It was a thrill to learn recently that one of my favorite Mad magazine artists, the legendary Al Jaffee, would give his personal papers to Columbia University. Among those treasures are a massive cache of Jaffee’s much-loved Mad fold-in cartoons and notebooks of ideas Jaffee never even submitted for publication. But the most intriguing part…
On the heels of its pioneering Holocaust-themed “motion comics,” Washington D.C.’s David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies is launching a major initiative enlisting comics luminaries to educate Americans about the Shoah and other genocides. Comics Creators for Holocaust Education is bringing together artists, writers and editors from the worlds of comic books, animation, and science…
The latest collaboration between Holocaust educator Rafael Medoff and comics giant Neal Adams is their most moving — literally. “They Spoke Out: American Voices of Protest Against the Holocaust” uses “motion comics” — panels with scrolling text, voiceovers, and archival newsreel footage — to tell the stories of Americans “who raised their voices, marched in…
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Beta-Sigma-Rho Man? The recent discovery of a 75-year-old pencil sketch by Superman creator Joe Shuster hints that Man of Steel’s origins have roots in a Toronto fraternity. The Ontario Jewish Archives in Toronto recently released an image of the circa-1937 drawing, which depicts a familiar caped figure with…
Drawn to New York: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Decades in New York City By Peter Kuper, Introduction by Eric Drooker PM Press, 208 pages, $29.95 This oversized, four-color 30-year compendium of comics, magazine illustrations, painting and sketchbook work by the artist best known for his “Spy vs Spy” pages in Mad Magazine, is stunning…
A Jerusalem shop settled out of court with two comic book companies that charged it sells unlicensed kippahs bearing the images of Superman and Spider-Man. Avi Binyamin, owner of the Kippa Man store on Ben Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem, will pay Marvel Comics and Warner Brothers $17,000 each for the unauthorized use of their…
Miriam Katin appears naked in one panel of “Letting It Go,” her new graphic memoir about coming to terms with her past as a Holocaust survivor. But the rest of this novel-length confessional comic is even more revealing. Her first full-length work since 2006’s award-winning Holocaust memoir “We Are On Our Own,” “Letting It Go”…
● Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories By Ben Katchor Pantheon, 160 pages, $29.95 Ben Katchor knows well that the city is an incredibly weird place. Specifically, it’s a place where weirdness has accumulated over time, propelled by the endless cycle of commercial solutions to urban problems and by the new problems the solutions create….
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