane Satrapis Persopolis: The Story of a Childhood, a memoir of growing up in Iran, and Harvey Pekars series about a Jewish everyman, American Splendor. Movie adaptations of works such as Splendor and Frank Millers Sin City have brought some graphic novelists broad name recognition.
Jewish writers and artists have kept pace with this revolution, and a growing number of graphic novelssome even by non-Jewsfeature Jewish themes.
Graphic novels vary in content and look. Subjects can range from crime noir to memoir, fiction to reportage, and the artistic style from cute animal cartoons to abstract collage. They all, however, share some basic elements. Similar to both comic strips and comic books, words and pictures are placed in a sequence of boxes (or panels). This creates a sort of word-and-art poetry, an amalgam of film techniques, script and design that appeals on both a visceral and intellectual level.
At the forefront of the convergence of Jews and comics lit (yet another term for the genre) is French artist-writer Joann Sfar. Renowned in France for his adult and childrens work, Sfar is making his American debut in August with The Rabbis Cat. The story takes place in 1930s Algeria and centers on the lives of Rabbi Abraham Sfar and his daughter, Zlabya, seen through the eyes of their irreverent cat. Originally published in French, The Rabbis Cat is drawn with an eye for emotional and background detail and a palette that reflects the mood of the characters and their surroundings: Algeria is an earthy range of browns, reds and yellows; the cats eyes flash green when he contemplates eating the rabbis pet parrotor the stupidity of the humans around him.
The book is divided into three chapters. In the first, the cat gains the ability to talk; the second features a visit from the legendary Malka of the Lions; and in the third, Zlabya marries a rabbi from Paris. The stories are compressed into an even six panels per page, creating a keyhole view of the rabbis world. Like the cat, we are outsiders, witnesses to the drama of the family Sfar.
Threaded throughout are whimsical human tableaux. In one, for example, the rabbi, faced with the cultured, nonreligious Jews of Paris who seem to have a better life than the Jews he knows at home, goes into a restaurant and orders the least kosher meal in the universe: ham...snails, seafood...oysters.... And a good wine named after a church or a Virgin Mary.
Before eating, the rabbi asks God to intercede: Tell me youll be sad if I break your Law. (In a nearby panel, a strange being with tiny wings and a kippawhether restaurant dcor or supernatural visitation is left to the readerlooks at the rabbi with a smile.)
It is elements like thesephilosophical and existential questions of ecclesiastic power and traditionthat take The Rabbis Cat beyond charming tales of an African shtetl. In 2003, it won the prestigious Jury Prize at the International Bande Dessine (drawn strip) Festival of Angoulme.
Mark Siegel, editorial director of First Second, a new publishing imprint from Roaring Brook Press dedicated to graphic works, describes the artist as Chagall-esque. Like Chagall, Sfar populates his worlds with signature characters. In Sfars case, rabbi-mystics and comical yellow-brown golems with the word emet, truth, on their forehead.
Chagall was developing a personal mythology, and if you look at his mythology as a sort of a code, his paintings become a bit like graphic novels, says Siegel. Sfar is constantly putting Chagall references all over his work.
Sfars cartoony, lyrical style in the service of mature storytelling is typical of LAssociation, a French comic publishing group of which he is a founding member. Included in the group is non-Jewish Christophe Blaine, whose first two Isaac the Pirate books were recently translated. In them, Isaac Sofer is a Jewish artist who comes, almost accidentally, to travel around the world with a pirate ship.
If Sfars drawings envision magical worlds, the harsh lines that fill Bipolar, the first joint endeavor of Israeli twins Tomer and Asaf Hanuka, create a disjointed psychological landscape. The five-part comic series, recently translated into English, has gotten press and peer attention. Each volume of Bipolar has autobiographical pieces by Tomer and a chapter of Pizzeria Kamikaze, a story by Asaf and Israeli author Etgar Keret.
Tomer, who works as an illustrator and now lives in England, has produced short abstract meditations on love and life. Asaf, who studied art in Lyon, France, and now lives in Israel, has a more classic comic-book style. He has worked with Keret on a number of stories and published a couple of books with French authors. I am not a writer, he says. I prefer to focus on the visual challenge.
Pizzeria Kamikaze, which will be published separately in November, is adapted from Knellers Happy Campers by Keret. It describes a desolate black, white and gray afterworld filled with people who have killed themselvesfrom Israelis who have slit their wrists to Arab suicide bombersall bearing the stigmata of their last wound.
Mordy, the main character, committed suicide over a broken heart and finds himself among the aimless wanderers. It reminds me of Allenby Street, he quips.
Asaf feels that Pizzeria Kamikaze mirrors the state of mind of Israeli youth. What Etgar is saying and the metaphor I am bringing to life, he notes, is that we all live right now as if we are all suicideswe have given up our dreams. We are saying that this is Tel Aviv and everyone has died.
In contrast to Sfars nostalgia-filled Cat, the universe Asaf and Keret have created is a sterile present. Yet they share a mystical bent and characters that yearn for a higher purpose, a connection to something greater. And in both there is an elusive divine response. Sfars hidden angel silently watches the rabbi; Asaf and Keret have undercover angels that guide the suicides and paratrooping mystical beings who collect the bodies of those who kill themselves again.
Asaf and Tomers comic-art education is typical of American graphic artists, from Spiegelman to newcomers Josh Neufeld and Neil Kleid. First, there is a childhood that is obsessed with comics from Peanuts to Superman and Batmanthe Hanuka brothers had an American aunt who brought them comics. Then in their twenties there is an Aha! moment, an I can use this form to explore other types of stories. For Asaf, this happened during his time in the Israeli Army.
In Europe, however, artists have a tradition of sophisticated comics on a variety of topics, and in general the medium has a respectability that it has not yet gained in the United States.
In the States, the comic-book business depends on teenage readers and muscle-men stories, says Sfar. In France, the festival of Angoulme has as much success as the film festival of Cannes. Besides, the greatest American [graphic novelists] seem more revered in France than in the States! Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Charles Schultz, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware.
Other Jewish-themed works from the Continent include Italian Vittorio Giardinos popular coming-of-age trilogy, A Jew in Communist Prague. His bright, beautiful drawings, very different from LAssociations work, embody a trend that references, for example, the realistic work of the French Jacques Tardi and Hergs TinTin books about a traveling reporter. Giardino won an award at the Angoulme festival in 1995 for A Jew in Communist Prague.
France has taken the lead in what was considered a native American art form, says Terry Nantier, whose publishing house, NBM (www. nbmpub.com), has been bringing European comics to the United States for over 25 years. Europeans have been viewing graphic novellas as an adult form since the 1970s.
This wouldnt be true if it werent for the history of repression of the medium in America, explains Siegel. In the 1950s, after starting to explore comics on all kinds of themes, the field suffered a backlash and official censorship. It stayed in that uncomfortable adolescence, he adds.
For years mainstream publishers focused on appealing to kids and teenagers. Today, the two huge comic companies, Marvel and D.C. Comics, churn out slick superhero books worked on by a team of writers, pencilers and inkers, colorists and letterers. D.C. publishes more idiosyncratic work under its Vertigo imprint.
It wasnt that Americans werent producing serious comics during the 1960s to late 1990s, but they were under the radar of the average reader. Spiegelman, Peter Kuper, Crumb and Pekarall Jewishchampioned the use of the comic format in a broad range of themes in self-published magazines and anthologies that they called underground comics or comix. And in contrast to mainstream assembly-line work, these books are created by a single artist who scripts and draws the story, or a writer-illustrator team, a trend that continues with young artists today.
Maus was the first big hit [in America], says Nantier. But it wasnt really anything that started a gold rush.
Today, publishers and readers are rushing to the field, treating it like a new discovery. You have two kinds of things going on, Nantier adds. One, a lot more literary-type graphic novels.... This brings legitimacy to this form. On the other side you have the commercial success of manga.
It has been a long journey, particularly if you use as a starting point the 1978 publishing date of Will Eisners A Contract with God, four short stories that revolve around a 1930s Bronx tenement. Eisner, who died in January at the age of 87, coined the term graphic novel; one of the industry awards is named after him. A traveling exhibit of his work, Will Eisner: A Retrospective, will be at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York through September 9 (212-254-3511; www.moccany.org).
In his later years, Eisner was concerned with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, and his final two works take on the literary excuses for that hatred. Fagin the Jew is a defense of the Charles Dickens character. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published posthumously in May with an introduction by Eisner and novelist Umberto Eco, is a history of the pernicious lie.
Eisners stock charactersThe Plots Matthieu Golovinski, writer of Protocols, is obviously abad guy with his squinty eyes and piggish expressionsincredible draftsmanship and sure knowledge of comic design and layout make his work a good introduction to the form. His mastery of unconventional page format, where characters step outside the panel or whole pages use no frames whatsoever, the story carried by page composition and the placement of word bubbles, is a bridge to the more abstract styles and pacing of, for example, Spiegelman and Kuper.
Kuper, who has been working in the field for 30 years, has explored reportage, fiction and humor among other styles. His latest is a war parable with no words called Sticks and Stones. He is, however, best-known for adaptations of the works of Franz Kafka (Give It Up! and The Metamorphosis). His blocky, abstract images and scratched-out stick men suit Kafkas anxiety-filled works.
A new generation of American artists has come forward, and many look to Europe as impetus to push the art form forward. Others are taking the same route as their underground predecessorsself-publishing, often with a grant from the Xeric Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting promising new graphic novelists.
We are seeing a lot of work coming to fruition that has been worked on for a while, says Kuper. You have to learn how to draw, to write, then compose a page. Maus, for example, published in book form in 1986, was originally produced as several small stories in Spiegelmans self-published magazine, Raw, and took 13 years to create.
Among the newer of the new is Josh Neufeld. He has illustrated Pekars work and won a Xeric grant to publish A Few Perfect Hours, an account of his travels with his then girlfriend, now wife, writer Sari Wilson.
When Sari and I went traveling, we left in 1993, he says. We took along a comic called Comics-Trips by Peter Kuper, a sketchbook-comic story about Kupers travels with his wife. It was completely eye-opening. Stories about dietary problems and gorillasall sorts of strange things. I kept a sketchbook and I drew a lot.
The short stories in A Few Perfect Hours are filled with intimate momentsfor example, the couples awed reaction to a Buddhist prayer, an image of Sari and Josh with beatific expressions against an entire panel filled with ohms.
The gentle, slow pace and the crisp drawings of A Few Perfect Hours are reminiscent of the clean European style, with an American flair (Neufeld cites TinTin as an influence). Unlike Giardinos blank, beautiful faces, Neufeld gives his characters individuality. Sari and Josh have an expressiveness, a hint of the cartooning seen in Eisners work, that creates an instant bond with the reader.
Only the last story is specifically Jewish in content. Called Tribal Rituals, Part II: Cremation, Cubicles and Cant, it compares the awkward funeral and shiva for Joshs Grandma Gus to the intricate funeral rites the two travelers witnessed in Bali. Ultimately, the story is about a family not at home with its own traditions. Unfortunately, Neufeld says, growing up I was never introduced to Judaism in a positive context....
Neufelds awareness of his heritage does wind its way through A Few Perfect Hours, though again in a negative context: The final line of How to Star in a Singaporean Soap Opera, spoken by Josh, is Do you think theyll be able to tell were Jewish?a response to Saris suggesting they become movie extras in Cairo.
Friends had acted as extras in Egyptian films, says Neufeld. One was Jewish, and he saidif they found out you are Jewish they wouldnt want you in their movie.
Kuper says his Jewish background comes out in his work, in the self-deprecating black humor of his storytelling. Neil Kleid, who is Orthodox, shows his roots on the final page of his Ninety Candles (www.rantcomics. com), published through a Xeric grant. The story of an artists life in 90 panels ends with an image of a gravestone upon which is carved a Magen David.
There are other artist-writers who, like Sfar, cant but help express their heritage overtly. Philadelphia native J.T. Waldmans Megillat Esthera seven-year labor of lovewill be coming out this summer (www.megillatesther.com). The book faithfully follows the Esther story with bold black-and-white illustrations, the Hebrew text and an English translation. One can use the abundantly, even overwhelmingly, illustrated work to follow the reading of the Megilla on Purim, though the flaunted sexuality may make it uncomfortable to bring to shul.
Waldman, who is self-publishing the book, grew up among secular and Reform Jews and became interested in Judaism during a junior year in Spain. I found my Judaism in a Catholic country, he says.
After Spain, Waldman spent time at Jewish Renewal weekends and eventually decided to create a comic that would reflect his new interest. I decided on Esther because it was a more secular book, he says, Then I learned that the first full text a sofer [Jewish scribe] writes is Megillat Esther. That was a sign for me that it was the right fit. His completed volume has an operatic scope, complete with the trappingsfrom architecture to hairstylesof a corrupt Persian dynasty. By faithfully following the text, with the help of midrashim, Waldman has overturned a trend of playing down the more salacious aspects of the account. He reminds us that the real Book of Esther is a perverse Cinderella story, where the belle of the ball has to save her people from certain annihilation.
The sheer volume of upcoming Jewish graphic novels is staggering: Kleid will be publishing Brownsville, about two members of Murder, Inc. Hungarian-born Miriam Katin will be debuting a book about the year she and her mother spent hiding from the Germans during the Holocaust. In 2006, First Second will publish The Golems Klezmer Band, a Joann Sfar book; Homeland, the history of Israel from Abraham to the modern state by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Mario Ruiz, will be available from Valor Comics.
There is real genius out there, says Siegel. If people dont want to read it, thats O.K., but they will miss out on something very, very good.
Whats funny with comics is that people keep being drawn to do itno pun intended, he adds. They keep being drawn to produce in that way.
Perhaps along the way to the storyboard theyll finally decide what to call it, too.
Jewish Graphic Novels: A Partial Listing
Isaac the Pirate: The Capital; and Isaac the Pirate:To Exotic Lands by Christophe Blaine (NBM)
A Contract With God: and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner (D.C. Comics)
Fagin the Jew: A Graphic Novel by Will Eisner (Doubleday)
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner (Norton)
A Jew in Communist Prague: Loss of Innocence; and A Jew in Communist Prague: Adolescence; and A Jew in Communist Prague: Rebellio by Vittorio Giardino (NBM)
Bipolar by Asaf Hanuka, Tomer Hanuka and Etgar Keret (Alternative Comics)
The Jew of New York by Ben Katchor (Pantheon)
Yossel by Joe Kubert (iBooks)
Give It Up!: And Other Short Stories by Franz Kafka by Peter Kuper (NBM)
The Metamorphosis by Peter Kuper (Crown)
Berlin, Book One: City of Stone by Jaso Lutes (Draw and Quarterly)
A Few Perfect Hours and Other Stories from Southeast Asia and Central Europe by Josh Neufeld (Alternative Comics)
Best of American Splendor by Harvey Pekar (Ballantine)
Maus: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelma (Pantheon)
Maus II: A Survivors Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon)
The Golems Mighty Swing by James Strum (Drawn and Quarterly)
Megillat Esther by J.T. Waldman (Peartree4productions)
WHATS IN WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE?
Will Eisner is a founding father of two American mediums: comic books (The Spirit) and graphic novels (A Contract With God). Will Eisner: A Spirited Life is the biography of this masters life and work, often told in his own words and family photos.
Eisner trained some of the worlds greatest comic art talent: Bob Kane (Batman); Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four); Jules Feiffer; Dave Berg (Mad); and Joe Kubert (Tarzan). Eisner also inspired generations of modern artists and writers, including Frank Miller (Sin City) Harlan Ellison, Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and Art Spiegelman (Maus).
Michael Chabon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was influenced by Eisners career, wrote the stirring introduction for Will Eisner: A Spirited Life. Neal Adams also contributed an appreciation of his friend Eisner.
Author Bob Andelman conducted almost weekly interviews with Will Eisner. The book includes interviews with dozens of other familiar names in popular literature and graphic arts. Among those who spoke about either their personal experience with Eisner or the way in which he touched their careers were: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Neil Gaiman, Denis Kitchen, Joe Kubert, Jim Warren, Stan Lee, Dave Sim, Patrick McDonnell.
SUBSIDIARY RIGHTS TO WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE
International and Foreign Language Rights: Send inquiries to
Lance Kreiter.
Excerpt, First Serial Rights: Send inquiries to
Kelly Macsisak.
Film, Video, Television and Multimedia Rights: Send inquiries to
Denis Kitchen.
Audiobook Rights: Send inquiries to
Michael Bourret.
PRE-ORDER WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE TODAY
Three years after starting on this book, its exciting to announce that you can now pre-order the book on Amazon.com,BN.com, BooksaMillion.com and anywhere books are sold. Order two; theyre small.
WILL EISNER LINKS
Will Eisner Official
Site; Who is Will Eisner?
http://www.willeisner.com
Order Will Eisner: A Spirited Life
Order Books By Will Eisner
Will Eisner: A Spirit Life Official Web Site
http://www.aspiritedlife.com
Will Eisner & The Spirit: Biography and History of a Comics Legend
http://deniskitchen.com/docs/bios/bio_will_eisner.html
The Comics Reporters Eisner Page
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/commentary/674/
Will Eisners John Law, New Adventures Online
http://www.johnlaw.us.com
Wildwood Cemetery: The Spirit Database
http://www.angelfire.com/art/wildwood/
Will Eisner Original Art For Sale
http://deniskitchen.com/
DC Comics Will Eisner Library
http://www.dccomics.com/graphic_novels/dc_category.html?cat=eisner
Dark Horse Comics
http://darkhorse.com
NBM Publishing
http://www.nbmpub.com/fairytales/eisner/eisnerhome.html
IMPACT Books (a division of F+W Publications)
http://www.artistsnetwork.com/impact_books/titles.asp
PODGallery: Fine Art Prints and Notecards of Will Eisner's work
http://www.podgallery.com/eisner
The Spirit Checklist
http://www.luckymojo.com/spiritchecklist.html
Rare Eisner: Making of a Genius
http://www.comicartville.com/rareeisner.htm
Fagin the Jew, Doubleday Books
http://www.randomhouse.com/doubleday/catalog/display.pperl?0385510098
Kitchen & Hansen Literary Agency
http://www.kitchenandhansen.com
Who is Bob Andelman, Anyway?
http://www.andelman.com
Will Eisner and authorized
biographer Bob Andelman at Eisner's studio in South Florida, August 2003.
(Photo by Pete Eisner)
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©2005,
All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced without the
express written permission of the author. bob@andelman.com
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