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http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/106525981668643.xml Jewish men took lead role in creating comics industry Michael Sangiacomo It's getting so that you can't swing a dead Catwoman at a newsstand these days without hitting a magazine or newspaper that has a story about comics. The New York Times recently had a Sunday story praising the art of Jack Kirby. Too bad the art used was the decidedly non-Kirby "Ultimate X-Men." The most surprising story was on the cover of the fall 2003 issue of Reform Judaism magazine, titled "How Jews Created the Comic Book Industry." The entire cover was a five-panel comic depicting two Jewish kids from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster creating a superhero. Arie Kaplan's article was surprisingly good, amazingly accurate and thought-provoking. It even taught me something that I bet would be a surprise to many folks: Superman's real name, Kal-El, is Hebrew for "All that is God." Kaplan writes about how Jewish men such as Siegel and Shuster, "Spirit" creator Will Eisner, Marvel godfathers Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "Batman" creator Bob Kane and MAD magazine's Al Jaffe and Dave Berg were instrumental in shaping the young industry. Of course, those are just a few of the many Jewish men (and a few women) who left a mark. Jaffe explained that in the 1930s, newspapers and advertising agencies were not hiring Jewish people, so they "drifted into the comic-book business," because comics publishers were mainly Jewish. The lengthy article takes the readers right through the 1950s, to the Frederic Wertham witch hunts that nearly destroyed the industry. The final proof of the influence of Jews on the industry lies in the simple fact that in 1933, Max Gaines created the comic book itself. He was trying to come up with a way to make money to feed his family, including son William Gaines, who would later found EC Comics and MAD. The story is that Max Gaines began reading his beloved collection of Sunday comics to raise his spirits and came up with the notion that if he enjoyed reading the collected Sunday comics in one sitting, others would, too. He persuaded Eastern Publications to collect the Sunday comics of characters such as Mutt and Jeff and package them as a book, which became the comic book. In February 1934, "Famous Funnies" No. 1 landed on newsstands and . . . well, you know what happened after that. |