‘From Krakow to Krypton;’ The people of the comic book

By KATIE SCHNEIDER

article created on: 2009-00-25T00:00:00

In 1978, cartoonist Art Spiegelman began interviewing his father Vladek about his experiences during the Holocaust. Over the next three years, he gathered enough material to write and illustrate the story of his father’s survival and its impact on his own psyche.

He conceived of a long-form work with the scope of a novel, telling the tale with anthropomorphized animals: Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs and Nazis as cats. Spiegelman, who published “Maus” in the mid-1980s, is the only graphic novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Arie Kaplan, a comic book author in his own right, offers up “From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books,” a showcase of Jewish contributions to the art form. Arie Kaplan begins at the beginning, with the birth of “Famous Funnies,” the first monthly comic book to be sold on newsstands. An unemployed former teacher named Max Gaines (nee Ginsberg) took inspiration from old newspaper comics in his attic, stumbling upon a formula for reprinting Sunday strips in magazine form.

“Famous Funnies” hit newsstands in May 1934, turning a profit within six months.

While “Famous Funnies” made its money recycling artwork from other sources, it wouldn’t be long before publishers began looking for original strips to fill the comic pages.

In those early days, Jewish writers and illustrators were looking for any work they could find. According to legendary MAD Magazine artist Al Jaffee. “I think the factor that brought all the Jewish guys into [comic books] is that there was a tremendous amount of anti-Semitic bigotry as far as a lot of industries were concerned. We couldn’t get into newspaper strips or advertising.” More than that, though, it was also a good cultural fit.

“We are the people of the Book,” said writer/cartoonist Will Eisner, “and anyone who’s exposed to Jewish culture, I think, walks away for the rest of his life with an instinct for telling stories.”

Two of those storytellers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, invented a superhero who may have dressed in red-white-and-blue, but landed on these shores with a Hebrew name. Kal-El, better known as Superman, may not have been outwardly Jewish, but the clues are there for those who know how to read them. Kal-El arrived in a small space capsule, much like Moses in a small basket traveling down the Nile. Clark Kent is a bland WASP, masking the more exotic man behind the disguise. An invincible hero who fights on behalf of the innocent? Sounds a lot like the Golem who protected the Jews in medieval Prague.

“From Krakow to Krypton” profiles the ups and downs of many of the industry’s greats. During the classic “Golden Age of Comics” in the mid-20th century, Bill Finger was cheated out of his credit as Batman’s co-creator.

In the ’50s, Harvey Kurtzman started MAD Magazine. The ’60s gave birth to Spiderman, the Fantastic Four and the X-men, courtesy of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In the ’70s, Will Eisner published the first full-length graphic novel. Rather than mask his identity, Eisner drew on it to produce A Contract with God, the story of a pious Hasidic Jew.

“From Krakow to Krypton” is an engaging book, in spite of some drawbacks. Siegel and Schuster’s tale, in particular, has been told many times and Kaplan is far from the first to analyze Superman looking for his Jewish attributes. Still, there is much to like about it. Lavish illustrations help the narrative come alive and introduce casual fans to new works. At heart, it is a hopeful book, proof that social progress has been made over the decades. From Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical American Splendor to Neil Gaiman’s Kabbalah-influenced Sandman and Judd Winick’s Caper, openly Jewish stories have long-since hit the mainstream.

At least one Jewish cartoonist thinks it may be time to stop looking at characters as ‘us’ and ‘them,” Go Girl!, a contemporary comic by Trina Robbins, features a main character who just happens to be Jewish. Although Robbins, like Spiegelman, has used comics to explore issues of the Holocaust, her teenage superhero Lindsay Goldman doesn’t wear her religion on her sleeve. “When somebody can be black,” Robbins says, “and somebody can be Jewish and somebody can be Asian and you don’t make a big deal out of it. When you don’t make a big deal out of what someone is, that’s real equality.”