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

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)

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?

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

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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