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December 28 2022 marks 100 years since the birth of the world’s most famous comic book writer: the late Stan Lee.

The 1960s were Stan Lee’s most astonishing decade, during which he came up with ideas and scripts for the first appearances of such heroes as the original X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Panther, Daredevil and Doctor Strange.

This extraordinary purple patch elevates Lee as one of the architects of modern pop culture. The Marvel method of writing comics (where artists plot the story of a comic and the layout of the pages based on a collaborative approach between artist and scriptwriter) enabled him to script several hundred comics in the 1960s.

He wrote the dialogue for the first decade of titles featuring Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men and many others.

Stanley Martin Lieber (who later changed his name to Stan Lee) was born to Jewish-Romanian immigrants in Manhattan. His father was a dress cutter and Lee had teenage jobs delivering sandwiches, as a theatre usher and an office boy, before his first writing jobs. These included advance obituaries for a news service and publicity material for the National Tuberculosis Centre.

In 1939, he found work at Timely – later renamed Atlas Comics, and eventually Marvel – as an editorial assistant, with his first writing credit on an early issue of Captain America in 1941. This issue saw the writer adopt his pen name and saw Cap throw his shield as a weapon for the first time – now a signature move for the hero.

Superheroes had been around since the 1930s, with DC Comics finding an early lead publishing Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. But by the early 1960s the genre had stagnated.

At this time, sci-fi and horror anthologies were Marvel’s staples. For the final issue of one floundering Marvel anthology, Amazing (Adult) Fantasy, Lee and artist Steve Ditko invented a new character – Spider-Man. The character was “an instant success”, helping revive the superhero genre.

Superheroes in the 1960s

In 1960, DC hit on the idea of gathering their most popular heroes together to create the Justice League of America, following their earlier Justice Society. At Marvel, Lee had only just co-created such characters as the Hulk, Iron Man and Ant Man but within a year of their first appearances brought them together to form The Avengers.

These initiatives show that Lee was not only good at creating concepts that others could build on. He also had a savvy nose for marvellous ideas, copying what rival companies were doing and looking to new readerships.

He also remembered the company’s back catalogue. First he brought back Namor in 1962, then revived Captain America in 1964. He also reimagined 1930s characters Angel and Human Torch as members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four respectively.

Lee rose quickly from fill-in writer to editor-in-chief at Marvel, partially due to the exodus of Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to DC due to lack of profit sharing and, perhaps, being a cousin of the owner’s wife.

Lee enjoyed being the public face of Marvel, conducting Q&As about comics at colleges in the 1960s. He also added “Stan’s Soapbox” to hundreds of titles, a column which allowed to not only respond to reader letters, but also pursue an anti-racist agenda.

Marvel Hub: “Every Stan Lee Cameo Ever (1989-2019) *Including Avengers Endgame* All Stan Lee Cameos Marvel Movies”

The public associated him with many of the characters he co-created because he also narrated Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk cartoons in the 1980s, as well as the Spider-Man video games in the 2000s.

More recently, cameos in nearly every Marvel adaptation between 2000 and 2018 made Lee the face of the film franchises.

Lee’s faith and multiculturalism

Despite being of Jewish descent, Lee showed little interest in faith but saw “world religion as a way into the storytelling process”.

While the Fantastic Four’s Thing was eventually revealed to be Jewish, it took four decades for this to be worked into storylines.

Lee’s fellow Jewish collaborator Jack Kirby, however, may have included iconography of the Golem (a mythical humanoid made of earth brought to life in Jewish folklore) into the character’s design and gave him a fictional Jewish neighbourhood as a home.

Although Lee didn’t bring his own background to his comics, he and Kirby wished to create the “first black superhero”, leading to the co-creation of Black Panther in 1966.

Interested in minority representation in the genre, Lee was also working on a TV adaptation of an LGBTQ+ superhero novel Hero in the 2000s, before that project was stymied by its gay writer’s passing in 2011.

One comic he co-created – X-Men – has resonated with LGBTQ+ readers. In an article for Syfy, author Sara Century wrote that with its 1980s run X-Men “implied queerness … and an analog to AIDS”.

Pop culture expert Anna Peppard notes Marvel comics in the 1960s and beyond took in themes from “the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism … and liberal multiculturalism”.

One of the last characters Lee created for Marvel was She-Hulk, whose 2022 TV series challenged toxic masculinity in superhero fandom. Stan Lee died, aged 96, in 2018.

By accident or design, Lee’s comics and the characters he helped create have not only had a huge influence on pop culture but also reflect an increasingly liberal world.

For these reasons and many more, his impact on the world is well worth celebrating.

Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – The Disney+ TV show featuring Ms. Marvel, also known as Kamala Khan — the first Muslim superheroine of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), launched June 8 — and the internet has been alight with discussions about the lovable titular character.

The comic book series, Ms. Marvel shot to No. 1 on the comic book charts after its 2014 debut.

The Pakistani American teen Kamala has been one of the most successful characters Marvel unveiled in the past decade, with a large audience reach.

The show has received strong reviews, and Kamala’s representation is a breakthrough — particularly to her South Asian, Muslim and racialized fans.

Unfortunately, the show has also received some racist and sexist backlash in the form of internet “review bombers,” people who spam a show with negative reviews, who are upset with the new identity of Ms. Marvel.

Marvel Entertainment: “Marvel Studios’ Ms. Marvel | Official Trailer | Disney+”

Regular Pakistani American teen

Kamala, played by Iman Vellani, is a regular Pakistani American Muslim teen who transforms into a superhero. In the comics, this happens after she comes into contact with a mist that induces genetic mutation. In the show, her powers are unlocked after she puts on her grandmother’s bangle.

Viewers can partly credit Ms. Marvel’s success to the comic series’ co-creator and editor, Sana Amanat, a Pakistani American Muslim, and its first writer, G. Willow Wilson, a white American convert to Islam.

Wilson wrote Kamala so beautifully that her struggles appealed to a large audience. As The New Yorker reports, Amanat and Wilson knew that as a breakthrough Muslim superhero, Ms. Marvel would face high expectations: “traditional Muslims might want her to be more modest, and secular Muslims might want her to be less so.”

Their work was also unfolding in the charged post-9/11 climate when representations of Muslims, while gaining some nuance, have also reiterated long-standing orientalist stereotypes — and Islamophobes framed debates that questioned the compatibility of Islam with the West.

South Asian Muslim culture

In both the comic and TV series, Kamala’s representation of Islam is primarily a South Asian one. For instance, Kamala wears a South Asian dupatta, when praying in the mosque. And the inter-generational trauma created by Partition, which led to the creation of the South Asian Muslim state, Pakistan, is a driving force in the plot.

Characters speckle their conversations with phrases and words in Urdu. Episode 1 shows Kamala and her mother shopping for a ceremony that is among the most important events in South Asian backgrounds: a wedding. The event is later shown in Episode 3.

The audience is treated to a fitting of Kamala’s go-to-South Asian wear in this episode, the shawlaar kameeze. In this scene, another major fixture in South Asian culture debuts: The gossiping aunty. South Asian music is also a regular feature on the show, and Marvel has posted links to the soundtracks which include a mix of pop and desi tracks.

Supporting cast: Nani and Red Dagger

I’m looking forward to the plot lines with two South Asian characters — Kamala’s nani (maternal grandmother), played by Samina Ahmed, and the Pakistani male superhero, the Red Dagger, played by Aramis Knight.

Red Dagger currently stars in a webcomic with Ms. Marvel and is important mainly because western popular media has often depicted Muslim men as oppressors of women, not superheroes.

Breaking the tired tropes

I’m excited about Kamala’s screen debut because of what she signifies to her South Asian, Muslim and racialized female fans after a lifetime of seeing sparse or orientalist representations of ourselves.

After watching the first two episodes, journalist Unzela Khan said she feels like her “day-to-day reality (minus the superpowers) was finally being shared accurately and safely with the whole world.”

In an audience study I conducted on the Muslim superhero archetype as part of my doctoral research, participants of many different Muslim backgrounds indicated an eagerness to receive Ms. Marvel.

Respondents expressed relief at seeing Kamala as a unique three-dimensional Muslim superhero in American comics, because she is a break from the relentless terrorist and oppressed women tropes entwined with representations of Islam that have dominated the western popular culture landscape.

They regard her as “relatable” because she connects both to her ancestral culture and American one.

The South Asian Muslim participants in particular were excited for her because she not only embodies much of their customs, but because she represents a break from the “Muslim equals Middle Eastern” portrayals. Black Muslim participants voiced this last point as well.

Refuge from stereotypes?

While most participants in my study welcomed Ms. Marvel as a refuge from Islamophobic stereotypes, one stressed that if a Muslim superhero appeared in a story showing something that didn’t reflect Islamic principles, there would be a risk this could negatively affect the Muslim community.

Since the show launched, some Muslim fans were outraged by Episode 3’s revelation that Kamala is a djinn.

According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, a djinn is a Qurʾānic term applied to bodies composed of vapour and flame. Djinns are popularly understood as supernatural beings. The djinn filtered through a western orientalist lens has been a staple of orientalist “genie” depictions.

Many have said that it was a baffling choice to draw on orientalist tropes while making the first Muslim superhero in the MCU a djinn — and that they can’t cosplay as her now. The plot turn of Kamala-as-djinn isn’t in the comics.

Turning point of representation?

In my audience study, a young Indian Muslim woman was excited to see Kamala take over the Ms. Marvel mantle from her blonde and blue-eyed predecessor, Carol Danvers.

She said Kamala would let young, brown and dark-skinned girls know that they too were special after a lifetime of not seeing themselves represented in western popular media.

The Pakistani American Muslim illustrator, Anoosha Syed, recently tweeted about this in response to questions on Kamala’s identity, writing: “Seeing a lot of people online … angrily commenting ‘who is this show even for??’ Hi! Hello! It’s for me!!! ME!!!! A Pakistani Muslim girl who has literally never seen herself represented in media like this before!!”

With the Ms. Marvel series currently clocking in at a 96 per cent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I ask whether we are on the cusp of a turning point for Muslim representation in the West — especially for South Asian and Muslim girls.

In the past, some dressed up as the orientalist Disney character, Princess Jasmine, for Halloween. With Ms. Marvel and other superheroines, girls are gaining heroines to choose from.

Safiyya Hosein, Part-time lecturer, Communication and Culture, Toronto Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The story revolves around a Pakistani-American 16-year-old girl from Jersey City who resents her strict and protective parents and wants to attend a comic book convention in *gasp* the evening and to wear a Captain Marvel uniform as cosplay. The hero, Kamala Khan, is played engagingly by Iman Vellani, a young Pakistani-Canadian actress. Ultimately, she sneaks off to the convention with a boy-who-is-a-friend (not a boyfriend) Bruno Carelli, played by Matt Linz (who played Henry in AMC’s The Walking Dead). Her grandmother had left a bracelet, and Kamala adds it to her Captain Marvel ensemble in hopes of winning a contest for best costume at the convention. It turns out that the bracelet is sort of like Aladdin’s lamp, bestowing superpowers of extension on her. She uses those powers at the convention but inadvertently causes some mayhem. She returns home to find her mother in her room waiting for her, aware that she had sneaked out. She is grounded.

At one point in the first episode, when she despairs of being allowed to go to the convention, she says, “Anyway, it is not as if the brown girls are the ones who save the world.”

Obviously, the point of the series is to disprove this defeatist point of view.

The television series is written by Pakistani-British comedian Bisha K. Ali, and Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy direct.

The streaming show is based on the award-winning Ms. Marvel comic books and graphic novels, which were begun by Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson, both Muslims, with art by Adrian Alphona.

Sana Amanat is a Pakistani-American raised in Jersey City, so there is a lot of her in Kamala. She had a career in magazine publishing, and then was hired in 2009 by Marvel Comics in a quest to make the company more diverse. She is now Director of Content and Character Development at Marvel, and has worked on other characters, such as Hawkeye, as well.

G. Willow Wilson is a novelist who deploys techniques of magical realism, and was the author of the first few years’ worth of Ms. Marvel comics.

Kamala Khan as played by Vellani is a sympathetic character, and she could end up helping do for Muslim Americans what the sitcom Will and Grace did for gays.

Some Muslim American commenters have worried that the depiction of Kamala’s very pious older brother and her strict parents will solidify rather than dispel some stereotypes. Me, I remember immigrant sitcoms like the Danny Thomas show in the 1950s that had some similar tropes. When Uncle Tannous visited from Lebanon, he thought Thomas’s American wife was way too skinny and wouldn’t be up to pulling a plow. Or there was Jimmy Durante, the Italian-American comedian who made fun of his own people’s syntax with phrases like “Yes, we have no bananas.” From that point of view, Ms. Marvel’s cliches stand in a long line of New World/ Old World tropes.

Some conservative Muslims have objected that Kamala Khan does not cover her hair. But I lived in Pakistan, and was interested to note that veiling is much less common in South Asia than in the Arab world. (It wasn’t so common in Egypt up to about 1990, either). So this criticism may come from differences between Muslim American traditions.

The generally positive and human depiction of Muslims is in any case a big change. We have had entire series, like Fox’s “24,” premised on Islamophobia. Muslims became stock villains. Rami Malik (a Coptic Christian of Egyptian extraction) even got a lot of cred for refusing to have his Bond villain be a Muslim in No Time to Die. This refusal is only newsworthy because the Muslim villain had become the default.

It wasn’t just dramas. I can remember being outraged some years ago when I saw a CNN report on violence by a small group of Muslim extremists somewhere, and they ran stock footage of ordinary Muslims praying in a mosque to illustrate it.

The American public has not always had a poor image of Muslims. In the Cold War era, they were often considered allies against Godless Communism. The Eisenhower administration even gave aid to Saudi Arabia to expand rail lines to Mecca to encourage Muslims to go on pilgrimage.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by a terrorist group that included secular-minded individuals such as the Lebanese hijacker Ziad Jarrah, who had a live-in Turkish girlfriend and some of whose family members were secular Baathists. Other members were a weird sort of Muslim nationalist. Al-Qaeda has never been more than a fringe extremist group in the Muslim world, akin to the KKK in the United States, and certainly does not represent Islam. Nevertheless, many Americans went on to tag Muslims in general with extremism and violence in subsequent years, very unfairly.

As I discussed for Tomdispatch this winter, even US law enforcement has been so obsessed by the small and for the most part remarkably well-behaved Muslim American community that they didn’t bother to keep sufficient watch on white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys, enabling the Capitol insurrection.

There are something like 3.8 million Muslim Americans now, about 1.15% of the population, and their numbers are roughly half that of Jewish Americans. Muslim Americans are roughly divided into four major groups, white converts — mostly Sufis– Arab Americans, South Asian Americans, and African Americans.

By South Asia I mean Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. There are now roughly half a million Pakistani Americans in particular, which would make them about 13% of the Muslim American population. The majority are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi rite, but Shiites form a significant minority (20% ?) among them. Their national language is Urdu, which is related to Hindi but with more Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Pakistan itself however, is ethnically diverse, having Punjabis, Pukhtuns, Baloch, Sindhis and Urdu-speaking immigrants from India known as Muhajirs.

Despite the four broad rubrics given above, Muslim Americans are extremely diverse, hailing from Senegal and Bangladesh, Egypt and India, Algeria and Malaysia. Many have been bewildered to be put by other Americans under the sign of al-Qaeda, since it comes from a narrow religious tradition and the hothouse atmosphere of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and is completely different from their own traditions. It is sort of as though the KKK carried out a terrorist action in China and then Chinese started being suspicious of Methodists and Roman Catholics.

Ironically, the virulent Islamophobia of the Trump administration appears to have caused Americans to rethink their views of the minority. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 89% of Americans say they would welcome a Muslim as a neighbor. 79% say they would welcome a Muslim as a family member. I suppose that means they would be all right with their son or daughter marrying one. While you have to regret the bigotted 19%, these attitudes are a huge improvement on those held even a decade ago.

On the other hand, half of Americans have doubts about whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

Myself, I have doubts about whether the contemporary Republican Party is compatible with democracy.

For months, I’ve been reading about the growing Trumpist-Republican movement to ban whatever books its members consider politically unpalatable, lest the lives of America’s children be sullied by, say, a novel of Toni Morrison’s like The Bluest Eye or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or a history book like They Called Themselves the K.K.K. It’s an urge that just rubs me the wrong way. After all, as a boy growing up in New York City in the 1950s, when children’s post-school lives were much less organized than they are today, I would often wander into the local branch of the public library, hoping the librarian would allow me into the adult section. There — having little idea what I was doing — I would pull interesting-looking grown-up books off the shelves and head for home.

Years later, exchanging childhood memories with a friend and publishing colleague, Sara Bershtel, I discovered that, on arriving in this country, she, too, had found a sympathetic librarian and headed for those adult shelves. At perhaps 12 or 13, just about the age of those Tennessee schoolkids, we had both — miracle of miracles! — not faintly knowing what we were doing, pulled Annmarie Selinko’s bestselling novel Désirée off the shelves. It was about Napoleon Bonaparte and his youthful fiancé and we each remember being riveted by it. Maybe my own fascination with history, and hers with French literature, began there. Neither of us, I suspect, were harmed by reading the sort of racy bestseller that Republicans would today undoubtedly loathe.

Buy the Book

Oh, and if you’ll excuse a little stream of consciousness here, my friend Sara was born in a German displaced-persons camp to Jewish parents who had, miraculously enough, survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which brings me back to the jumping-off spot for this piece. Unless you’ve been in Ukraine these last weeks, it’s something you undoubtedly already know about, given the attention it’s received: that, by a 10-0 vote, a school board in McMinn, Tennessee, banned from its eighth-grade classroom curriculum Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, about his parents’ Holocaust years in Auschwitz and beyond (and his own experience growing up with them afterward). When I first heard about that act I felt, however briefly and indirectly, pulled off the shelves myself and banned. And damn! — yes, I want to make sure that this piece gets banned as well! — I felt proud of it!

Just to back up for a moment: that Tennessee school board banned Spiegelman’s book on the grounds, at least nominally, that it contained naked cartoon mice — Jewish victims in a concentration camp and Spiegelman’s mother, who committed suicide, in a bathtub — and profanity as well (like that word “damn!”). In a world where, given a chance, so many of us would head for the modern equivalent of those adult library shelves — these days, of course, any kid with an iPhone or a computer can get a dose of almost any strange thing on this planet — that school board might as well have been a marketing firm working for Maus. After all, more than three decades after it first hit the bestseller lists, their action sent it soaring to number one at Amazon, while donated copies began to pour into rural Tennessee.

As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently pointed out, if you truly want a teenager to read any book with gusto, the first thing you need to do is, of course, ban it. So, I suppose that, in its own upside-down way, the McMinn board did our world a strange kind of favor. In the long run, however, the growing rage for banning books from schools and libraries (or even, in the case of the Harry Potter books, burning them, Nazi-style) doesn’t offer a particularly hopeful vision of where this country’s headed right now.

“What’s So Funny?“

Still, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m only going on like this because that incident in Tennessee and the media response to it brought back an ancient moment in my own life. So, think of the rest of this piece as a personal footnote to the McMinn story and to the growing wave of book bannings in courses and school libraries across too much of this country. And that’s not even to mention the plethora of “gag order” bills passed by or still being considered in Republican-dominated state legislatures to prevent the teaching of certain subjects. It’s further evidence, if you need it, of an urge to wipe from consciousness so much that they find uncomfortable in our national past. It’s also undoubtedly part of a larger urge to take over America’s public-school system, or even replace it, much as Donald Trump and crew would like to all-too-autocratically take over this country and transform it into an unrecognizable polity, a subject TomDispatch has covered for years.

However, my moment in the sun began at a time when The Donald was about to open the first of his Atlantic City casinos that would eventually turn him into a notorious bankuptee. And it took place inside the world of publishing, which then seemed all too ready to essentially ban Maus from this planet. Back in the early 1980s, putting out a Holocaust “comic book” — though the term “graphic novel” existed, just about no one in publishing knew it — in which Jews were cartoon mice and the Nazis cats, seemed like a suicidal act for a book publisher.

And in that context, here’s my personal story about the cartoon mice that might never have made it to McMinn County, Tennessee. In the 1980s, I was an editor at Pantheon Books, a publishing house run by André Schiffrin who, in a fashion hardly commonplace then or later, gave his editors a chance to sign up books that might seem too unfashionable or politically dangerous.

One day, our wonderful art director, Louise Fili, came to my office. (She worked on another floor of the Random House building in New York City, the larger publishing house of which we were then a part.) In her hands, she had an oversized magazine called RAW that I had never seen before, put out by a friend of hers named Art Spiegelman. It was filled with experimental cartoon art. And in the seams of new issues, he had been stapling tiny chapters of a memoir he was beginning to create about the experiences of his father and mother in the Holocaust. Jews from Poland, they had ended up in Auschwitz and managed, unlike so many millions of Jews murdered in such death camps, to survive the experience. Louise also had with her a proposal from Spiegelman for what would become his bestselling graphic novel Maus.

I still remember her telling me that it had already been rejected by every publisher imaginable. In those days, that was, I suspect, something like a selling point for me. Anyway, I took the couple of teeny chapters and the proposal home — and all these years later, I still recall the moment when I decided I had to put Spiegelman’s book out, no matter what. I remember it because I thought of myself as a rather rational editor and the feeling that I simply had to do Maus was one of the two least rational decisions I ever made in publishing (the other being to do Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback, also a future bestseller).

At that moment, I doubt I had ever read what came to be known as a graphic novel, but there was something in my background that, I suspect, left me particularly open to it. My mother, Irma Selz, had been a theatrical and later political caricaturist for New York’s leading newspapers and magazines (and, in the 1950s, the New Yorker as well). She was, in fact, known as “New York’s girl caricaturist” in the gossip columns of her time, since she was the only one in an otherwise largely male world of cartoonists.

Because she lived in that world, after a fashion I did, too. I can, for instance, remember Irwin Hazen, the creator of the now largely forgotten cartoon Dondi, sitting by my bedside when I was perhaps seven or eight drawing his character for me on sheets of tracing paper before I went to sleep. (Somewhere in the top of my closet, I suspect I still have those sketches of his!) So I think I was, in some unexpected way, the perfect editor for Spiegelman’s proposal. I was also a Jew and, though my grandfather had come to America in the 1890s from Lemberg (now Ukraine’s Lviv) and later brought significant parts of his family here, I remember my grandmother telling me of family members who had been swallowed up by the Holocaust.

Anyway, here’s the moment I still recall. I was lying down reading what Louise had given me when my wife, Nancy, walked past me. At that moment, I burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?” she asked. Her question took me completely aback. I paused for a genuinely painful moment and then said, haltingly and in an only faintly coherent fashion, something like: “Uh… it’s a proposed comic book about a guy whose parents lived through Auschwitz and later, in his adolescence, his mother committed suicide…”

I felt abashed and yet I had been laughing and that stopped me dead in my tracks. At that very moment, I realized, however irrationally, that whatever this strange, engrossing, disturbing comic book about a world from hell turned out to be, I just had to do it. From that moment on, whether it ever sold a copy or not wasn’t even an issue for me.

A Holocaust Comic Book?

And then, you might say, the problems began. I went to André, told him about the project, and he reacted expectably. Who in the world, he wondered, would buy a Holocaust comic book? I certainly didn’t know, nor did I even care then. In some gut way, I simply knew that a world without this book would be a lesser place. It was that simple.

Thank heavens, as a boss, André deeply believed in his editors, just as we editors believed in each other. He also hated to say “no.” So, instead, a kind of siege ensued while the proposed book passed from hand to hand and others looked and reacted, but I remained determined and knew that, in the end, if I was that way, he would let me do it, as indeed he did.

I was considered something of a fierce editor in those days and yet I doubt I touched a word of Spiegelman’s manuscript. What it is today, it is thanks purely to him, not me. I took him out to lunch to tell him about our publication decision and prepare the way for our future collaboration. While there, I assured him that I knew nothing about producing such a book — he, for instance, wanted the kind of flaps that were found on French but not American paperbacks — and would simply do what he wanted. The one thing I wanted him to know, though, was that he shouldn’t get his hopes up. Given the subject matter, it was unlikely to sell many copies. (A Pulitzer Prize? It never crossed my mind.)

Fortunately, as far as I could tell, he all too sagely paid no attention whatsoever to me on the subject. And as it happened, some months later (as best I remember), the New York Times Book Review devoted a full page to him and, in part, to the future Maus. It was like a miracle. We were stunned and, from that moment on, knew that we had something big on our hands.

And in that fashion, in another century, you could say that I unbanned Maus, preparing the way for McMinn County to ban it in our own Trumpist moment. I couldn’t be prouder today to have had a hand in producing the book that caricaturist David Levine would all too aptly compare to the work of Franz Kafka.

In its continuing eventful existence, as a unique record of the truly terrible things we humans are capable of doing to one another, it is indeed a masterpiece. It raises issues that all of us, parents and children, should have to grapple with on our endangered planet, a place where we have so much work ahead of us if, in some terrible fashion, we don’t want to ban ourselves.

Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously in favour of removing the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman from its Grade 8 language arts curriculum in January. Maus is based on interviews with Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Auschwitz survivor, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its searing and innovative visual and narrative exploration of the darkest period of German history.

The McMinn County’s Board of Education cited “rough, objectionable language” and the cartoon drawing of a nude woman as their primary objections.

However, with editions flying off the shelves and comic book stores giving away copies, the McMinn County school board has, in fact, improved Maus’s distribution, getting it into the hands of more readers.

Graphic novel and historical representation

Maus explores Spiegelman’s parents’ life in Poland and their internment at Auschwitz. Vladek Spiegelman’s experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath — including the 1968 suicide of Art Spiegleman’s mother, Vladek’s wife, Anja — is filtered through cartoonist’s narrative and visual account. He portrays the Holocaust as a conflict between cats, mice, and pigs where Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs.

Spiegelman’s use of animals met some controversy including among some Polish readers, as well as some in the Jewish community who saw in mice the stereotpye of Jews as pathetic and defenseless creatures. Yet Spiegelman noted that his anthropomorphized mice intentionally challenged Nazi propaganda that likened Jews to rats. For example, a teaching guide characterizes Spiegelman’s Jewish mice as “a barbed response to Hitler’s statement ‘The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.’” His mice, Spiegelman wrote, “stand upright and affirm their humanity.”

Maus was first published in Françoise Mouly and Spiegelman’s comics anthology RAW from 1980 onward, before the first six chapters were published in 1986 as Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and the latter five chapters were published in 1991 as Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles.

The graphic novel’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize win (in the “Special Citations and Awards” category) drew academics’ attention to the comics medium for the first time.

Now heralded as one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, Maus successfully established comics as an important feature of contemporary culture and historical representation. It opened the floodgates to comics addressing serious subject matter and changed the medium’s relationship with history.

Ethics of representing the Holocaust

While some may be encountering Maus for the first time in their newsfeeds, comics fans, teachers and literary and cultural studies scholars have known the importance of Maus in teaching and learning for decades.

Maus made comic books visible and legitimate in ways that had been previously inconceivable. As my research has explored, Maus also redefined the medium’s potential through its engagement with what is known in Germany as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, overcoming the past or coming to terms with the history of Nazism. At the same time, Maus prompted important popular and scholarly debates on the ethics of representing the Holocaust.

For example, literature professor Marianne Hirsch examined the role of photography in Maus in a 1992 essay, providing the scholarly foundation for her subsequent work on transgenerational trauma.

German and comparative literature professor Andreas Huyssen examined the ethics and esthetics of remembering the Holocaust by looking at Maus’s narrative strategies. In particular, Huyssen turned to Maus as an important example of how to move debates on representing the Holocaust beyond a focus on the “proper” depiction of historical trauma. Instead, Huyssen analyzed Maus’s ability to shock and jar its reader “through ruptures in narrative.” As Huyssen notes:

“[T]he telling of this traumatic past … is interrupted time and again by banal everyday events in the New York present. This cross-cutting of past and present, by which the frame keeps intruding into the narrative … points in a variety of ways to how this past holds the present captive, independently of whether this knotting of past into present is being talked about or repressed.”

Huyssen found that Maus demonstrated the power of modernist Holocaust commemorations that steer clear of “official Holocaust memory” and its rituals while incorporating a critique of representation itself.

Similarly, historian Hayden White looked to Maus as a case study in his discussion on the relationship between history and narrative.

White questioned the belief that the uniqueness of Nazism and the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the mass genocide of Jews — might set limits on its portrayal, insisting that there are no unacceptable modes of historical narrative. White argued that the destabilizing of the division between fact and fiction as seen in Maus is well-suited to representing what may otherwise seem “unrepresentable,” namely, the Holocaust as well as the experience of it.

Multi-layered process of ‘witnessing’

Maus’s multi-generational memoir laid the groundwork for comics, and graphic memoir in particular, to become an essential form for remembering the Holocaust and communicating its legacy of transgenerational trauma. Even today, thirty years after Maus’s Pulitzer award, graphic novelists are turning to comics to explore these issues. For example, German-American illustrator Nora Krug’s 2018 Belonging offers new perspectives on German guilt through her graphic novel that is both memoir and scrapbook.

Recently, researchers are looking again to comic art to educate on the Holocaust and genocide more generally. Germanic and Slavic studies professor Charlotte Schallié from the University of Victoria is leading a SSHRC-funded project called Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.

In an interview, Schallié said this focus was inspired by her son’s discovery of Maus as a reluctant reader at age 11. She explained how comics are foundational in Holocaust education and that Maus is an essential piece of graphic literature for both middle- and high-school curricula. According to Schallié, Spiegelman’s complex esthetic modes of representation complicate the genre of survivor testimony to draw attention to the multi-layered process of witnessing. “To ban Maus in the middle-school curriculum,” she said, “does a great disservice to students.”

However, with the media attention that the recent ban of Maus is receiving, it’s likely that more readers than ever are going to come to regard Spiegelman’s graphic art as an essential text in Holocaust education.

Biz Nijdam, Lecturer, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By taking on the mission of rehabilitating villains in the new Spider-Man movie, Peter Parker shows the good that can happen when we invest in people rather than imprison them.

Raven Yamamoto | –

This article contains spoilers for “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

( Waging Nonviolence) – I went into “Spider-Man: No Way Home” thinking it was going to be another feel-good film about one of my favorite characters to come out of Marvel’s long list of heroes. But I was happily surprised to find that the film had a deeper plot that was underscored by themes of restorative justice, or the idea that those who do wrong need healing just the same as their victims. These themes are incredibly relevant to the real-life discussion of how American society views incarcerated people as “villains” and unworthy of redemption. 

Instead of the typical scenario where the hero of the story must defeat the villain to save the day, we’re presented with a plot that requires the hero, Peter Parker, to forgive — forcing the hero to show empathy to the villain in order to do so. 

As people grapple with another spike in COVID infections, we can’t forget empathy for a vulnerable population of folks whose deaths are preventable: the incarcerated. We can easily save them by setting them free and providing resources that address why they’re incarcerated in the first place. The prison abolition movement is rooted in this mission and actively working to make it a reality. But prisoners aren’t a priority in a country that willingly casts them aside rather than invest in their freedom.  

Villains from earlier Spider-Man trilogies — led by Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield — pour into the universe of the latest Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland. As a result, Holland’s Spider-Man is tasked with sending villains like Doctor Octopus and Electro back to their respective universes, but the solution to the conflict is more complex.

Peter realizes he has a choice (thanks to his wise Aunt May): Send the villains back to their respective universes to meet their end or try to convince them to abandon their evil ways before returning home. To see the hero of a Marvel movie offered this choice is a huge victory for prison abolitionists, showing that their vision of a world without prisons is permeating American culture in a positive way. 

Dr. Strange is resistant to the idea of helping the villains and argues that their fate is fixed, insinuating that they deserve to die for the havoc they’ve wreaked. Strange’s argument is strikingly similar to real-life carceral thinking and reminiscent of how proponents of our own prison industrial complex view criminals as inherently violent and favor capital punishment. As prison abolitionists point out, this limited mindset overlooks the many factors that drive someone to commit a crime or, in this case, resort to villainy. 

The overarching message in “No Way Home” is that everyone deserves a second chance — even the villains we all know and, in some cases, love to hate. In the real world, some view the two million people in prisons, jails, juvenile correction facilities and immigrant detention centers as villains of their own making, which helps explain why the U.S. has the highest amount of incarcerated people worldwide. Every year, 600,000 people are sentenced to prison and 83 percent of federal criminal defendants are found guilty. 

Re-entry programs give formerly incarcerated folks the second chance they need to overcome the complex challenges they face when they are released to break the cycle of incarceration. Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles provides former gang members and the formerly incarcerated with resources to reintegrate, such as employment, tattoo removals and mental health services. The Center for Women in Transition in St. Louis provides formerly incarcerated women with transitional housing, case management and other resources to rebuild lives after prison. These organizations and others like them are supported by the Second Chance Act, a fund that awards grants to groups working to reduce rates of recidivism nationwide. 

In a similar (albeit superhero) fashion, the three Spider-Men join forces to “cure” the villains rather than defeat them in a final battle that takes place at the Statue of Liberty — a monument that symbolizes the film’s theme of restorative justice and second chances. After all, for earlier immigrant generations, the statue was a beacon of hope, representing the possibility of a second chance or the start of a new life. Of course, America isn’t so welcoming of immigrants today. Not only has the path to naturalization narrowed over the past few decades, but there are currently more than 22,000 migrants in ICE detention centers — despite most having no criminal record. What’s more, nearly two million migrants were arrested at the U.S-Mexico border this year, alone. The opportunity the statue once stood for has been tarnished — something the filmmakers are clearly aware of, as they allow it to serve as a backdrop to the final act.

As the film comes to a close, the Spider-Men “cure” most of the villains by addressing the trauma that led them to acquire their menacing abilities. Doctor Octopus was relieved of the relentless voices in his head after Holland’s Peter injected him with a device that stopped his tentacles from infecting his brain. Sandman, Electro and Lizard — who were disfigured by the traumatic accidents that gave them their abilities — were given antidotes by the other Spider-Men, reverting them back to their human forms. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Strange — who’s more concerned with keeping the multiverse from collapsing than learning about restorative justice — prepares to close the many portals that Peter opened. In the commotion, the three Spider-Men are blindsided by the Green Goblin who they have yet to cure. Norman Osborne has long stood as a metaphor for the criminalization of mental illness, but until this film, the source of his demons had not been explored — no doubt due, in part, to our general lack of understanding of mental health as a society. 

After all, the U.S. has a history of punishing the mentally ill rather than treating them. Before the first psychiatric hospital was established in 1773, Americans were incarcerated just for being mentally ill. That legacy carries on today where, in most states, the majority of people with mental illnesses are in prisons rather than psychiatric hospitals equipped to meet their unique needs. Incarceration has only ever kept people from getting the help they need to lead better lives.

Scenes from “No Way Home” shed light on Osborne’s mental health, showing symptoms that mirror borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. After encountering Holland’s Peter for the first time, Osborne is seen covering his ears in an alley to silence the voices inside his head. In a scene with Aunt May, he talks about how he becomes someone else when he puts on his mask. In the final battle, he switches from Osborne to the Goblin, wanting nothing more than to make people suffer the way he does. After watching the Goblin kill his Aunt May and wound Maguire’s Spider-Man, Holland’s Spider-Man struggles to be empathetic at first. But he honors Aunt May’s dying wish for him to finish what he started — by curing Osborne of his alter ego that killed the only living family member Peter had left.

The movie ends with Holland accomplishing what he set out to do. The villains, along with the Garfield and Maguire Spider-Men, are all sent back to their universes. We can assume they made better choices after being given the tools they needed to change their narratives. 

What’s most compelling, however, is that Holland’s Peter also — knowingly or not — seeks out his own second chance. In the last film, “Far from Home,” Mysterio outs Peter and frames him as his killer. In the eyes of many, the hero became the villain. Consequently, in “No Way Home,” Peter wants Dr. Strange to wipe his slate clean so he can walk through life as if he was never outed. His wish is granted in the end when Dr. Strange recasts the spell that went wrong to make everyone forget who Peter Parker is and what he was accused of.

In the real world, that’s a fantasy that many incarcerated folks want, too, but can ultimately never have under a system that punishes them even after they’ve served time. Convicted felons struggle against laws that make it near impossible to reintegrate into society without being defined by their record. People with criminal records are half as likely to get a job compared to those without one. States have been slow to enact Clean Slate Initiative laws that allow ex-offenders to get their records expunged or sealed once they’re released from prison. They might be free from their cells but they aren’t free to vote, apply for social benefits or even serve on a jury after they’re released. 

Holland’s Spider-Man insists throughout the film that the vitriol aimed at him was because people didn’t know the whole story — namely that Mysterio was actually a villain. People who look like Peter Parker, a white man, are given the benefit of the doubt far more often than people of color in the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, Peter’s frustration with the public’s perception of him aligns with that of marginalized people in our own world who are affected by racial bias during every step of the system, from profiling to sentencing.

Despite having the opportunity to see through the eyes of the oppressed, Peter still didn’t know what stories the villains carried with them — stories that were crucial to him changing his views and unlearning a carceral mindset. After all, villains are easier to hate when you only see the horrible acts they commit. But it gets harder when you’re introduced to their backstories that are often tragic and riddled with abuse and neglect. The same can be said for the incarcerated. 

In order to save the day, Peter had to give those he once saw as villains the very thing he was seeking for himself: a second chance. The minute viewers like me realize this, we’re also able to see the power we have to do the same in our everyday lives — and with great power comes great responsibility.

We can choose what kind of hero we’re going to be the same way Peter did in “No Way Home.” Recognizing the flaws of our punitive carceral system, through the lens of Spider-Man or otherwise, can be a stepping stone to getting involved in the actual struggle to change the system and build a world without prisons.
It all starts with acknowledging that the people we throw into cells every single day are just that: people.

–

Raven Yamamoto is a journalist and fellow in the Uprising Fellowship at Just Media.

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