Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels ed. by Derek Parker Royal (review)

Whether one is a scholar or a teacher whose classroom has been happily infiltrated by graphic novels, memoirs, comics, or other sequential narratives, this volume of twenty-one essays offers much to cherish and ponder (alas, due to its steep price most readers will require access to a research library). Its highlights include an exemplary introduction by editor Derek Parker Royal that succinctly presents some of the often charged debates about both the prominent role of Jews in the early comics industry and the "Jewish" nature of their contributions.

At the outset, it should be noted that even among the volume's less accomplished essays (a few more descriptive than genuinely analytical) there is something valuable to glean. While structured in four wide-ranging thematic sections ("Picturing Jewish Identity"; "Jewish Engagements with Comic Genres"; "Jewish Comics, the Holocaust, and Trauma"; Representation of Israel, Biblical Text, and Legend"), more often than not the contingent nature of life in the Diaspora—its joys as well as grave uncertainties—form a unifying theme. A gripping exemplar occurs in a memorable discussion of acclaimed French artist Johann Sfar's Klezmer, where James and Nicole Goldberg argue that Sfar "redirects our cultural memory of shtetl life from 'Tradition' to the unpredictability and improvisation of klezmer music." Their observation that Sfar's outsider musician characters "perform in a space between unity and cacophony, unsure of whom or what to trust and yet confident enough to embrace the fragmentary nature of living in the diaspora" applies to many of the figures addressed in Visualizing Jewish Narrative.

No collection of this scope can overlook the seminal influence of Will Eisner, and both Lan Dong's and Royal's respective contributions are among the collection's many highlights. Dong ably addresses the intersection of "life writing and the graphic novel," while Royal argues that the "neo-naturalistic . . . fatalistic reading of ethnoracial relations" distinguishes Dropsie Avenue from the sensibility of Eisner's other urban works. Jules Feiffer, a very different artistic witness to the Jewish American urban experience, receives his due in a lovely essay from Ira Nadel, who hails him as "the visual poet of interior angst and the choreographer of urban tensions," a fine description of Feiffer's sophisticated yet invariably bewildered characters' extravagantly frenzied and whimsically neurotic interactions with their environment (he calls them "victims of misfortune and heroes of endurance"). For Nadel, "what Feiffer explains is the inability to explain. His characters collapse into self-defeat. The explanatory agencies of family, institutions, and psychology fail to help. The self is left flailing."

Other gems include Eli Valley's gleefully provocative comic "Jews and Superheroes," a witty sendup of Jewish American literary tropes and preoccupations. In another illustrated essay, Al Wiesner delineates how his early frustration at the lack of Jewish characters in the superhero genre inspired his pedagogical Shaloman series. Robert Weiner's essay addressing the superhero genre will appeal to those interested in the portrayals (oblique and overt) of Jewishness in the Marvel Comics pantheon; his account of their frequent flirtation with the Golem legend adds important new layers to that story. Tahneer Oksman, to my mind one of the most sophisticated and consistently interesting scholars in the entire field, delivers a penetrating comparative discussion of Leela Corman's Unterzakhyn alongside Mary Antin's ardently assimilationist 1912 memoir, The Promised Land. In addition to highlighting Corman's creative response to the "suppressed" voice of Antin's sister, Oksman addresses the artful ways that Unterzakhyn illuminates the immigrant's experience with "the vernacular . . . everyday encounters with oral and visual forms of knowledge" and thus demonstrates "how comics can emphasize aspects of those experiences that have yet to be fully explored . . . the unofficial schooling that took place in the day-to-day, and which in many ways is most effectively and powerfully conveyed through images as well as words . . . especially through the intersection of the two on the page...