In 2000, Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, sparked considerable interest in the Jewish-American background of so many leading creators of the superhero genre. Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (Jewish Publication Society, $25 paper, Sept.) is the third nonfiction book in the last several years to be devoted to this subject. (Full disclosure: in his acknowledgments, Kaplan thanks this reviewer for answering a few research questions.)
Rather than competing with each other, the three books have proved to be complementary: in fact, their authors even appear together on comics convention panels. Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s Up, Up and Oy Vey! (2006), a more serious tome than its title suggests, focuses on what Weinstein perceives as Jewish cultural and moral values as expressed in superhero comics. Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007) reveals and explores subtexts in comics that reflect their creators’ Jewish background. Kaplan’s new book takes a more purely historical approach. From Krakow to Krypton provides a good basic introduction to the history of the American comics industry, focusing on the contributions of major Jewish creators. Kaplan draws extensively on interviews he conducted for the book with figures ranging from comics industry founding fathers like Will Eisner and Jerry Robinson to current creators like Chris Claremont and Art Spiegelman.
In a major difference from the other two books, Kaplan ranges well beyond superheroes to cover other sorts of comics by Jewish creators, from Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. (Pekar even contributes an introduction in comics format.)
For readers who are starting to explore the interface between Jewish culture and comics, Kaplan’s book may be the best place to start. It offers a thorough grounding in the history of the subject, which will enable them better to appreciate Fingeroth’s and Weinstein’s more analytical approaches.
In a presidential election year, it behooves the voter to review and ponder the history of the current administration. What could be a more entertaining method than looking back through editorial cartoons? Ambushed!: A Cartoon History of the George W. Bush Administration (Paradigm Publishers, $19.95 paper, Sept.) combines editorial cartoons by the Miami Herald’s Jim Morin with text by Harvard and Boston University political science scholar Walter C. Clemens Jr.
For 200 pages Clemens lists the failings of the Bush administration. Yet Clemens seems to be preaching to the choir. Bush supporters are unlikely to be converted by the book, and even those readers nodding in agreement may find themselves nodding off toward the end of this long catalogue of criticism. In contrast, Morin’s cartoons enliven the book with their sharp wit, continual inventiveness and devastatingly powerful attacks. In the classic tradition of American political cartoonists, Morin has a knack for creating visual metaphors, like comically enormous hippopotamuses representing colossal national debt, or, more disturbingly, soldiers positioned like the figures in the famous photograph from Iwo Jima, raising not a flag but a giant gas station pump in the Saudi Arabian desert.
Back in the 1970s, the Topps Company, best known for trading cards and bubble gum, produced numerous series of stickers that parodied commercial advertising of the day with products like Ditch Boy Paint and Blisterine. It was partly through creating these Wacky Packages that some of the leading creators of underground comix, including Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith and Jay Lynch, made a living back then. The new Wacky Packages hardcover (Harry N. Abrams, $19.95, June) collects the first seven series, handsomely reproduced in color. In his introduction, Spiegelman persuasively argues that, like the early Mad, Wacky Packages served an important function for kids by subverting and mocking American commercial culture. Comic art aficionados will surely admire the ways in which the Wacky Packages artists so perfectly captured the look of 1970s advertising while rendering it absurd. But the book collection repeats the same basic gag over and over. However admirable it is that Abrams has resurrected the Wacky Packages, this book is best appreciated in small doses.
In his foreword to Gary Gianni’s The Prince Valiant Page (Flesk Publications, $29.95, June), Hellboy creator Mike Mignola writes, “Gary is a genuine throwback to the good old boys of illustration—Cornwell, Wyeth, Gibson, Pyle, Booth. Gary was not imitating any one of them; he apparently was one of them.” Indeed, Gianni carries on a tradition of romantic yet realistic illustration that once, as exemplified by Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, was a dominant force in American comics but is virtually absent from 21st century comic books and strips. Foster created the great comic strip saga Prince Valiant; in 2000 Gianni became the assistant to artist John Cullen Murphy, Foster’s successor on Valiant, and in 2004 Gianni took over drawing the classic strip.
To those of us who cannot draw, the work of skilled comics artists may seem like magic. How do they do it? In The Prince Valiant Page, Gianni helps demystify the process. He pays tribute to Foster and Murphy through reproducing impressive examples of their work and chronicles his own apprenticeship on Valiant under Murphy. Gianni shows preliminary and intermediate versions of his own drawings for the strip to demonstrate how his work develops step by step to the finished art. A particularly illuminating chapter centers on models and photographs, showing how Gianni both uses and transforms the images they provide.
In a nice touch, the book also has an introduction by Robert Wagner, who played Prince Valiant in the 1954 movie adaptation. But perhaps readers will most appreciate The Prince Valiant Page as a showcase of Gianni’s superb artwork, on Valiant and previous projects. Certainly this retrospective demonstrates that the current strip deserves much wider visibility in newspapers than it currently receives. Instead of confining itself to alternative comics on its "Sunday Funnies” page, what if the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran something like Prince Valiant for a few months?
