Harvey Pekar: Mensch Author, Mensch Editor... and other Jewish Comic Stars

66 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 Culture B O O K S | F I L M | M U S I C T he day has arrived for the art comic, with respectable attentioninthereviewcolumnsof slick magazines and (possibly more important) the appearance of a regular comic page in the New York Times Magazine. More than a handful of “alternative” artists—that is, those working not in Superhero Comics, drawing for the daily newspapers or seen often in the New Yorker—are making a living without a day job. And the day of the Jewish comic artist has arrived as well. There’s a deeply buried irony here, becausefromitsearliestdaysatthecloseofthe Depression the mainstream comic book industry has always been deeply Jewish, from management to artists, inkers, and scriptwriters. Alternative comics, in their original version Underground Comix, were the exception, probably because they were centered in the Bay Area of the later 1960s70s , and their ambience flavored the proliferationofstyles (andpublications)inSeattle and elsewhere. Perhaps it was Art Spiegelman ’sRawmagazine(1980-91)thatbrought Jewishness back, even if there was nothing (beyond his own totemic work and that of Ben Katchor) especially Jewish about Raw. More likely, with the graphic novel picking upsteaminthenewcentury,youngerartists came from (and gravitated to) New York City. By an old adage never entirely wrong, New York=Jewish. Or at least a lot of people think so, and the publishing contacts are still overwhelmingly there. [BO OKS] Harvey Pekar: Mensch Author, Mensch Editor…and other Jewish Comic Stars Recent comics reviewed by Paul Buhle (See box on next page) SAMMY HARKHAM across her long career as artist, editor, and scholar of women’s comic and cartoon work. The story on Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow begins properly with James Sturm, an editorial assistant at Raw back intheday,thefounder-directoroftheCenter for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, and the artist of one of the astounding newer works of comic art, The Golem’s Mighty Swing (about a touring Jewish baseball team of the 1920s, besetbyanti-Semites).Sturm,ageneration younger than Robbins, is another mighty force for comic art at large, and Striking Out Jim Crow (in the Hyperion Books for Children series) offers up a deeply empathetic tale of the racial outsider in 1943 Alabama —the proud pitching giant who won’t give an inch, even when his life is at stake. Sturm knows his baseball as well as his social history, and I sure wish that a booklikethishadbeenaroundformeahalf century ago, when the photos of Willie Mays making an astounding center field catch in the 1954 World Series were plastered on my bedroom wall. I know what thislittlevolumewouldhavemeanttome. Sturm’s fellow instructor at the Center for Cartoon Studies is Jason Lutes, whose continuing series, on Berlin as Hitler is about to come to power, has been among thegrandartisticachievementsofyounger comics generations. Houdini, done in collaboration with Nick Bertozzi, tells the storyoftheWisconsin-bornJewishescape artist who adamantly denied his Jewishness through much of his life. Splendid art is followed by five pages of historical notes on the subject of the volume and a very funny page on the Center, arguably the chief fount of future American comic talent . The latest of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics, arguably the totemic anthology of today’s artists, might be described as having a Jewish comic section, because three strips appear in a row. Each isamazinginitsownway. Twenty-eight year old Sammy Harkham, born in L.A., educated in Australia , and living back in L.A., is himself an anthologist in the art-for-arts-sake section oftoday’scomicsworld,hisKramer’sErgot a show-place for comic modernism. But “Lubavitch, Ukraine, 1876” is deeply and precisely historical: the best recreation of shtetllifeincomicformthusfar,withacuriously Harkham-like protagonist whose tedious work is to produce mezuzahs on demand for the village rabbi. He smokes, When the Masters of American Comics exhibition traveled during 2005-06 and the accompanying prestigious (and gorgeous ) volume set a new standard for claimsofcomicart,few commented on its disproportionatelyJewish nature (not even when theshowopenedatthe Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and traveled...