Graphic Novel – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Wed, 18 Dec 2024 06:01:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 Shamash! “The Flight” https://www.juancole.com/2024/12/shamash-the-flight.html Wed, 18 Dec 2024 05:02:21 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222094 ]]> Panel #24

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Shamash! “The Brilliance” https://www.juancole.com/2024/12/shamash-the-brilliance.html Sun, 15 Dec 2024 05:02:35 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222050 ]]> Panel #23

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Shamash! “The Condition” https://www.juancole.com/2024/12/shamash-the-condition.html Thu, 12 Dec 2024 05:02:38 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222001 ]]> Panel #22

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Shamash! “The Kiss” https://www.juancole.com/2024/12/shamash-the-kiss.html Mon, 09 Dec 2024 05:02:30 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=221962 ]]> Panel #21

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Shamash! “Candid Thoughts” https://www.juancole.com/2024/12/shamash-candid-thoughts.html Sat, 07 Dec 2024 05:02:43 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=221925 ]]> Panel #20

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100 years of Stan Lee: how the Comic Book King challenged Prejudice https://www.juancole.com/2023/01/years-challenged-prejudice.html Tue, 03 Jan 2023 05:02:56 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=209189 By Alex Fitch, University of Brighton | –

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.

Spider-Man perched atop a street light in Spider-Man: No Way Home
One of Marvel’s most popular characters, Spider-Man, was a Stan Lee invention.
Matt Kennedy / Marvel

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.

Stan Lee wears large tinted glasses, wears a green shirt and holds a microphone. His hair is grey.
Stan Lee speaking at a convention in the 1980s.
Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA

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.

A pair of trainers/sneakers standing on an array of Marvel comics.
Many Marvel fan favourites were Stan Lee’s creation.
Erik Mclean

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.The Conversation

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.

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Why MCU’s Ms. Marvel matters so much to Muslim, South Asian Fans https://www.juancole.com/2022/07/marvel-matters-muslim.html Mon, 04 Jul 2022 04:02:58 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=205593 By Safiyya Hosein, Toronto Metropolitan University | –

(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.

People dressed up and dancing.
Kamala’s friends Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher) and Bruno (Matt Lintz) are seen dancing with her and her Auntie Ruby (Anjali Bhimani) at her brother’s wedding.

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.

A superhero is seen extending her hand.
Iman Vellani stars as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan in Marvel Studios’ ‘Ms. Marvel.’
(Marvel Studios 2022)

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.The Conversation

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.

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Ms. Marvel: Can a 16-year-old Marvel Superhero Change the Image of Islam in America? https://www.juancole.com/2022/06/marvel-superhero-americans.html Fri, 10 Jun 2022 05:42:41 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=205128 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Marvel Cinematic Universe streaming superhero television show, Ms. Marvel dropped on Disney+ this week, and it is a revolution in the representation of Muslim Americans on television.

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.

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My Life with Maus: Or How I Was Banned (Even If in a Second-Hand Way) by a Trumpian World https://www.juancole.com/2022/02/banned-second-trumpian.html Sat, 19 Feb 2022 05:04:03 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=203046 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of that of a rural Tennessee school board this January. In another life, I played a role in what could be thought of as the unbanning of the graphic novel Maus.

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

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