Visually orgasmic, painfully gorgeous, blissfully pulpy, a must-have for epicureans of American culture: Is it possible to heap too many superlatives on Dan Nadel’s “Art/Time” series? Dedicated to the lesser-known, often tripped-out and fantastical also-rans along the byways of comics history, the books remind us of a parallel universe that stretched far beyond Captain America…
The past year has seen a bumper crop of Jewish-themed graphic novels, with subjects ranging from the recent history of the Middle East (Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza”) to the ancient mythology of the Middle East (R. Crumb’s “Genesis”) to the poets of the Beat Generation (Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor’s “The Beats”). Still, the…
On February 7, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, a new publication from New York University Press, “Is Diss A System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader” edited by Ari Y. Kelman, will be presented. Gross (born in 1895) of Russian Jewish ancestry, drew comic strips of wild slapstick energy, following in the violence-for-laughs tradition…
What if Batman and Robin worked in the American Jewish community? Eli Valley offers up a clever exposition of this silly scenario in a comic on the Web site Jewcy.
What is it with rabbis and superheroes? First, there was Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s “Up Up and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History Culture and Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero.” Now, the New Jersey Jewish News tells us about Batman aficionado Rabbi Cary Friedman and his book, “Wisdom from the Batcave: How to Live a Super…
The Forward has earned a reputation for uncovering the Jewish ancestry of figures both real and fictional. Comics, in particular, have been a rewarding realm of inquiry: My friend and former colleague Max Gross outed The Thing, while executive editor Ami Eden discovered an uncanny Jewish X-Men connection. So it was only natural that we’d…
Great news. Variety recently reported that Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox are moving forward with an “X-Men” spinoff — “Magneto,” the back story of the villain portrayed by Ian McKellen in the original trilogy. The film, according to Variety, will open with Magneto coming “to grips with his mutant ability to manipulate metal objects…
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