The feeling, of course, is largely a function of language. Yiddish may be the most onomatopoeic language ever created. Everything sounds exactly the way it should: macher for a self-appointed big shot, shlmiel for the fellow who spills the soup and shlmazel for the poor guy who gets the soup spilled on him, putz for an active louse, shmuck for a hapless one (as in “poor shmuck”), shnorer for a freeloader, nudnick for a pest. The expressiveness is bound into the language, and so is a kind of ruthless honesty. There is no decorousness in Yiddish, nor much romance. It is raw, egalitarian, vernacular.

That is why, even though there was, as Harvey Pekar makes clear in these pages, a vibrant Yiddish literature, the whole idea of a literature may have been inimical to the very spirit of Yiddish. Sentiment, sensationalism, and formula—all of these were natural to a language that was focused on the here and now rather than on airy philosophical discourse, on the forcefulness of expression rather than on nuances, on brutal truthfulness rather than on fine emotions. Yiddish is a blunt instrument. That is its real charm, not the phony whimsy that Pekar so detests in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, perhaps the most famous Yiddish writer.

Instead of great works, the language’s primary legacy is not only the Yiddishisms sprinkled into English for flavor or the subversive candor that impregnated American entertainment through Jewish comics but also the very democracy of Yiddish—its stubborn plebeian pride. Yiddishkeit seems to luxuriate in its own lack of elegance and its own marginalization, which is why a book of comics art, another outsider form, seems especially appropriate to describe it and why a wry shlump like Pekar seems an especially apt coauthor.

Yiddishkeit is abrasive. It is an attitude of challenge just as Yiddish is a language of challenge. As this book amply demonstrates, Yiddish artists were always attacking the status quo, and it is certainly no coincidence that many of these Yiddish artists, not to mention many grassroots Yiddishers, were political leftists. By the same token, the artistic and political Jewish establishments were afraid of Yiddish—afraid of the way it seemed to bulldoze right over politesse. Even the state of Israel reviled Yiddish, ostensibly for fear it would override Hebrew, and, as you will read, there were times when Israel outlawed the Yiddish theater. In effect, though, the real fear of Yiddishkeit was that it was too Jewish, too insular, too much an expression of the loud, wild, lively Jewish hoi polloi whom high-born Jews found so offensive. Who could imagine a state where the citizens spoke Yiddish?

Now that Jews have been largely assimilated into America, Yiddishkeit may seem both anachronistic and nostalgic here. Many Jews of my generation will no doubt remember, as I do, their grandparents speaking Yiddish when they didn’t want the children to know what they were talking about. As the European-born and then the first American-born generations passed, they seemed to take Yiddish with them. And yet Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely, not because there are individuals dedicated to its survival, though there are, but because Yiddishkeit is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.

Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is an author, cultural historian, and film critic. This is excerpted from Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land, edited by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, published by Abrams ComicArts. Introduction copyright © Neal Gabler, 2011. Illustrations copyright © their respective creators, 2011. Reprinted by permission.

If you don’t immediately think of Foreskin Man and Captain Israel, no worries; the former, after all, was created by anti-circumcision activist Matthew Hess, while the latter is the brainchild of Stand With Us, a conservative pro-Israel group. They are not alone: Jewish children in search of wholesome heroics could get their thrills from the adventures of the Dreidel Maidel, Minyan Man, and the rest of the members of the Jewish Hero Corps, follow the illustrated foibles of rabbis Elfassi, Peretz, and Lavi as they travel the perilous path from Morocco to Palestine, and curl up with any number of recently published comic books more interested in edification than in entertainment.

Call it the third wave of comics: Originally created by writers and illustrators seeking a way to grapple with their own bifurcated identities as American Jews, comic books bloomed into mainstream artifacts and were often forced to sacrifice their complexities on the altar of popularity. Now, with the medium enjoying a Hollywood-driven new golden age, it is only natural, perhaps, that comics would return full circle to their primordial obsession with identity. A host of advocacy organizations, operating everywhere from Kuwait to Los Angeles and promoting a host of ideologies and religious convictions, have taken to using comic books to capture the imaginations of young readers and drive them into the folds of faith. Many of these organizations are Jewish; whether they hope to convince American college kids to stand with Israel or Israeli youth to revere ancient rabbis, they rely on old-fashioned penciled-and-inked superheroes to deliver the message.

To understand just how far comic books have come since their inception, it’s worth recalling the moment of their birth. Writing in Men of Tomorrow, his account of the medium’s early years, comic-book writer and scholar Gerard Jones neatly captured the cultural and ethnic affinities shared by its founding fathers: “Jerry Siegel, Jack Liebowitz, Joe Shuster, Harry Donenfeld, Charlie Gaines, Bob Kahn, Stanley Lieber, Jake Kurtzberg, Mort Weisinger: all born in the course of a generation, all acquainted with each other, all Jewish kids, the sons of immigrants, many of them misfits in their own communities. They were all two or three steps removed from the American mainstream but were more poignantly in touch with the desires and agonies of that mainstream than those in the middle of it.”

But what was originally experienced as an exercise in sublimation has turned, six decades later, into a contact sport. With identity politics now a trenchant feature of culture, the Siegels and Shusters of the new millennium needn’t mask their anxieties in fabricated tales of faraway planets and secret identities. Arlen Schumer, for example, an award-winning illustrator, found his inspiration for Captain Israel in the all-too-real biblical kingdom of Judea, where his scale-armor-clad hero was born. In eight densely packed pages, aimed primarily at American college students, the Captain introduces his readers to Mark Twain, Theodor Herzl, Lord Balfour, and a bevy of boldly colored maps, all illustrating Israel’s unimpeachable moral uprightness and right on its divinely promised land. When the Captain himself speaks, it’s only to deliver punchy lines like “For almost two thousand years, no other state of unique national group developed in Palestine; instead, different empires and peoples came, colonized, ruled, and disappeared—but Jewish communities remained throughout the ages.” Even ignoring the gross historical inaccuracies and racist overtones packed into this lumbering sentence, it’s hard to imagine any actual young person finding the Captain remotely compelling.

And yet, the Captain soldiers on. A second issue—the first one was published this January—was slated for publication earlier this month but was postponed following a spat between Schumer and Stand With Us over the inclusion of some anti-Semitic writings by Martin Luther. An advertisement for the second issue shows the muscular hero battling an enormous serpent, identified as “The Venomous Snake Charmer BDS,” a reference to the international movement pursuing boycotts against Israel. Until he can do battle with the evil reptile (which, as some critics have rightly mentioned, bares a troubling resemblance to imagery used in the anti-Semitic cartoons of early last century), the Captain has taken on Foreskin Man in a single-panel illustration that maintains all of the schoolmarmishness of his original adventures. Not that Foreskin Man should mind—the blond avenger of mutilated penile flesh is currently on the third issue of his adventures.

American Jews, however, are not the only ones enjoying this new surge of didactic entertainment. Those Moroccan rabbis, for example, are the heroes of a recurring storyline in Or, a popular comic book published in Israel and aimed at ultra-Orthodox children. Since its debut in September 2009, Or has released 40 issues, most of which feature illustrated stories about biblical heroes and Jewish sages. It’s one of a number of fervently religious comic books published in the last two years. On the other end of the monotheistic spectrum, Muslim kids can now dig The 99, a gorgeous series created by Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, a psychologist and entrepreneur. Named for the 99 attributes of Allah, the series features, among other superheroes, a burqa-wearing heroine and a hulk-like Muslim giant with abs of stone and a heart of gold. While more sleek and sophisticated than Captain Israel’s verbose historical narratives or Or’s Torah lessons, The 99 is hardly bereft of long lectures or characters whose only virtue is their virtue.

How, then, are readers reared on more traditional—and less preachy—superheroes to approach this new crop of caped educators? The answer may not be simple. Seen from a strictly evolutionary perspective, there can be little doubt that the text-heavy panels, the simplistic characters, and the message-driven plot lines represent a regression from the peaks the medium has scaled in the past three decades. A wider cultural lens, however, may allow for a more forgiving view; compared with the current, and wilted, crop of mainstream superheroes, even the more loquacious among the new slew of advocacy-based he-men feel closer to the medium’s origins than their computer-generated Hollywood counterparts. After all, when the minders of an icon like the Green Lantern—a comic book that once featured a race of omnipotent blue men modeled after David Ben Gurion—put more effort into Doritos tie-ins than in coming up with a script intelligible to anyone older than 6, the ramblings of Captain Israel become all the more appealing by comparison.

Of course, one may still wonder why the new pioneers of advocacy comics can’t feature heroes who are both educational and engrossing. It’s a task, perhaps, that requires superhuman strengths.

The column is inspired by one of Finck’s favorites children’s books: Tell Me a Mitzi. Written by Lore Segal and illustrated by Harriet Pincus, it’s a 1970 classic about a girl whose parents tell her stories about another girl named Mitzi, who has real adventures. And so, each week, our imaginary questioner, Mitzi—serving as Finck’s muse and foil—will post a question either overtly or tangentially about Jewish life in our blog, The Scroll. Mitzi will choose her favorites, which will then be rendered in illustrated form the following week. As with Segal’s heroine, Mitzi’s adventures are essentially quests for knowledge. Help her.

• “Comics are the literature of outcasts, of pariahs, of Jews, of gays, of blacks,” says Ta-Nehisi Coates. You can expect more articles about comics for the next week. [Ta-Nehisi Coates]

• Bon Jovi is playing Israel in 2011! Where? He told Larry King, “Whatever the Olympic Stadium is.” You can tell he’s excited. [JPost]

• Speaking of whom, the King (nē Zeiger) is abdicating his throne tonight at 9 EST. His 25 years at CNN were longer than any of his eight marriages. [CNN]

• American rabbis have almost unanimously rebuked the Israeli rabbis who are telling their followers not to rent to non-Jews. Feel free to proudly hum the national anthem. [Forward]

Speaking of which, Jewcy scored an interview with Peter Beinart. You know: The guy who wrote that essay about how Jewish-American liberalism and Zionism are drifting apart.

Sylvia’s creator, Nicole Hollander, wrote a comic strip that ran in some 80 newspapers, including big ones like the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Detroit News, and Hollander’s hometown paper, the Chicago Sun-Times. (It moved to the Tribune a year or two later.) But earlier this year, Sylvia was pink-slipped by the Trib; these days the strip runs in only 30 or so newspapers, as well as online. It’s more proof that newspapers are screwed. Maybe you’ve heard.

So, thank heavens for the new collection The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior From Reagan to Obama. “For thirty years, long before Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, my friend Nicole Hollander has been one of our nation’s leading satirists,” Jules Feiffer writes in a foreword. “That means that she is in the business of telling the truth and making it funny. She is right about almost everything. And because she is right, and she is funny, she has no power whatsoever.”

Nicole Hollander doesn’t look powerless. At 71, she radiates charisma. She’s tiny, with a big voice, gleaming, spiky-chic white hair, fabulous earrings, and snazzy little round glasses. She looks like an artist and an intellectual. I guess she is powerless. “I created Sylvia to say what I couldn’t,” she told me.

Last week, I talked to her about her life and Sylvia’s.

Your work feels very Jewish to me, even if the Judaism isn’t explicit.

My father was an atheist. He encouraged me to eat on Yom Kippur. He might have even handed me a candy bar and suggested I eat it outside in full view of everybody. What he believed in was unions. Both my parents believed it was important to be part of the community, to give to your community. That’s a Jewish value. I don’t feel art is selfish, exactly, but I wanted to be part of something more. When I found the feminist movement, it gave me direction. I could take my drawing and my humor and my politics and put them all in one place.

You grew up in Chicago—your father was a carpenter and your mother was a hospital administrator. Was Sylvia based on people you knew?

Sylvia is modeled after my mother and her two friends Esther and Olga. I loved to listen to their conversations—all the jokes and irreverence and backbiting. [“They’d sit around a table and smoke and linger over coffee and coffee cake (does anyone eat coffee cake now?)” Hollander writes in The Sylvia Chronicles. “They had their coffee with half-and-half. Low-fat milk was not even a bad dream back then; but on the other hand there was no cappuccino, so it wasn’t paradise.”]

My father didn’t understand my work. It made him uncomfortable. He felt I didn’t like men. He didn’t live long enough to see my books. [Hollander has written or collaborated on more than 20.] But what made me really sad was that he never lived to see me in a newspaper. He loved the newspaper. Every morning he had breakfast at the deli, a Danish, and read the Sun-Times. My mother did live to see what I was doing and get a lot of naches from it. Wherever she went, she said she was Sylvia’s mother.

I like when you get weird. You have two aliens in your strips.

Two recurring aliens. The Alien Lover is my idea of the perfect man. He cares about this human woman in a way I think most women want to be cared about. He’d bring the Artie Shaw Band back from the dead for her!

And then there’s Gernif, described in The Sylvia Chronicles as “an Alexis de Tocqueville, not from France but from Venus.”

I like science fiction! Gernif comments on the absurdities of human politics and life in our culture.

Speaking of absurdities, in the section on the earliest strips, you mention regretting depicting Reagan as a moron for so long, because it kept you from going deeper—for instance, questioning why the White House was so afraid of the Sandinistas taking control. Any other regrets?

In general I worry about missed opportunities. There’s so much information out there; I’m always worried about not catching something. Also, because of my deadline, I’m four weeks behind. So, I can only deal with politics if the issue will remain resonant a month later, when the strip runs.

Some of the strips—about corporate greed, environmental disasters, and health care reform—are as relevant now as ever. I like the one from 2003 set at the HMO Café, where a customer asks, “What’s the special?” and the waitress says, “A turkey club and a sigmoidoscopy … just kidding!” The customer gasps, “Oh, thank God!” And the waitress says, “We’re out of turkey.”

Thank you.

But as I read the book I was surprised at how I’d pretty much forgotten things that seemed so resonant not so long ago. The Promise Keepers, Alexander Haig, the Unabomber, Georgette Mosbacher—

What surprised me was that our memories are so short. But what dismayed me was the number of different ways we could repeat the same mistakes as a nation. Things don’t change. The fight for women’s equality goes on. We say the world has changed because of technology, but advanced technology hasn’t advanced thinking. I don’t see that the relations between men and women have changed that much, other than stronger laws against chattel.

So, you don’t think we’re in a post-feminist era?

When did we get to the post-feminist era? Was I asleep, in a coma, or otherwise engaged?

The Times reports:

Ms. Seibel made no secret of her admiration for the pioneering comic work of Mr. Pekar, whom she described as “a 70-year-old hipster who loved listening to the Beastie Boys in the car.” In turn he provided her with stories that she illustrated for publications like Chicago Newcity, The Austin Chronicle and The Jewish Review of Books.

Ms. Seibel was also one of four artists whom Mr. Pekar invited to work on the Pekar Project, which starting in 2009 was an effort to translate his work and persona to the Internet. …

As the Pekar Project continued, it became apparent that Ms. Brabner was displeased with one contributor in particular: Ms. Seibel, the only female artist involved, and the only one who worked face to face with Mr. Pekar.

Ms. Seibel, whose husband and three children also became acquainted with Mr. Pekar, said that Ms. Brabner would abruptly pull Mr. Pekar out of their telephone conversations, and that she tried to interfere with a Brooklyn book-signing event at which Ms. Seibel appeared with Mr. Pekar in November. Ms. Seibel said Mr. Pekar told her these conflicts were “for him to worry about,” not her. “He put it under his business,” she said. (Ms. Brabner declined to comment on these matters.)

No one in their artistic circle believes the relationship between Mr. Pekar and Ms. Seibel crossed professional boundaries, but some could see how it strained Mr. Pekar’s marriage.

“A part of him was enjoying the attention he was getting from this very good-looking young woman,” said Mr. Parker, one of the Pekar Project artists. “And, naturally, Joyce, how could she enjoy that? You don’t have to be a psychologist to see that one’s not going to be good.”

Not even Mr. Pekar’s death quelled the tensions between Ms. Seibel, who has said she spent part of his last day alive with him, and Ms. Brabner.

Among her husband’s work with Ms. Seibel that Ms. Brabner has objected to is an illustration created for the catalog of “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” an exhibition opening Oct. 1 at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. (Ms. Brabner said she was embarrassed that the show, ostensibly about Jewish women, is “being hyped by way of saying we’ve got an old dead Jewish guy.”)

Mr. Parker said he was contacted by Ms. Brabner, who wanted to “cut Tara out of the equation” of the Pekar Project’s work. Other people with direct knowledge of the project’s operations, but who did not want to speak for attribution for fear of offending Ms. Brabner, said she would not allow a book to be published if it included Ms. Seibel’s contributions.

The Unfinished Tale of an Unlikely Hero [NYT]
Related: Gut Shabbes [Jewish Review of Books]
Splendor [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Harvey Pekar Dies

In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to a couple from Russia who’d moved to the Bronx, created a cast of tenement dwellers who spoke a heavily accented English, full of malapropisms and Yiddish grammatical constructions, which Gross rendered in inimitable, and sometimes almost indecipherable, phonetic spelling. His work, which included large helpings of the ethnic caricature and vaudeville-style slapstick popular in the 1920s and ’30s, had a popular following, and he ultimately published several collections of his comics and book-length cartoons. The journalist H.L. Mencken was a fan, and The New York Times ran glowing reviews of his work.

Some Yiddish-speakers who wanted to present their community in a more respectable light—including Gertrude Berg, creator of the radio show The Goldbergs—found Gross’s hapless greenhorns offensive. It’s easy to see why. Here’s a recurring character, Mrs. Feitlebaum, complaining about a quarrelsome couple in her building: “By dem is going on a lengwidge?? I tut wot dey lookin to be sotch a idill copple!” The Feitlebaums aren’t so perfect either; in the next scene, her husband, Mr. Mow-riss Feitlebaum is beating their son Isadore again.

Gross also parodied a number of American classics, including Poe’s poem “The Raven” and Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha,” in the diction of the Feitelbaums. (The Yiddish-accented Native Americans in his “Hiawatta” predate Mel Brooks’ version of the same joke by almost 50 years.) Much of his work has now been reissued in Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Reader edited by Gross enthusiast Ari Y. Kelman, who wrote the book’s introduction. Here, we present Gross’s take on “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas” (1927)—narrated by the New Yiddish Repertory’s Allen Lewis Rickman.

“Are you two here for the couples treatment?”  >>

When I went away to college, I tried going to Hillel High Holiday services, but I really hated it…>>

Meantime, have a look for yourself at Crumb’s version of Eve, who looks a mite like Crumb’s wife, Aline.

Word Made Fresh [Bookforum]

They relented, and I got to go … >>

“Overall, it was a pretty normal trip home.” >>

“Can I ask you just two questions?”
“Shoot!”
“Are you really Jewish…?”
“Yes. Second question?”
“Do you want to go to the ladies room with me?”

One semi-tasteful panel later (“Wait’ll I tell Miriam and Roselee about this!”) Flagg’s back to fighting crime, as though the whole bathroom tryst, and the whole revelation that our square-jawed action hero is Jewish, never happened. And this contradicts one of mainstream comics’ most basic rules: every deviation from the norm must be both profound and consequential; if a character is Israeli (say, Marvel Comics’ Sabra), Israeliness should suffuse her every utterance; and if a character is disclosed to be, say, Jewish, the consequences of that disclosure should shape the entire story. Otherwise, why mention it at all? What’s strange about this passage, and American Flagg! as a whole, isn’t that Flagg’s Jewish; it’s that Flagg happens to be Jewish.

After being out of print for a decade, issues 1 to 14 of American Flagg! were finally reissued last year, in a 25th-anniversary “Definitive Edition” by Dynamic Forces, with an introduction by Michael Chabon. (The series was originally published by now-defunct First Comics.) By marrying the testosterone-fueled visuals of superhero comics to the nagging self-doubt of alternative comics (that is, everything from Krazy Kat to 8-Ball), American Flagg! managed to scale heights of vulgarity and hipness never before seen in mainstream comics.

The two great comic-book monoliths of the past 25 years—Allan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns—were inspired by Chaykin’s innovations in plotting, layout, and subject matter, although they didn’t manage to catch Chaykin’s subtler innovations in both tone and the depiction of city life. Chaykin’s best work is characterized by dialogue that reads like Mickey Spillane crossed with Noël Coward, and a cacophonous vision of urban identity that includes Martians, Brazilians, Russians, the undead, white humans, black humans, gay humans, vampires, demons, trannies, robots, and a leading man who always looks like William Holden, and almost always just happens to be Jewish.

American Flagg! is riddled with such incidentals and incidents—there just happens to be a talking cat named Raul; Ranger Flagg’s new deputy just happens to be an animatronic robot named Luther whose face looks like Reggie from Archie Comics; no one in Flagg’s world really notices or cares. Flagg—we learn in passing that his parents were Russian-Jewish “bohemians” (his middle name is Mikhail), and that he was born in Earth’s colony on Mars—just happens to bring home the luscious Dr. Titania Weiss on New Year’s Eve, only to discover she’s wearing an enormous swastika pendant under her blouse. In an X-Men comic, such a revelation would launch a solemn, main-theme-clarifying, highly rhetorical exchange between the characters. Instead, Weiss asks cheerfully, “Why mix politics and sex?” and Flagg, after hesitating a moment, turns around, rips the pendant off her neck (“Ow! That’s one way to deal with it! All right!”), and sleeps with her anyway. One cutaway panel later, we’re treated to the following half-naked exchange:

“I’m sorry.”
“For what? It was incredible. You’re an animal.”
“That was just anger, fired by self-loathing.”

And then they’re interrupted by the talking cat.

The Weiss incident has some carryover—in the next issue the cat asks Flagg why he’s been so weird the past few days, and he answers, “Let’s just say I’m not used to finding National Socialists in my bed and leave it at that”—but not enough to qualify it as a plot thread. And again, we haven’t actually seen Flagg “acting weird”; the cat just happens to mention it. This is what makes American Flagg! so difficult to read: although there is a central, action-based plotline—something about weather satellites, militias, a corporate takeover of America—it receives no more airtime than the Titania Weisses, the talking cats, or the recipe for Flagg’s spaghetti frittata.

In Chabon’s perceptive introduction to the reissue, he writes that, whereas Moore and Miller simply described 21st-century dystopias, “Chaykin went and built one.” Chabon is referring to Flagg!’s panel layouts, animated sound effects, crawls, and background visual noise. But this sense of overwhelming, unfocused detail may not be so much postmodern as simply urban. Speaking of Flagg!’s follow-up, Time², Chaykin, who grew up poor in Brooklyn, said: “I lived in a neighborhood that was Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, and black. You’d walk down the street and the radios were blasting from open apartment windows. It was like turning the dial of the radio. That was the inspiration for the way the dialogue reads, breaking out and opening up from different perspectives. You heard Symphony Sid on WJZ, you’d hear the Yiddish radio station, you’d hear the Latino stuff, you’d hear Daddy Divine, I loved that.”

More focused than Flagg! both in scale and scope, Time² allows us to see the logic of Flagg!’s take on Jewish identity more clearly. Whereas Flagg! casts its net from Brazil to Chicago to Mars, the two-issue Time² takes place entirely within a five-block radius, an interdimensional nexus populated by humans, robots who look like humans, and undead who look like humans. It’s an idealized, clangorous vision of bebop-era Times Square, complete with its own jazz clubs, anti-defamation leagues, and jive-talking hustlers. Its chief villain is a broker of demons named Aunt Rose daSilva who looks like Bella Abzug and is also—you guessed it—Jewish. In this case, religious and ethnic identity are more grounded in the narrative—daSilva operates out of what seems to be the Carnegie Deli, her two kids are named Dani and Azrael, her approach is always signalled by ominous—and beautiful—tendrils of Hebrew. But you still have to ask: if she’s Jewish, why does her name just happen to be daSilva?

And in such a stupid question, I think you get to the core of Chaykin’s specifically urban vision of race, religion, and ethnicity. It’s a vision conditioned by growing up in a city so multicultural that not only does difference cease to be an event; it ceases to be legible. Demons who look like humans, Jewish witches with Italian last names, robots who are actually black men, trannies who are actually vampires (who are actually porn stars)—all coexisting in a single city where a shared morphology allows everyone to pass without sacrificing their own convictions or sense of identity. In such a city—Time²‘s New York, or American Flagg!’s Plexmall—villains are always marked by a casual, offhanded racism that seems more about leveraging power, or scoring verbal points, than any actual conviction. They’re not actually racists; they just happen to talk that way.

And thus Reuben Flagg, Chaykin’s offhandedly, incidentally Jewish hero reveals the limitations of “inclusivity” in mainstream comics. Because the vision that experiences difference—cultural, racial, religious—as an event is a vision that’s fundamentally provincial. In interviews, Chaykin likes to paraphrase the comic-book artist Gil Kane: “One of the problems with comics is that they mistake gravity for enormity. I felt I could do more important, serious work by being funny than by striking adolescent misrepresentations of adulthood.”

Click to see the full page of this comic

Let me begin with a confession: I’m not a fan of The Spirit. Will Eisner’s 1940s-era crimefighter, who last week became the latest comic book icon to make the jump to the big screen, has never particularly moved me; I find him contrived, not quite believable—more a pastiche of a hero than one fully realized on his own terms.

The Spirit’s significance has more to do with what it led to than with what it was. Eisner, who died in 2005 at the age of 87, published the comic from 1940 to 1952 as a Sunday newspaper supplement, which—because he operated as an independent contractor rather than a work-for-hire craftsman—allowed him a degree of creative control and ownership that contemporaries like Bob Kane (the creator of Batman) or Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (who developed Superman) never had. He could be ambitious, trying out odd narrative devices: “The Last Trolley” takes place in its entirety on a late-night streetcar ride, while “The Killer” unfolds (at times literally) through a murderer’s eyes.

The idea was to introduce comics to a more mainstream, adult audience. “I wanted to write better things than superheroes,” Eisner said in a 1997 interview, discussing both the origins of The Spirit and his desire to transcend genre limitations from the start. “Comic books were a ghetto. . . .[The newspapers] wanted a heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he’d have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, ‘Yes, he has a costume!’” On occasion, the Spirit himself became a peripheral character in his own series, as in “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble,” where the crimefighting occurs almost entirely in the background of the main plot, which involves a man’s slow, inexorable passage to suicide.

Yet if all this speaks to the influence of The Spirit—you can do almost anything in a seven-page comic, Eisner seems to be saying, a radical notion in the 1940s—I’ve long had the feeling that he continued to chafe at the conventions of the medium, that he couldn’t quite align his aspirations with what were, after all, irreconcilable restrictions: the need to resolve everything quickly and neatly; the crimefighter template, with its palette of cops and criminals, heroes and femmes fatales; the throwaway nature of comics in general, which even into the 1970s were regarded as a disposable form. It took a quarter century or so for him to come up with a solution: the long-form comic, or graphic novel, which Eisner helped innovate with his 1978 book A Contract with God.

Three decades later, it’s common to claim A Contract with God as the first graphic novel, but like all creation myths, this is not completely true. In the first place, the book is not really a novel, since it doesn’t tell a single story like the literary works Eisner aimed to emulate; it contains four long stories of Depression-era Jewish life. More to the point, as Eisner himself acknowledged in a preface to the 2005 omnibus The Contract of God Trilogy, he was less a pure innovator than part of a continuum, influenced by experimental graphic artists who in the 1930s “produced serious novels told in art without text.” These are the so-called woodcut novels, inspired by expressionism and printmaking and conceived as a response to silent film. It’s hard to call them comics, exactly, although you can see the work of certain comics artists (Eric Drooker; Peter Kuper; even, to an extent, Art Spiegelman) in them. Yet what their existence suggests is that, as Spiegelman puts it, long before A Contract with God, “the idea of a long comic book was in the air . . . There was conversation about it, and there was even an attempt to figure out what it might be.”

What, then, is Eisner’s real legacy, 30 years after A Contract with God? More than anything, it’s that he recognized the potential of the medium, seeing in comics not just disposable juvenile entertainment but a storytelling palette as rich as that of any narrative art. This is what The Spirit, at its best, has to offer, although it came to fruition only once Eisner shifted his focus—in A Contract with God, as well as the dozens of other graphic novels he produced, at the rate of nearly one a year—to the material he knew best: the urban immigrant world from which he had come.

Here, we have the landscape of A Contract with God: a tenement in a neighborhood of tenements, populated equally by the dissatisfied and the dreamers, by the betrayers and those who feel themselves betrayed. The title story revolves around Frimme Hersh, a Hasid who walks away from religion after the death of his daughter, which he deems a violation of the covenant between God and man. That’s an audacious way to start a book, especially a comic; it announces Eisner’s ambition in no uncertain terms. Comics, he wants us to understand, can take on the most elusive subjects: spirituality and religion, death, obligation, and all those messy questions about existence—about who and what we are.

At the same time, his characters have no choice but to play out their own small dramas, the minor-key struggles of the everyday. This slice-of-life approach is reminiscent of Daniel Fuchs, whose Brooklyn novels of the 1930s—especially Summer in Williamsburg and Homage to Blenholt—also take place in the Jewish tenement, with its strivers and its shnorrers, its sense of community as a comfort but also a burden, where people are always in each other’s business and everyone is looking for a way out. That’s a point driven home by the final image in A Contract with God, in which a young man named Willie (an Eisner stand-in) watches the sunset from a fire escape, turning his back on his mother, who warns that “[t]his year you’re going to have lotsa responsibility around here.”

Eisner’s thematic similarity with Fuchs offers one approach to understanding him—as aligned with, if not exactly part of, the tradition of Jewish immigrant literature. Even so, he remained very much a product of his medium, which was undergoing an evolution of its own. It’s telling that even as Eisner was developing A Contract with God, underground artists like Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar were mining not unrelated territory; the former’s first short “Maus” strip appeared in 1972, as did “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” which exposed his torment at his mother’s suicide, while the latter’s “American Splendor” series debuted in 1976, raising the slice-of-life aesthetic to high art. These works, of course, were not widely distributed; they caught on by word-of-mouth. Still, it all suggests a certain nascent sensibility, a self-consciousness about comics that was transfiguring the way a lot of people, both in the underground and the mainstream, were thinking.

In 1978, the year A Contract with God came out, Spiegelman published the original Breakdowns, a collection of his shorter, edgier work from the early 1970s, including both “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and that early “Maus.” (It was republished with additional material in 2008.) “What I needed at the time,” he said in an interview with me early this fall, “was to see it all together . . . to see what it added up to on its own.” As a statement of intention, it’s remarkably of a piece with Eisner’s aspirations for the graphic novel: “My early work in newspaper comics and comic books allowed me to entertain millions of readers weekly, but I always felt there was more to say,” he wrote in The Contract of God Trilogy. “I yearned to do still more with the medium. . . . Call me, if you will, a graphic witness reporting on life, death, heartbreak, and the never-ending struggle to prevail . . . or at least to survive.”

And yet, if such a comment indicates the extent of Eisner’s achievement, it highlights something of his limitations as well. Try as he might, he never quite overcame the comic-book sensibility of the 1940s: a broad-strokes approach to both text and image that often lacked the subtlety necessary to convey complex subjects. His drawing style could be imprecise, sweeping, with melodramatic action sequences that were all on the surface and left no room for sensitivity or depth. His narrative abilities were inconsistent; for every sequence like the one at the beginning of his 1988 book A Life Force, in which a man named Jacob Shtarkah reflects on the meaninglessness of his own existence by ruminating on a cockroach in the alley (“So?? Mister Cockroach,” he asks, not quite rhetorically. “What are you struggling for?? To maybe stay alive a few more days?”), there are other efforts that come off as gimmicks, mawkish, or too easily resolved.

In “The Super”—the third piece in A Contract with God—a simple man is tricked by a conniving schoolgirl who steals his money, and Eisner uses this as the setup for an overblown, if tragic, ending. “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” written in the 1980s and collected in the Will Eisner Reader, opens with a deft evocation of an elderly cafeteria owner’s nearly physical sense of memory but quickly yields to a predictable saga of retirement and aging—the character forgoes his neighborhood to move to Florida, where he ends up spiritually and emotionally lost. Even The Dreamer, a 1986 autobiographical “novella” about the early days of comics, comes to us almost devoid of conflict, with the nuance and uncertainty flattened out. “I’ve got a big future,” Eisner’s alter ego announces late in the story. “I know mine will come true! . . . It’s hard to explain . . . but I know, I know!”

It’s unimaginable that Spiegelman or Pekar would ever traffic in such overt sentimentality. Nor, for that matter, would any of the contemporary comics artists (Alison Bechdel, Adrian Tomine, Ben Katchor, Daniel Clowes) who might legitimately be called Eisner’s heirs. Comics are too sophisticated now, too complex: we come to them with an entirely different set of expectations than we could have 30, even 20, years ago.

Yet this is only as it should be, a sign of the cultural shift Eisner helped to bring about. He was a man of his moment, who recognized that comics were capable of storytelling in all its diversity and depth. He was an essential bridge figure, a survivor from the early days of the medium, who lived to see the graphic novel institutionalized in both an aesthetic and a commercial sense. And he never stopped trying to push boundaries, as he had throughout much of his career.

In his final book, The Plot, completed only a month before his death, Eisner tried once again to take comics in a new direction by telling the story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fraudulent tract, supposedly outlining a Jewish plan for world domination, that anti-Semites have used for more than a century to justify everything from pogroms to Nazism. Here, as in The Spirit, Eisner butts up against the form’s restrictions; there’s too much exposition, long blocks of text that don’t quite work. A fitting conclusion to a career of more than 60 years, The Plot offers a way of thinking about comics that looks beyond the genre’s limitations even as, in its own way, it falls prey to them.

At the height of the 2006 Lebanon war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Argentine humor magazine Barcelona published a one-frame cartoon depicting two bearded, hook-nosed, tzitzit- and yarmulke-wearing men whose Haifa apartment has just been hit by a rocket. “Fuck, do something!” one of them says. “Those sons of bitches have launched a Katyusha and destroyed my toilet and my jacuzzi!” “Well then,” says the other, “we’ll bomb Gaza, Beirut, the airports, the refineries, the highways, and we’ll destroy the Parliament.”

The cartoon quickly aroused the ire of many in Argentina’s Jewish community. “Del arte de cruzar los oceános,” a blog by an Argentine Jew living in Israel, denounced the work as anti-Semitic for its stereotypical caricatures, its stance against Israel’s actions in the war, and its ignorance of the realities of Israeli life (a jacuzzi, the blogger pointed out, would be a rare luxury in that middle-class desert nation). Comunidades, a newspaper circulated in Buenos Aires’ Jewish community, echoed the denunciations almost to the letter. Some members of the community took their outrage a step further, sending emails and letters to the artist comparing his work to 1930s Nazi propaganda.

The target of this outcry was the celebrated Argentine cartoonist Sergio Langer, a man deeply invested in his Jewish heritage and also deeply committed to using humor, in his words, “to make things right, to fix injustice…to mock Nazis.” “If I perceive [authoritarianism] and I draw it and do it humorously, that’s mission accomplished for me,” Langer says. His work forces the viewer into close contact with a host of the hideous: rotting military dictators, dominatrix suicide bombers, lecherous priests, and Klansmen, to name a few. A history of violence shadows these crude, emphatic drawings, which attempt to call out reactionaries at the same time as they offer a time-honored form of Jewish cartharsis: laughing at tragedy, laughing at suffering, and laughing at ourselves. Clearly influenced by the grotesque physicality of Robert Crumb and the irreverent irony of Art Spiegelman, Langer has crafted an original style that can be both vulgar—impossibly ugly priests in the throes of orgasmic ecstasy—and tender—scenes depicting mothers and sons.

Over the course of his 30-year career, Langer’s work has appeared frequently in the major Argentine newspapers Página/12 and Clarín, in the Peruvian magazine Somos, and in U.S. publications such as Newsweek, the Miami Herald, and the now-defunct New York Newsday. Despite this steady work, Langer was known almost exclusively to the cartoon cognoscenti until five years ago, when his comic strip “La Nelly” brought him widespread recognition for the first time. Published daily on the back page of Clarin since September 2003, “La Nelly” chronicles the misadventures of a bigoted middle-aged woman whom Langer sees as an exemplar of the Argentine middle class. Even in the most mainstream venue in the Argentine cartoon world, Langer’s work snaps with an outsider’s bite.

Langer, who is 49, relishes throwing viewers into a world that brazenly mixes senseless violence with dark humor. His work often elicits profound discomfort, challenging artistic boundaries and social acceptability. Langer’s stated goal is to fight authoritarianism, and he sees skewering political correctness as part of the battle. Usually cast as opposites—a Holocaust-denying reactionary like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after all, spews defiantly un-P.C. statements—political correctness and authoritarianism do have in common a desire to suppress or limit speech. “There’s a paranoia, a madness,” Langer says, “because society is very intolerant, and it [pretends] not to support its own intolerance.”

Langer’s own dark personal history colors the violent images and provocative voice of his cartoons. Born in 1959 in Once, Buenos Aires’ traditionally Jewish neighborhood, Langer grew up hearing first-hand stories of Nazi Europe from his maternal uncle, who escaped Romania and fought in the Soviet Army at Stalingrad, and his survivor mother, who was imprisoned for four years at the Mogilev-Podolski concentration camp. Growing up in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of Eichmann’s dramatic capture, Langer eagerly collected newspaper clippings that detailed the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. He dedicated his first cartoon collection, Langer: Blanco y Negro, to his “beloved superhero Simon Wiesenthal” (who responded with a gracious letter saying that he was “touched,” and noting of Langer’s black humor that “sometimes the desire to chuckle gets stuck in the throat”).

As a child, Langer made sense of the horrors of his family history through play. A typical scene in the Langer house involved the young Sergio tracing soldiers and tanks in flour on the kitchen table as his mother cooked at the stove, a habit that he translated to pen and paper as an adult. “It’s like I still haven’t finished exorcising that,” he says. “In fact, I can say that I’m a pacifist, but I love weapons. I love to draw them; I love to watch war movies. When I was a kid, I played Warsaw Ghetto and killed Nazis…you can say that’s a kind of Jewish humor.”

When Langer was 12, reality caught up with the darkness of his fantasies. His father, who fled to Argentina from Poland in the 1930s, was murdered during a robbery of his business in the Patagonian city of Rio Gallegos. Five years later, in 1976, a military junta seized power in Argentina, launching a clandestine war on leftists, intellectuals, young people, Jews, and many others unlucky enough to arouse the government’s paranoid suspicions. While studying architecture at the University of Buenos Aires during this period, Langer began to draw for Humor, a subversive magazine that published covers mocking the dictatorship. Though many critics of the junta faced murderous reprisal, the military granted Humor an unspoken amnesty, permitting the underground magazine to mock the government as a sham demonstration of democracy and free speech. “In 1979, I published one of my first drawings,” Langer remembers. “[It was] of a military officer saying, ‘We’re not going to stay in power,’ while he had a chain tying him to the presidential seat. I would do that kind of thing with the military, but they never gave me any problems. That said, I knew what was going on—not in detail, but I knew.”

While the dictatorship is a recurring theme in his work, Langer comes to terms with the horrors of the past most fully in his comics about the Holocaust. In the 10-page comic story La Vida Es Bella (Life Is Beautiful)—published in its entirety in the July 2008 issue of the Argentine comic magazine Fierro—Langer places the viewer inside the mind of his childhood self, defending the right of each generation to engage with remembrance in its own way. The story begins with the young artist drawing furiously at the kitchen table as his mother cooks on the stove. Against this quotidian backdrop, the young Langer peppers his mother with a series of questions about the Holocaust that quickly exasperate her. “If you could change destiny what would you do: Save the six million who the Nazis killed or the family that you’ve made in Argentina?” he asks. “Enough!” she shouts, sending the young Langer back to the table to resume drawing.

In the upper frame of each of the comic’s remaining nine pages, the young Langer imagines a series of events that he thinks might have stopped or impeded the Holocaust: a group of 250,000 Jews leads a violent resistance on Kristallnacht; German industrialists threaten to rescind their support of Hitler if he continues to use Jewish slave labor; the Pope leads a group of 300 bishops to Dachau to intercede on behalf of “our Jewish brothers”; Hitler succeeds as an artist, becoming one of the most controversial German painters of the 1920s and ’30s. On the bottom of each page, a train carrying Langer’s mother and grandmother chugs through a starless night until, in the final frame, we see a guard tower and a smokestack looming in the distance—reality dashes the young Langer’s hopeful fantasies.

La Vida Es Bella personalizes remembrance in a way that passive reverence could not. “There’s a kind of official culture of what memory is and how we must remember,” Langer says. “But everyone sees things in his or her own way. It’s not The Diary of Anne Frank and nothing else.” Langer argues that irony and humor can help us better come to terms with historical truth than can “official culture,” which makes the work of remembrance into a compulsory ritual—a phrase like “never again” can be uttered very solemnly without any genuine individual reflection on its meaning. Langer’s speculative, ironic work argues that each generation needs to hone its own voice for that memory to stay relevant.

But how does this care for memory, history, and justice fit in with Langer’s pugnacious, highly controversial Lebanon War cartoon? Is it possible to reconcile the harshly criticized polemicist with the zany memorialist of La Vida Es Bella?

Langer admits that his mistake in the Lebanon war cartoon was in using stereotypical Jewish caricatures as stock representations of Israelis, enabling his critics to interpret it as a blanket statement that Jews are petty and barbarous. By employing these simplistic caricatures, he gave his critics an opportunity to interpret his work as sinister. His real target, he says, was the kind of conservative thinking that he saw expressed in Israel’s actions in Lebanon. “There’s a sector of the Jewish community that says, ‘If it’s good for the Jews, then it’s good—that’s it, nothing else matters,’” he says. “It’s like if there’s a war between Iran and Iraq, saying ‘That’s great! Let them kill each other!’ That kind of thinking has always existed for better or worse, but it doesn’t interest me at all.” Had the cartoon more clearly conformed to the sentiment of that statement, it would likely still have been criticized; but without stock Jewish caricatures, it may not have been so easy for some to label it anti-Semitic.

While acknowledging this, Langer says he has no regrets. In a world where so many are quick to take offense, his comics try to shake us out of a nervous silence that not only suppresses speech, but also suppresses laughter. This false tolerance—cohabitation enabled by averted eyes and guarded speech—mutes the possibility of a more vibrant world of acceptance. Langer belongs to a long tradition of proudly subversive cartoonists who believe that creating challenging art means recognizing that some people will be offended by it. “I understand that it’s a delicate subject,” Langer says about the Lebanon War, “but sometimes it’s worth it to go over the line, to take a risk.”

“Mama, what would have happened if the Holocaust in Europe had never existed? Where would I be today?”

“Hmmm…I don’t know, little one. I would have stayed in Romania, I would have married Isaac, I would have had a family, children…The Nazis wouldn’t have killed my family and my friends. Who knows?”

“Or maybe you wouldn’t have come to Argentina, you wouldn’t have met Papa, I would never have been born, and I never would have been your son!?!”

“Yes, my love! You would have been born just like you were because you were destined to be my lovely little boy…it was written.”
“Destiny?”

“If you could change destiny what would you do: Save the six million who the Nazis killed or the family that you’ve made in Argentina?”

“Enough! I’ve had it with your questions about the war! Go draw and don’t torture me any more…”
“I’m going to draw a comic about extermination camps…”

“Freedom for our Jewish brothers!”

Freedom for our Jewish brothers! With that pronouncement, Pope Pious XII, at the front of a delegation of 300 Catholic bishops, presented himself at Dachau on March 12, 1942. This brave act brought about the closing of the camp and the suspension of the extermination plan in the rest of Europe.

“Hello, Hello, another man might be getting on, ay!”

“If this isn’t art, art doesn’t exist!”

November 1923. In the classic Munich brewery “Hofbräuhaus,” an exhibition opens of the well-known artist Adolf Hitler. Going beyond the criticisms for inciting racial hate and violence, Hitler, or as he often signs, “Der Führer,” becomes recognized as one of the most controversial artists of the next decade in Europe.

Go, little train, go through the meadow!
“I’m cold, Mama…”

Eric Benson is an editorial intern at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Down Beat, and The Argentimes.

In many ways Shira’s story is a typical one of adolescent anxiety: she’s looking for love, fighting with her overbearing lawyer father, doing battle with snooty girls in her class. “I combine various forms of uncoolness,” Shira confesses, echoing so many beloved literary characters who never quite fit in. “Still,” she continues, “you wouldn’t think [sucking at sports] would matter so much at a Jewish high school.”

Token, written by Alisa Kwitney and illustrated by Jöelle Jones, is the final book published as part of D.C. Comics’ Minx line, which launched auspiciously in 2007, aiming to capture the teenage girl market with pithy, stylish graphic novels that were a clever hybrid of Young Adult fiction and comic books. This fall D.C. announced the line’s cancellation, in part because the genre-bending that made the books attractive also made them difficult to place in YA sections of major bookstores. Still, Minx titles were generally well reviewed, boasting feisty heroines involved in various levels of adventure (competing in a martial arts competition, joining up with a group of artistic renegades, heading out on a road trip) while navigating the troubled waters of adolescence, where there were plenty of crushes, parents, friends, and insecurities to contend with. With snappy dialogue and striking black and white illustrations, the graphic novel format made these standard tropes feel fresh. It also proved friendly to characters with a specific ethnic or cultural identity, those outside what Kwitney calls the “default, mainstream Christianized culture.”

In Token, much of Shira’s angst plays out in the context of her Jewishness, most dramatically as her father starts dating his non-Jewish secretary, Linda, and Shira herself gets involved with a Spanish guy named Rafael. The whole book is riddled with Jewish cultural shorthand. “Remember when we took that trip with Elderhostel?” Shira’s grandmother asks Minerva. “You couldn’t stop kvetching about being constipated!” Sitting on the beach, the two discuss whether the pastrami they’ve brought with them is spoiled, and—doing the stereotypical Jewish grandmother thing—note approvingly that the bathing suit-clad Shira has “a very nice shape. Very voluptuous.” The saleslady at Woolworth’s calls Shira “Maideleh.”

In visually representing these characters, Kwitney told me she was definitely not looking for “the Betty and Veronica thing, where they have the same body, but different hair.” The Shira she envisioned, and who Jones brought to life, is “large-breasted and short-waisted…she [did] not have legs up to her armpits.” Madison and Mallory, Shira’s bitchy classmates-cum-adversaries, are rendered more like classic, idealized comic book women: tall, with pouty lips and luxurious hair. Here, Shira’s specificity is directly tied to her Jewishness; it’s a way to make sure she stands out, both physically and otherwise.

One night, trying hard to ingratiate herself, Linda prepares a special dinner for Shira and her father, Alan: chicken parmigiano. Shira bluntly informs her that cheese on top of meat is not kosher. “But the chicken is kosher,” Linda objects. “It said so on the package. I thought it was red meat that couldn’t be cooked with cheese.” She looks defeated. “I called up my old friend Naomi Hyman from high school! Naomi said it was just the red meat.” Alan steps in to reassure her, and says they’ll eat what she has cooked: “Sometimes you have to bend the rules a little.” Incredulous, Shira refuses, stirring up fury in her father. “You’ve eaten milk and meat together before,” he accuses. Hand on her hip, Shira returns fire. “I ate a pepperoni pizza once, four years ago. When I was 12. Since you’re sending me to a Jewish school, it seems to me that eating milk and meat together would be completely hypocritical.”

Shira wields her adherence to kosher laws as her own brand of rebellion, claiming the moral high ground for herself in the face of her father’s sudden ambivalence. But while she may have won this battle on principle, that’s not really the point. “I don’t really care that much about keeping kosher,” she reflects soon after the dinner incident. “But my dad always cared. And now he’s changing all the rules.” As if to reinforce it all, for Shira’s 16th birthday, her father gives her a Star of David pendant, the same night he presents Linda with an impressive engagement ring.

Even as she’s holding tight to this particular principle, Shira’s breaking some other rules by shoplifting and hanging out with Rafael. Both come with an intoxicating sense of risk, but what really draws Shira to Rafael is an equally classic aphrodisiac: his difference from her. One day on the beach, they talk about different ways to mark becoming an adult. Sixteenth birthdays aren’t a big deal in Ibiza, Rafael says, but at 15, you have a Quinceañera, which is “supposed to mark the end of childhood.” Hearing this, Shira perks up: “Like a bat mitzvah.” Rafael is confused. “That’s the big Jewish coming-of-age party,” she explains. “Although mine wasn’t really big. Or even much of a party. I just memorized a lot of prayers in Hebrew.” Rafael looks surprised and seems to begin to say he didn’t realize she was Jewish. But instead he changes the subject, and they make out in the surf.

Token’s 150 pages seem like scant space to develop a story of much depth or nuance, and it’s true that the plot’s various threads are tied up a bit too hastily. But in exchanges like these, Kwitney leaves her characters appealingly exposed, exploring complicated, bittersweet emotions with real sensitivity. There’s plenty of room for more stories that share this approach, and it’s a shame that Minx—the line of books designed to encourage this kind of storytelling—didn’t quite take off.

Eryn Loeb is associate editor of Nextbook.org.

“Reality is more grotesque and strange than anything you can invent,” says the Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan. “Sometimes life is too much, you have to tone it down to make art.” Modan’s own work has evolved over the past fifteen years from rather strange and grotesque fables into some of the strongest graphic fiction on the planet. Like the novelists David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua, and young filmmakers such as Hilla Medalia, Modan has found ways to tell stories that use the flood of bad news in Israel as the backdrop to subtle stories about ordinary people learning how to live.

Modan, who moved to England last year when her husband accepted a post-doc position there, has recently been cultivating an international following. Last year her graphic novel Exit Wounds was released in English to widespread acclaim. This year she drew two very different series of comics for The New York Times. Her memoir blog, “Mixed Emotions,” ventured into the realm of autobiography with illustrated stories about her family, such as the fallout from her youngest son’s obsession with a pink tutu, in an ingenious vertical format that would have been cumbersome on paper but worked perfectly online. Her serial mystery “The Murder of the Terminal Patient,” which follows an underemployed Russian doctor as he navigates the hierarchy of an Israeli hospital to investigate a suspicious death, is one of the best comics to have appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

Modan’s visual style may at first appear somewhat plain, but she has a masterful skill for pacing and perspective, a keen eye for postures and facial expressions, and a command of composition and color that rivals the old masters of Sunday comics. Her illustrations recall the whimsical work of Little Nemo creator Winsor McKay, or, as Douglas Wolk has suggested, the “clear line” style of Tintin creator Hergé, where simple characters stand out against finely drawn landscapes to make for an oddly affecting sense of reality. One might wonder how such talent was incubated. Part of the answer arrives this month in the form of Jamilti and Other Stories, a collection of Modan’s early comics released by the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. Over a decade’s worth of genre experiments veering from fairy tales to crime fiction, Modan emerges in its pages as a storyteller of rare insight and restraint.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1966, Modan’s career has run parallel to the rise of a serious independent comics scene in Israel, which in the past fifteen years has grown large enough to provide a decent market for domestic graphic fiction. Months after first seeing Art Spiegelman’s outlandish magazine RAW as a student at the Belazel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Modan began to publish comic strips that ranged from the absurd to the macabre in local papers. “Since there was no comics tradition” in Israel at the time, she says, “I could do anything I wanted.” In 1993 she was hired to edit the Israeli edition of MAD magazine, along with artist Uri Pinkus. When it folded, Modan and Pinkus decided to start their own comics collective. “If we were going to lose money, better to do exactly what we like,” she says.

The first meeting of the Actus Tragicus collective was convened, as chance would have it, on the evening in 1995 that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. The group stayed up all night concocting conspiracy theories in which Rabin survived the shooting. It would be too simple, though, to conclude that this founding trauma set the artists on a path to darker or more cynical work. “This event didn’t change our art,” Modan says. “Israeli reality gives you so many opportunities to be macabre.” Her story-length comics, published in a series of Actus anthologies over the past decade, appeared to seize as many of these opportunities as possible. An early one reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm features a forlorn plastic surgeon who tries to rearrange his patients’ faces in the image of his lost love. In a later story, as hardboiled as it is preposterous, a series of dead bodies turn up bearing the signature of a new serial killer: a pair of panties on the head.

In recent years Modan’s work has become more understated and more revealing as she has grown to engage more fully with contemporary life in Israel. Refusing to shy away from the catastrophes in the headlines, she also refrains from commenting directly on pressing issues like war and terrorism. Instead, Modan tells stories about ordinary people who are confronting their own emotional weaknesses, even as they project strong exteriors to the rest of the world. “In Israel we try to live like political events have no influence on our lives, and most of the time we succeed,” Modan explains. “But it’s a delusion, even if we are not at the center of the drama.”

How thick a skin must you have when you live in a society under siege? This question lies at the heart of Exit Wounds. It follows a bitter young taxi driver as he searches for his deadbeat father, with the help of his father’s wealthy, estranged girlfriend. Its earth tones and mellow pace have a lulling effect on the reader, even as the prickly dialogue reveals enough emotional damage to leave a metal tinge in the throat. The book draws much of its power from the particularly Israeli confusions that drive the story. Was the father tragically ripped away from his son by a suicide bomber before they could reconcile, as it might first appear? Or does the bombing merely give him an alibi to escape from the demands of his own loved ones? In refusing to uncover the truth about what became of his father, is the son succumbing to the fantasy that his life is immune from political events? Or is he simply refusing to give in to the terror-induced hysteria around him? The book offers no clear answers.

The threat of suicide bombings, and the unexpected ways they can twist the mind and the heart, are also central to a pair of the most haunting stories in Modan’s collection. Both are based on real events. In “Jamilti,” the new collection’s title story, an Israeli woman, on the eve of her wedding, rushes to the aid of a man wounded in a suicide bombing. She later learns that the handsome man to whom she gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was the bomber himself, his own sole victim. Though the plot may sound contrived, Modan has adapted it from a true story, in which a medic found himself questioning his conservative beliefs after reviving a man who turned out to be terrorist.

Known as the brassy but forgiving wife of legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky Crumb has charted her own equally rebellious life course. Raised on Long Island, she fled her family’s bourgeois milieu and headed for art school. In San Francisco in the early 1970s, she fell in with a group of pioneering women cartoonists—and married her future collaborator, Robert Crumb, with whom she had a daughter, Sophie, also a cartoonist. In the early 1990s, in the face of rising conservatism, the family relocated to Southern France.

In her new autobiography, Need More Love, rendered in vibrant images and frank text, Kominsky Crumb offers colorful episodes from her unusual life. She talks with host Sara Ivry about her trajectory from curly-headed class clown to unabashed expat artist.