Tragic Comics

...and, to skip some centuries, provide the cultural framework for contemporary allegations that Jews control American foreign policy...

...He produced 10 more graphic novels, anumber of which also mined Jewish themes, including one called Fagin the Jew that presented a positive perspective on the Jewish villain in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist...

...But the paring down necessary for Eisner to tell the essential story in 128 pages of words and pictures necessarily eliminates all context...

...At the peak of its popularity The Spirit appeared in newspapers with a combined circulation of five million...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...

...Drafted into the Army in 1942, Eisner produced cartoons and film strips for the military...

...For Will Eisner, the breakthrough into "serious" cartoon work coincided with the rediscovery of his Jewish roots...

...The scene then shifts to Russia in the 1890s, where reactionaries at the court of Tsar Nicholas II search for a way to discredit the advocates of liberalization...

...AntiSemitism is a far more protean and complex social phenomenon than can be dealt with in a history exposing the truth about the Protocols, let alone one geared for readers who need cartoons to lighten the prose...

...The Time story quoted Eisner's explanation forthe graphic novel: "It was intended as a departure from the standard, what we call 'comic book' format...

...Will those who hold the world's single Jewish state to standards not applied to any other nation have second thoughts...

...I sat down and tried to do a book that would physically look like a 'legitimate' book and at the same time write about subject matter that would never have been addressed in comic form...

...Yes, we have before us a useful and even somewhat entertaining account of the history of a forgery...

...A son of Jewish immigrants, he grew up in New York City, his adolescent years coinciding with the Great Depression...

...EISNER hoped that the appearance of The Plot in 2005 would begin the process of removing that material from the bookstores and eliminating the attacks on Jews and their institutions...

...Toward the end of the book, Eisner draws pictures of himself investigating the Protocols and learning how those fearful of social change try to seize power by scapegoating "a group...

...Over the last decade of his life Eisner became increasingly disturbed by the persistence of anti-Semitism and appalled by the continuing propagation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a work, Eisner notes in the Foreword to The Plot, "purportedly written by Jewish leaders that describes in close detail how Jews wish to conspire to take over the world...

...This was a particularly brilliant strategy at a time when the Dreyfus Affair-involving a Jewish officer of the French Army falsely accused of betraying his country-was making headlines all over Europe, and the first Zionist Congress, organized by Theodor Herzl to secure a Jewish homeland, could be portrayed as an international conclave of the "elders of Zion...

...who are vulnerable and could seem to be a threat...

...The picture story begins with an obscure French author, Maurice Joly, whose equally obscure 1864 satire attacking Emperor Napoleon III as a master manipulator, The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, would later be plagiarized to produce the Protocols...

...Since the "graphic narrative" has become "a vehicle of popular culture," he attempts through The Plot "to deal head-on with this propaganda in more accessible language.' If people-particularly young people-will not read old-fashioned books, he suggests, let them discover from a graphic treatment that the best-known ' classic of anti-Semitism is a fraud...

...These revelations are punctuated by Eisner's depictions of those who were not interested in the facts...

...Henry Ford, the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Soviet Russia, fanatical Islam, all touted the Protocols as an accurate picture of Jewish schemes of world domination...

...That this should be happening at a time when Israeli-Palestinian violence-a few years ago cited as the underlying cause of much of the problem-has sharply declined suggests that the long-term efforts of governments, law-enforcement agencies and Jewish organizations to foster intergroup understanding are not working and a new approach is needed...

...Eisner designates a certain Rachkovsky as the man who came up with the idea of making Joly's book into fabricated "protocols" of Jewish leaders plotting to gain control of the world...

...The graphic format allows Eisner to set selections from Joly's Dialogue side by side with parallel passages from the Protocols, demonstrating plagiarism beyond the shadow of a doubt...

...Basing himself on information recently uncovered in newly opened Russian archives, Eisner identifies a shady Russian living in France, Mathieu Golovinski, as the actual forger of the Protocols...

...The theme of A Contract With God was the spiritual lives of tenement Jews Eisner remembered from his youth...

...That same inattention to the broader picture casts doubt on the very basis of Eisner's project in The Plot...

...caused many otherwise reasonable people in medieval times to think that Jews murdered Christian children for their blood, desecrated the host, and poisoned wells...

...Even if the documented proof of their perfidy "is shown to be a fake...

...Charles McGrath, writing in the New York Times Magazine last year, noted that "the fastest-growing section of your local bookstore these days is apt to be the one devoted to comics and so-called graphic novels," with several of them selling hundreds of thousands of copies...

...After World War II he resumed writing for the comics, did artwork for educational institutions as well as businesses, and taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he helped train the next generation of cartoonists...

...Eisner, a pioneer American cartoonist, died on January 3,2005 at the age of 87, four months before the book's publication...

...To do so would take little more than some changes in wording, making Jews the sinister conspirators in place of Joly's Machiavelli/Napoleon...

...The comic book with a brain," in McGrath's felicitous words, can, if drawn well, create a mood and uncover psychological depths that are out of reach to most conventional novelists...

...people will buy it anyway...

...Will the swastika daubings, firebombings, arson attacks, cemetery desecrations, and defamations cease...

...Assume, for the sake of argument, that his graphic narrative succeeds in doing what his conventional literary predecessors failed to dothat is, definitively discredit the Protocols...

...Yet why, one may reasonably wonder, did all of these cartoonish crooks pick on the Jews...

...associate director of research, the American Jewish Committee RECENT studies in France, Canada, Great Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere document an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents...

...He was also an innovator...

...A reader coming to The Plot without a background in history-and that probably describes much of Eisner's audiencewould have no way of knowing that allegations of secret Jewish plots go back to pre-Christian Alexandria...

...Despite all the scholarly exposes that have proven the Protocols a forgery concocted by the Tsarist secret police, Eisner laments, it "has continued to gain new exposure and credibility" in Europe, Asia and especially the Arab world...

...The last page depicts a burning synagogue, dates and places of several recent anti-Semitic incidents, and, in the center, the words "2004: The Protocols of Zion are still sold in bookstores around the world...

...received a religious seal of approval from early Christianity...

...Fittingly, one of the industry's most prestigious accolades is named the Eisner Award...

...Thus was launched a new literaryartistic phenomenon...

...They decide to blame Jews both for the problems plaguing Russia and for the liberal program proposed to cure them...

...The history in Eisner's book is impeccable...

...Will Eisner seeks to provide one in The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

...The tale continues with a recounting of the repeated exposures of the truth about the Protocols, beginning with that of the London Times in 1921, continuing with court decisions in Switzerland and South Africa in the 1930s, a U.S...

...While the genesis of the "graphic novel" is a matter of some dispute, Eisner's A Contract With God, published in 1978 with that term on the cover of the paperback edition, is generally considered the first of the genre...

...Unfortunately, there is little reason to believe a graphic expose of the Protocols will be any more effective in undermining their credibility than the conventional books and articles listed in a bibliography appended to The Plot...

...Time magazine, in fact, marked "The Graphic Novel's Silver Anniversary" in 2003,25 years after.4 Contract appeared...

...Senate report in 1964, and an announcement from Russia in 1993, after the downfall of Communism, that a panel of independent experts had declared the book a "fraud...

...To be sure, many who might pick up and quickly scan Eisner's book would never have the time or patience to tackle such scholarly works as Norman Cohn's magisterial Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

...While some believe the great popularity of picture books marks one more step toward the dumbing down of our culture, others are not so sure...

...He began writing for comic books in 1936, and four years later achieved great success with The Spirit, a four-color feature syndicated to newspapers about a masked detective who uses his fists and wits to defend "Central City" from crime...