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In the Image of God

By Paul Buhle

To say this book is a remarkable volume or even a landmark volume in comic art is somewhat of an understatement. It doesn’t hurt that excerpts of the book appeared during the summer in the New Yorker and that the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is opening an exhibit of the original drawings from which the book’s contents were adapted. “The Book of Genesis,” Robert Crumb’s version, nevertheless stands on its own as one of this century’s most ambitious artistic adaptations of the West’s oldest continuously told story.Read More

Superbad

By Paul Buhle

Who knew that Joe Shuster (1914-1992), the Cleveland Jewish teenage artist of the Depression Era, rising from obscurity through his portrayal of The Man of Steel, would become in later life a soft-porn artist? Not me, and surely not those other kids, mostly male, who grew up reading the Super-franchise heroes while developing mild fantasies about a very chaste Lois Lane.Read More

Will Eisner’s Life, Drawn by His Own Hand

By Paul Buhle

In one of many ironies whose origins may be suggested here, artist-entrepreneur Will Eisner died in 2005, just as his collected oeuvre had begun to persuade readers that he was a true master and not a historical footnote to the otherwise juvenile art form known as the comic book. His most thoughtful works have posthumously appeared — or reappeared more prominently than in their original form — and a documentary about his life premiered last month. That is to say, he lived almost long enough to see a life’s work vindicated.Read More

Comic Artist Remembers, Sort of

By Paul Buhle

Every Forward reader, it is safe to say, knows Ben Katchor’s work, and almost as many would recognize the contributions of Art Spiegelman. Since the 2000 publication of Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” the in-house story of Jewish predominance in the comic book trade has become part of literary folklore. The rise of comic art to respectability has brought new interest toward what should be considered an artistic genre all of itself, with veteran artist Peter Kuper smack dab in the Jewish American corner.Read More

Labor’s Loves Lost

By Paul Buhle

Paul Buhle is a senior lecturer in history and American civilization at Brown University.

A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists In New York By Tony Michels Harvard University Press, 352 pages, $27.95. * * *The tale of Jewish socialists on Manhattan’s Lower East Side offers one of those urban legends, alive with so many otherRead More


 

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