Dutch museum shows Jewish links to comic strip art
AMSTERDAM (Reuters Life!) - From the simple sketches in America's turn-of-the-century Yiddish newspapers to Art Spiegelman's Holocaust narrative "Maus" 70 years on, comic strip art has long been used as a way to depict Jewish experience.
Jewish artists, as an exhibition at Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum shows, also played a special role in the development of the genre, creating figures such as "Superman", "Batman" and "The Hulk", before pioneering the graphic novel.
Early Jewish immigrants expressed their struggles to integrate in the United States in the short comic strip format which began to appear in East Coast newspapers from around 1900.
In a strip on show from 1914 in a Chicago evening newspaper, just after the outbreak of the First World War, a youngster looks at a map of Europe and asks his father where Belgium is.
His irritated father tells him he should be learning "U.S. traveling-salesman geography" instead.
Other early strips make light of the "Yinglish" -- a mix of Yiddish and English -- spoken by immigrants.
Massive institutional prejudice in the traditional worlds of publishing and illustration meant that for aspiring artists among a second generation of Jews coming of age in America in the 1920s and 1930s, the new comic book format was one of the few avenues open to them.
"Comic books were invented in New York in the 1930s. They were nearly all created by Jewish writers," said Chris Couch, a comic book expert at the University of Massachusetts.
"Jews were not part of American publishing. The comic book was a new, small format and something they could get into."
The exhibition suggests that the appearance of the comic strip superhero is also linked to the Jewish integration process, and the struggle to lead a dual-existence in the city.
Superman was created by Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel in 1932, both the sons of Jewish immigrants.
"In the guise of the journalist Clark Kent, Superman represents the ultimate assimilationist dream of becoming a part of American society," said Couch.
Although Superman was never an overtly Jewish character in one strip dating from 1940 he tells Hitler, who he has collared, "I'd like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw".
After the Second World War and the Holocaust, many comic super-hero figures began to assume more direct Jewish identities and the narratives assumed more adult themes about prejudice and segregation.
A large part of the exhibition is devoted to the artist Will Eisner, showing his comic strips and large-scale drawings as well as pages from his later graphic novels.
Eisner co-founded the first American comic strip production studio in 1936 and created the masked crime-fighter "The Spirit" in 1940, but he is also credited with creating the first long-form comic in 1978 which he termed a "graphic novel".
"That created a cultural space," said Couch, helping gain the graphic novel respect in the 1970s and launching a canon of works in that format exploring Jewish history and personal experience.
By printing "graphic novel" on his 1978 work, Eisner also gained access to the U.S. public library market, then closed to comics.
The exhibition, which shows the work of some 40 comic strip artists, also includes pages from Spiegelman's 1986 graphic novel Maus, an award-winning book exploring the generational conflict between Holocaust survivors and their children, and where the Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats.
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
