The Jewish Side of Superman

Two New Surveys Struggle to Define the Jewish Comic Book

File Under: Hefty Collections You Probably Can’t Afford But Totally Wish You Could

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when endemic anti-Semitism barred American Jews from careers in the creation of mainstream American culture. So, as Harvey Pekar’s excellent foreword to From Krakow to Krypton illustrates (in comic form!), they climbed in through the windows.

The comic book as we know it was born in 1933, when Charlie Gaines (nee Ginsburg), an unemployed Jewish Sunday school teacher, developed a scheme to repackage the Sunday funnies in magazine format. At first some doubted that anyone would pay for comics that had already been published, but many did, and the form soon exploded. Jewish writers and artists created virtually all of the most famous superheroes, and they’ve played a key role in the medium ever since.

Or, as the press notes to Krakow would have you know, Jews didn’t only create the first comic book, but also “the first graphic novel, the first comic book convention, the first comic book specialty store, and they helped create the underground comics (or ‘Comix’) movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s.” So there.

Out of this veritable treasure house of material, it’s fitting that whatever god governs the zeitgeist (I don’t think it’s ours) decided to bring forth not one but two very different, very illustrated histories of the Jewish contribution to comic books. One, the appropriately named Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, edited by Paul Buhle, dryly attacks the issue from the standpoint of big-C, big-H Cultural History. The other, Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books, is an exuberant, chaotic oral history of Jews in the medium, complete with glossy pages and full-color illustrations.

The question of how to address the confluence of Jews and comics is complicated by the fact that there’s no consensus on what makes a comic book Jewish. Is it enough that its creator is Jewish, as Superman, Batman, and Spiderman’s have been? Because its characters are Jewish, like X-Men’s Magneto or Batman’s Ragman? Because it deals with Jewish themes, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus? Or is it something more subtle; some unique, ambiguous quality that speaks to the Jewish experience?

The answer to all these questions, for both books, is “yes.” Both authors take a big-tent approach to the question of what comics to consider “Jewish.” This is probably a wise move‚ Jews in comics have been as diverse as the works they have created, and it would be foolishly reductive to try and tease out a single narrative from so many voices. Like most things stereotypically Jewish: banking, Hollywood, newspapers, Jews were probably drawn to comics as much by lack of opportunity elsewhere as by any part of their genetic makeup.

And yet Buhle, probably because his account is so much shorter, emphasizes this more clearly than Kaplan, there is something about the archetypal themes of the comic book form that do seem very, well, Jewish. This is especially clear in early Yiddish comics and the “comix” movement that began in the 1960s. In these cases, comics were a voice for anti-establishment, leftist critiques of the status quo. Buhle makes this point explicitly, referencing early Yiddish comics, which frequently attacked the exploitative labor practices of the Jewish upper class, saying they “reflected something not so common to all cultures, the articulation of resentment by the dispossessed against the elite.”

Even the superhero comics of the 1940s, despite their goyish-looking characters like Superman and Batman, dealt with some very Jewish themes. Much has been written about the similar cultural roles filled by Superman and the Golem, both of whom are all-powerful saviors dreamt up by the powerless. But more than that, the superheroes struggle with problems of dual-identities and alienation from a society that may turn on them as soon as they are no longer useful. It’s hard not to see some parallel between the superheroes who must work to “pass” as normal in a world that fears and mistrusts them, and their creators, who lived in a society so anti-Semitic that most of them had to change their names simply to find work.

So even if neither book arrives at a definition of the Jewish comic, they celebrate the rich history of the medium in a way that humanizes its artists and their struggles to succeed, be accepted, and make really badass cartoons. After reading one (personally, I would suggest Krakow) there will be no doubt in your mind that comics are a true art form saturated with a rich Jewish influence, even if you can’t describe exactly how.