On the Strange Relationship Between Religion and Comics
Menachem Wecker
|
Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus: A
Survivor's Tale (Pantheon, 1991), addresses the artist's
father's memories from the Holocaust (told with Nazis as cats
and Jews as mice) and the aftermath of September 11.
Click image to enlarge.
Is Tom and Jerry a Jewish conspiracy to endear mice to Europeans, who saw Jews degraded and compared to mice in Holocaust era propaganda?
Iranian University professor Hasan Bolkhari thinks so, according to a lecture that is posted on YouTube via MEMRI (The Middle East Media Research Institute) TV. In the clip, Bolkhari cites the "Jewish Walt Disney Company," which he says produced Tom and Jerry. Never mind that many call Disney an anti-Semite and that MGM made the show, not Disney. Bolkhari tells his students the show's appeal derives from "the cute antics of the cat and mouse, especially the mouse," noting that Jerry is the aggressor in the relationship, but is still loved for being nice, clever and cute.
It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the politics of Iran and the authenticity of the video clip. The relevant phenomenon is the collaboration of comics and religion. The recent cartoons depicting Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper are a perfect example. The story which surfaced in almost all of the media outlets was one of "representation": What does it mean to represent the prophet? Is it disrespectful to depict God? Yet, no one stopped to ask if a comic strip really is a representational drawing. If much of Western art is based on the Greek notion of mimesis--that is, the ideal painting of a still life is so deceptively realistic that it fools the birds into pursuing the painted grapes--part of the reason that caricaturists are such effective party entertainment, and one of the reasons we hang funny cartoons on refrigerators is that they are both real and fake at the same time. They evoke the Mannerist paintings like the Madonnas with the long necks, where we "read" the images and interpret the narratives correctly (assuming the images are effectively drawn), but we would never confuse them with photographic realism.
The terms "cartoon," "comic," and "comic strip" as I use them in this essay require some elucidation. Scholars of the different media often differentiate between the different forms, much like the artists themselves might. A cartoonist may see her cartoons as true art and frown upon comic strips, much like a painter may think of a cartoon as an illustration that ought never to be confused with Art. For purposes of this article, I use the terms to refer to their most natural meanings: a cartoon is the sort of thing you might see in the newspaper pullout section or in The New Yorker, while a comic (which exists in reproduced form in a comic strip) is the object that tells more of a narrative that unfolds over several frames. In fact, cartoons originally referred to sketches that painters created to block out forms for larger works, and evolved into more narrative-driven serial works. Some historians point to William Hogarth's 1732 series, A Harlot's Progress as a forerunner of cartoons. There are many exceptions to these definitions to be sure, but what is immediately relevant to this inquiry is the common ground between the media, rather than their differences.
What makes people take cartoons-comics so seriously? Why do so many confuse them with the Gospels?
The answer has something to do with the ability of the medium to imagine and to dream, which often overlaps with the religious experience. In fact, comics have worn religion on their sleeves since their inception. A recent exhibit-collaboration between the Jewish Museum (New York) and the Newark Museum (New Jersey) called "Masters of American Comics" was jam-packed with Jewish references. One strip suggested, "Take a sock at Hitler! Sock your dough in bonds and stamps!" In another, Captain Marvel Jr. pins a Nazi to the floor and shouts, "Come on, you Nazi man, we've got a date with the American Embassy." Captain America (who recently passed away from gunshot wounds) broke into a Nazi lab to rescue a hostage upon whom the Nazis are experimenting (think Mengele), and Superman bent the gun of a tank decorated with swastikas. Most famously, the cover of Captain America #1 (March 1941) shows Captain America punching Hitler in the face, while dodging Nazi fire.
As Simcha Weinstein explains in Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero, to a large extent, comics were invented by Jewish kids in America who were drawing superheroes to beat up the Nazis overseas. A few examples include Will Eisner (The Spirit), Bob Kane (born Kahn) and Bill Finger (Batman), Martin Nodell (Green Lantern), Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon (Captain America), Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber), who created Spiderman, and Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman). Art Spiegelman's graphic novels Maus: A Survivor's Tale and In the Shadow of No Towers address the artist's father's memories from the Holocaust (told with Nazis as cats and Jews as mice) and the aftermath of September 11. Joe Kubert's graphic novel Yossel: April 14, 1943 tells the imaginary story of the young artist and his parents trying to survive in a concentration camp (they actually escaped before the war). Kubert draws himself as a young cartoonist, compiling a comic strip memoir about the Holocaust, while Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (which contains "A Contract With God," "A Life Force," and "Dropsie Avenue") and his collaboration with Umberto Eco, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion tell of the struggles of European Jewish immigrants settling the Lower East Side and of the history and plagiarism of the infamous Protocols.
Weinstein sees superheroes as extensions of the "superpatriarchs and supermatriarchs of the Bible and heroic figures named Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, and Samson--not to mention the miracle-working prophet Elijah and those Jewish wonder women Ruth and Esther to name a few." Indeed, Kirby also connected his interest in comic books with his study of the Bible: "In the movies, the good always triumphed over evil. Underneath all the sophistication of modern comics, all the twists and psychological drama, good triumphs over evil. Those are the things I learned from my parents and from the Bible. It's part of my Jewish heritage."
In a recent lecture at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center titled "Comics 101," Spiegelman, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest living artists of the medium, often referenced religion. He called Superman "the circumcised Übermensch from outer space"--although a web site devoted to cataloging the religious identities of comic book heroes on http://www.comicbookreligion.com identifies Superman as Methodist. A page devoted to Superman admits that Superman did have some Jewish components:Superman's Moses-like origin and his Midwestern WASP-ish (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) persona are widely regarded as a symbol of Jewish assimilation. Children of immigrant Jews, Siegel and Shuster were not unlike many in their generation in their desire to fit in to the general goyim [non-Jewish] population. The creation of Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent was a manifestation of the desire by Siegel and Shuster to "pass" in mainstream population and also to assert control in a world that had often left them feeling powerless, such as when Siegel's father was murdered. The site--which carries a quote by Frank Miller (author of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil, and Sin City), who says "If people can't stand cartoons about religion, they've got a problem"--collects characters from a variety of faiths: atheist, Baptist, Buddhist, Catholic, Community Church, Eastern Orthodox, Egyptian classical religion, Episcopalian/Anglican, Hindu, Jewish, Jewish Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Lutheran, Methodist, Muslim/Islam, Objectivist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Roma/Gypsy, Taoist, Sikh, Vodou/Vodoun, Wiccan and Yazidi.
But comics do not only show characters strongly asserting their religious faith; they also show the opposite. Spiegelman focused at length on the use of comics in anti-Semitic propaganda, noting the "old way" of learning to draw cartoons involved using a sort of dictionary of stereotypes: "coons, kikes, Indians and gypsies."
"A type of image everyone already has in the back of his lizard brain," he said showing an anti-Semitic German drawing of a proper Aryan and a Jew. "Pop quiz: Which one's the Jew?"
On Valentine's Day 1993, Spiegelman's particularly provocative drawing of a Hassidic Jew ("who looks like he got lost from a Chagall painting") kissing an African-American woman in the wake of the "blows and bloodshed" of the Crown Heights Riot ran on the cover of The New Yorker. Spiegelman received a lot of criticism for the cover, from critics referring to the Hassid's "lascivious lips" ("I realized the problem was the Jew had lips at all!") to others calling him a racist for showing a white man kissing a black woman rather than the alternative. "What exploiting?" he asked. "They're kissing each other." When a reverend suggested to Spiegelman on a radio program that he depict a black man kissing a Jewish woman, he said, "You might be a good reverend, but you are not a good art director. No one would know what I was saying with a woman with a kerchief on her head."
|
Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie
Avenue (W. W. Norton, 2005)tells of the struggles of
European Jewish immigrants settling the Lower East Side and of
the history and plagiarism of the infamous Protocols.
Click image to enlarge.
Spiegelman also showed a blank page, which he called his drawing of Muhammad, complaining that the Danish cartoons appeared only online, and not in the "genteel press." In a piece he drew for Harper's, Spiegelman rated the Danish cartoons not with stars but with fatwa bombs. He also drew some entries for the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest, which he submitted to The New Yorker. In one, a man in a restaurant (presumably a Jew) turned down the waiter's offer of Palestinian blood. "Bad for cholesterol," he says. A second plays off large Jewish noses, and not depicting the profit (prophet). The third showed the final solution to Iran's anti-Semitic cartoon contest: a Jew standing in line in a concentration camp laughing. A bubble indicates that he does not believe the Holocaust is occurring.
Spiegelman, like many other artists, tried to shrug off his Holocaust denying cartoons as "just lines on paper," but by the same logic, a check, a parking ticket, and Bible are all only lines on paper, yet they play significant practical roles. I am reminded of the music video of Norwegian band A-Ha's 1985 song, Take on Me. In the video, a young woman finds her way out of a coffee shop into the comic strip she is reading, when a dashing young man invites her in. The plot thickens as the real world and comic world collide, and trouble escalates as a waitress crumples up the comic strip.
The model of the comic strip world influencing the real world and vice-versa might account both for the infusion of religion into comic strips and the controversial reputation of comics. Even if the young Siegel and Shuster could not defend their relatives in the Holocaust with guns and planes, they were able to use their cartoons to fight back, to create larger than life superheroes or demigods, who could judge and punish accordingly. But comics were not mere child's play. The great propagandists in Hitler and Mussolini recognized the power of the images, and banned Superman strips (interestingly, they also found Superman to be a Jew), though Mussolini could not bring himself to ban all comics in Italy, so he pardoned his favorite, Mickey Mouse.
In the end, though, playing off Spiegelman's notion of "just lines," the success of the medium owes its gratitude largely to the immediacy of the lines and their ability to achieve maximum information and narrative in relatively minimalist form. In The Far Side, Gary Larson managed to create a wide range of characters and emotions, restricting himself to the most part to three types of eyes: circles with dots inside, simple glasses or an unembellished horizontal line. By finding a bold form with which to capture and represent their dreams and hopes (and oftentimes just thoughts or curiosities they encountered), early cartoonists invested heavily from their identities as people, and often as religious and ethnic people, in their comics. And there is little to be found in the art world that is more interesting than works that simultaneously engage in self-portraiture and in outward reflection.
Weinstein, in the concluding chapter of his book titled Spiritual Metaphors in Spandex, envisions the superhero's mask as a metaphor for concealment of heritage. In the newer generation of Jewish graphic novelists--Kubert's Yossel, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, Ben Katchor's The Jew of New York, Daniel Clowes' Ghostworld, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat and Aline Kominsky-Crumb (R. Crumb's wife)--a generation of artists who "are not afraid to push the boundaries of art and explore their heritage in their work. Unlike their predecessors, they don't have to allude to their backgrounds through allegory or change their names to be successful." And their characters "took off their masks and found they didn't need them after all."
Menachem Wecker is the creator of Iconia, a blog about
religion and art. His art reviews have appeared in part in
New York Arts Magazine, Forward, Arab
American News, Arlington Catholic Herald, and
The Jewish Press.
|
|
|
|
