The Thing is Jewish

Yes, it is old news by now. However, some people are still just finding out about it. People like Ben Wheeler at Ben and Alice.

Ben quotes from Paul Jenkins's piece in The Nation and then discusses the website Religious Affiliation of Comics Book Characters.

If you've never been to the "Reigious Affiliation..." site, I'd reccommend it as a cool site to visit. You'll notice that the site backs up their info on the characters by quoting other websites. Not surprisingly, much of the Jewish data comes from the sites of Mikel Midnight &/or myself.

Another review of Yossel April 19, 1943: A Story of the Warsaw Ghetto


I feel especially obligated to steer people towards this review, since it's written by a Texan librarian (I used to live in Texas and have been working as a librarian for 8 years).

Gypsy Librarian's review

Maybe Superman's Jewish, after all?

Take a look at the 3rd entry of April 23, 2005 of Scott's Polite Dissent blog ("Passover, Superman Style").

Now, why would Superman make such a casual reference to "matzo ball soup" if he wasn't Jewish?

Diana Marsh's adaptation of "The Bleeding Tree"

Marsh's adaptation of the Jewish folk tale was available at the Alternative Press Expo back in August 2005. Her blog quotes a reviewer who was impressed with it :

Diana Marsh's The Bleeding Tree is a Jewish folktale with lush drawing and a truly disturbing last two pages. It seems like there's always a comics adaptation of some folktale or another, their brevity, I suppose. It's rare that someone takes advantage of the visual oppurtunities provided in these neat little stories and it's rarer that the comics are anything more than illustrated expositions. Marsh's talent really shows through in the last three wordless pages as she lets her drawing capture the quiet moment of something happening in the woods and nobody around to hear. I'd love to see this a little bit extrapolated, but maybe that's just because I've gotten so immersed in the Jewish religion and its prohibitions against blood lately.

The Thing: the World’s Strongest Jew

The 10-paragraph research paper proposal may be read at Nathan Mutchler's blog.

Peter Soloway adaptations of 2 Jewish stories

The Dying Wish (adapted from a Jewish folk tale)
http://www.doesstuff.com/Illustration/slides/chaninah-1-orig.html
http://www.doesstuff.com/Illustration/slides/chaninah-2-orig.html
http://www.doesstuff.com/Illustration/slides/chaninah-3-orig.html


Gimpel the Fool (adapted from the short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer)
http://www.doesstuff.com/Illustration/slides/Gimpel-1-orig.html
http://www.doesstuff.com/Illustration/slides/Gimpel-2-orig.html

The 37th Tzaddik

"Lamed Zayin" (Hebrew for the letter combination that equals "37") has a blog at http://lamedzayin.blogspot.com/ which he occasionally uses as a place to display his one-panel Jewish comics.

Thus far, there are 6 comics.

His latest, titled "Barnyard Cops" involves a sheep-cop, McGruff the Crime Dog and a pig.

Israely [sic] Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest

Amitai Sandy (of Dimona Comix) and Eyal Zusman have responded to the anti-Mohammed Danish cartoons and the Iranian Holocaust cartoons contest by having their own cartoon contest - an anti-Semitic cartoons contest.

Hmmm.

“We’ll show the world we [Jews and Israelis] can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy.

I can understand judging a cartoon's offensiveness &/or its humor, but how are they going to determine if the author / illustrator is actually Jewish. Will they be rejecting cartoons by suspected Gentiles?

Oh no! Not another potential who-is-a-Jew debate.

To read about the contest, go to the official website at http://www.boomka.org/.

Jewish Book Week 2006 - "The Art of the Graphic Novel" session

This year's Jewish Book Week (in London, England) program includes a session on graphic novels. The panelists are :

* Paul Gravett (comics historian, author of the book Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life, as well as an as-yet-unpublished essay about American-Jewish graphic novels)

* Steve Marchant (author of The Cartoonists Workshop)

* Corinne Pearlman (Jewish Quarterly cartoonist and author of the short comic story "The Non-Jewish Jewess")

* Marion Baraitser (coauthor of Home Number One, "a gripping graphic novel for teens featuring a young heroine from the year 2020 who travels through time to meet her distant cousins in Theresienstadt, 1944")

Robert Leiter's critique of Jewish graphic novels

In response to the Hadassah cover article on graphic novels by Leah Finkelshteyn, Robert Leiter wrote an opinion piece basically saying that he still finds comics a juvenile format.

I really can't figure out why anyone would pay good money for such supposed "adult" versions of the stuff I read back then, or why reams of words have been wasted explicating such "books."

Books by Danny Fingeroth and A. David Lewis

Jason Tondro's blog entry for Mar. 26, 2005 reports on his trip to San Diego, where he attended the 35th National Popular Culture Conference.

Jason mentions how guest of honor Danny Fingeroth was (and still is?) working on a book titled Disguised as Clark Kent, described as a look at the Jewish role in the creation of the superhero.

Jason also mentions A. David Lewis's book The Lone and Level Sands.

A Google search for that title brought up a review at Comic Book Galaxy. The reviewer, Jim Witt, describes the book as "a re-examination of the Jewish exodus from Egypt".

"Malopolska" by Yirmi Pinkus

The first issue of Guilt & Plreasure magazine contains the short comic story "Malopolska". The Table of Contents for the issue, as it appears on the website, provides the following description :

Pinkus’s comic strip asks whether there is really anything new about renewal. As Jews move on, do Jews just create new versions of the places they left behind? After visiting Poland, Pinkus wonders whether his hometown of Tel Aviv could be seen as a kind of shtetl redux as opposed to a medieval city? This article can be a nice complement to Josh Kun’s memoir and Nathaniel Deutsch’s essay. To what extent are we always recreating what we know, for better or for worse?

A comic for the genizah

A genizah is, in the Jewish tradition, "a place where worn-out ritual objects, as well as any piece of paper on which the four-letter Hebrew name of God is found, can be placed for sacred storage and/or eventual burial".

Though it's a Christian comic, not a Jewish one, it seems that copies of the comic book Captain Miracle would need to be eventually buried in a Jewish cemetery, since the 4-letter Hebrew name of God appears in it. The four-letter name (יהוה) is spoken by the main character, Billy Batista (not to be confused with Billy Batson), to transform him into the Christian superhero Captain Miracle (not to be confused with either Captain Marvel or Miracleman).

You may view a preview of page 3 of the first issue (which shows Billy speaking the name) at http://captainmiracle.holycomics.com/captmiracle/preview3.html.

Neil Kleid, author of "Shomer Negiiah" and Brownsville

Over at Sequential Tart, reviewer Rebecca Henely gave the anthology True Porn a "9" and declared "There is so much great stuff in this anthology, it's amazing." Among the stories she describes is the following :

Practicing Jew Neil Kleid’s "Shomer Negiah" portrays being tempted in such a strong way that you can almost feel his passion simmering off the page.

That was back in Nov. 2004, but noone told me about it back then.

How does Neil feel about being a contributor to such a risque issue? During his Silver Bulletin interview, he said :

Let's just say Mom isn't getting a contributor copy.

In more recent news, preview pages of Kleid's Brownsville (a graphic novel about the Jewish mob group known as Murder, Inc.) may be found at the NBM website.

Cargo - Comic strip reports from Germany and Israel

I don't have a copy of this yet, but there's an article about the book at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3193303,00.html

Comic book journalism

Israeli, German artists team up to create a comic book illustrating their personal perceptions of Tel Aviv and Berlin
Ashley Perry, EJP

After visiting each others countries earlier this year, a group of three German and three Israeli artists have joined together to create a book about their experiences.

The end product is called ’Cargo’ and was produced in both an English and German version. It is one of dozens of projects instigated to make the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany.

The book launch and comic fair will be held at the Goethe-Institut Jerusalem on Feb. 23rd at 7 PM.

See http://www.goethe.de/ins/il/jer/ver/en1165416.htm for details.

A series of dialogues between Howard Chaykin and Michael Netzer

For those who don't want to follow the hyperlink to http://www.flamingsword.biz/2005/05/crazy-about-comics.html, I'll try to summarize.

What started out as some one-liners between Jewish cartoonists Howard Chaykin and Michael Netzer has become a long-running in-joke between them. Of course, now that Netzer has blogged about it, the joke isn't as private as it once was.

The punch lines of the jokes involve Netzer being characterized as a "crazy Lebanese Jew" and Chaykin fearing that he needs to find himself a bullet-proof vest.