Dutch museum shows Jewish links to comic strip art

By Alexandra Hudson

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.