Comic Book Resources

I was going to try to publish an academic article on Jewish identity in comics until I found out there's like four books that either just came out or are about to come out on the subject, which probably blow my stuff out of the water. But! My research indicates many Jewish creators found themselves working in comics because the more lucrative advertising firms and the like would not hire Jews. I'm not sure about the comic strip industry being anti-Semitic as opposed to the comic book industry, but it could be possible.

I dunno. Al Capp was Jewish, and obviously Rube Goldberg and Harry Hershfield, and Milt Gross's stuff was Yiddish as all get out.

Not to say that there wasn't discrimination -- I bet there was -- but there were plenty of Jewish comic strip cartoonists back in the day.

Agreed with Butler, for the same reasons. Lots of Jewish writers and artists in the mainstream entertainment. Tons of screenwriters, producers, directors, comedians. Fleischer from Fleischer cartoon studios was Jewish, and that was pretty mainstream cartooning. Kings Feature Syndicate was founded by Moses Koenigsberg, a Jew. I think it was like Hollywood, Jews could write, direct and produce behind the scenes all they want, and use a lot of Jewish influence in the storytelling, themes, gags and conventions, but the characters themselves were never allowed to be blatantly Jewish, unless for comedic or caricature effect.

The Spirit ran in newspapers, just as a comicbook sized insert. So it's not like the papers were keeping Eisner out.

I think it boils down mainly to age and technical ability.

My dissertation advisor is on me to look at this idea but it seems to me that there are at least 5 books on the subject. I suspect it it was because comics were one of the few industries to hire them (once their names were suitably anglicized.

I suspect it it was because comics were one of the few industries to hire them (once their names were suitably anglicized.

Every industry that valued creativity and high IQ hired Jews to be honest. Hollywood, the music industry, publishing, newspapers, investment banking, television, comedy, etc. They may have treated them like crap but they were too valuable not to hire for fear a competitor may get their talents and use them against you.

The same theory applies to blacks in sports. World was still racist, but after a while the color green trumped the color of skin. Teams had to start recruiting black athletes like Robinson and Aaron and Mays because of the fear on of their competitors would first.

Jack Kirby for one was working on numerous comic strips before he made it big in comic books (under various different names, like Lance Kirby, Jack Curtis, Bob Brown etc.). Whether the use of pseudonyms by most of those guys was due to explicit anti-Semitism or just the general "done thing" I don't know. But I reckon probably the latter.

The "reform Judaism" magazine had an excellent three-part series on the history of Jews in the comic book industry back in 2003/2004. Hopefully I am not violating any CBR policy by doing this, but the links to the issues are as follows:
http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/03fall/
http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/03winter/
http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/04spring/

Well, for one thing, it was the pinnacle of the field to have a comic strip. As has been stated before, for many of these creators, this was the way to break into the field. I know that I've read at least a couple of times (from Joe Simon maybe) that Kirby was the exception because he LIKED comic books over strips. And even then, up through the end of the 50's, Kirby was trying to break into the strip field to get the financial stability for his family.

The other poster is correct that there are numerous books out now about the Jewish influence on early comics, mostly fed by Chabon's Kavalier and Clay, where he took the ideas that were floating about and coalesced them into a coherent narrative.

If I had to guess at the large numbers of Jews trying to get into comics (books or strips), I'd guess that it had more to do with being second and third generation immigrants more than anything else. Being in a creative field was "better" than hard labor, even if it wasn't as professional of a field as law or medicine. Tailors' children become fashion designers, Cantors' children become singers, sign and can painters' children become artists, etc.These people believed in the American Dream -- it gave them hope, but it also fired their imagination and helped them be more creative.

and don't forget that there had always been a large Jewish contingent in any field that was considered scandalous or inappropriate for "better people." That's why there were so many Jewish stage performers and bankers.

It may seem a little irrelevant or strange - when people say "Jewish" creators, all or most of the names of those people are West European (in fact, most of them are German). Siegel, Schuster, Kurtzberg, Lieber etc are names still existing in Germany today, some of them Jewish, some not.

It's a provocative question. To be certain, these Jewish comic book creators refrained from making explicitly Jewish characters or Jewish-themed stories until when..? The bronze age? I'm guessing that the first such example from a big name would have been Eisner's "Contract with God" but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Certainly we do have to keep in mind that during the "Golden Age" of superhero comics, antisemitism was at a high-point in America (see Leonard Dinnerstein's Antisemitism in America) and that this was going to affect young Jewish artists and writers looking for work-- so it's understandable that they might have gravitated to a new industry not already run by established firms with primarily Anglo-Saxon Protestant owners.

There's also the story, I've heard attributed to Joe Simon, that after he and Kirby introduced Captain America #1 with Cap punching Hitler in the jaw, they received threats and harassment from people sympathetic to the German American Bund (legend has it that Mayor Fiorello La Guardia telephoned them personally to encourage them to continue-- has this been covered in "Comic Book Legends Revealed"?) .

I suspect that comic books might have been the only mass medium where Jewish artists would not have been prevented from expressing such sentiments in 1940-- even if they could not explicitly refer to their identity.

It's always possible that this idea that the newspaper syndicates discriminated against Jews was an extension of ONE syndicate which had such a policy, and people are just misremembering. Or perhaps none of them did, but there's a general sense that overall the newspapers were rife with antisemitism.

After all, reportedly William Randolph Hearst was a major anti-Semite. And actually, his papers were among the ones to originate "the funnies" as a feature. Hearst died in 1951 though, so there's a lot of time after that to cover too .

when people say “Jewish” creators, all or most of the names of those people are West European (in fact, most of them are German). Siegel, Schuster, Kurtzberg, Lieber etc

Keep in mind that the acquisition of Germanic surnames by Ashkenazi Jews is a relatively recent phenomenon (only becoming common in the latter 1700s) prior to that, most Ashkenazi would have used patronyms (the exceptions being Cohains and Levites who would have used tribal names of ancient origin.) This was a matter of the rise of modern European nation-states that demanded a uniform means of keeping records of those who resided within their borders. It just happened that most of these Ashkenazi were either living in countries where German was the official language or in a Slavic-speaking nation, where Jews were required to take Germanic names in order to distinguish them from their neighbors.

"Siegel, Schuster, Kurtzberg, Lieber etc are names still existing in Germany today, some of them Jewish, some not."

That may be true . . . but the creators in question were/are in fact Jewish, so kind of irrlevant, no?

I think you have a point when you speculated that the Golden Age comic book creators were "perhaps not [as] good enough" as the comic strip creators.

This was also the Golden Age of the comic strip -- Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, Raymond's Flash Gordon, Foster's Prince Valiant, Segar's Popeye, Hogarth's Tarzan, McManus's Bringing Up Father, Falk and Moore on Phantom, Capp's Li'l Abner, Gould's Dick Tracy, and so forth.

A lot of these are now coming back to print. Compare these to DC's and Marvel's archival editions reprinting their 1930s and 1940s work, and the difference in quality, script and art alike, hits you.

Barring the Quality stable of artists -- Eisner, Fine, Crandall, Cole -- the other comic book writers and artists seem a bit crude by comparison. Which newspaper editor or syndicate would prefer even, say, a Kirby over a Caniff at that point in their careers?

As Ajit said, most guys working on comic books during the golden age were not refused by comic strip syndicates because they were jewish, they were refused because they were terrible!

A lot of them were able to do comic strips later (including Kirby, Gil Kane and even Siegel and Shuster, who were STILL quite bad but had a sucessful concept).

As for using pseudonyms, that was a bit of Standard Operational Procedure in the comic industry at the time. As Stan Lee said, he was expecting to become a novelist someday, so he was "saving" his real name for it (ironically he later legally changed his name to Stan Lee...).

It was also fairly common in Europe (Hergé = Georges Rémi) and Japan (Shotaro Ishimori/Ishinomori = Shotaro Onodera) - and there weren't many jewish comic creators in Europe (and none whatsoever in Japan) at the time!

(Ironically, the most famous european jewish comic creator, René Goscinny, always signed his real name.)

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

"It may seem a little irrelevant or strange - when people say “Jewish” creators, all or most of the names of those people are West European (in fact, most of them are German). Siegel, Schuster, Kurtzberg, Lieber etc are names still existing in Germany today, some of them Jewish, some not."

Yiddish is a Germanic language, so you would expect similarities.

The thing about comic strips is that they've always been hard to break into. There's only a certain amount of space in newspapers for strips and for a new one the break in, an old one pretty much has to be eliminated. As a result, syndicates have always been very selective about who they use.

btw - nobody has metioned the most iconic jew in comics - stan lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Lee

Here in Melbourne an exhibition is about to start about jews working in the comic book industry.
http://www.jewishmuseum.com.au/exhibitions.htm

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