David Kaufmann and the early comics: how Jewish are they really?

When is it more interesting to read a review of what isn’t there than what is? David Kaufmann wrote an Arts and Culture Column in the Jewish Forward in review of both Danny Fingeroth’s and David Hajdu new books on comics (Disguised as Clark Kent and The Ten Cent Plague respectively), focusing on the appropriate “jewishness” of the early comics and their creators.

Now, what has always struck me as interesting is how much of the New York sensibility was transferred in those early comics. They were, after all, produced in the urban areas with the publisher there in Manhattan, and reflected the particular energy of those who grew up there, or those who had moved there, looking for jobs and opportunities. But the creators were making the effort to invent language and storytelling on the fly in a effort to make a buck and put food on the table that week, kosher or not. Lets face it, the early comic book history is an immigrant one, perhaps one that only happened to be jewish, but didn’t need to be jewish for it to exist.

Fingeroth, a former editor at Marvel, draws direct parallels between some of the early heroes and biblical jewish heroes, and really over-reaches with the parallels. David Kaufmann, in his review, also has to do more stretching than should be necessary to “find” the jewishness of those early issues of More Fun, Action, and Detective. I would posit that he should have been writing from this point of view: why, given the creators ethnicity, is there such a lack of “jewishness” in those comics?

As anyone who has read any of the history books that relate to the early years of the comic book field (Tales to Astonish, Kirby: A Life in Comics, Meanwhile…, Steranko’s History of Comics, Cavalier and Klay), there was no money anywhere, and the business was rife with a number of shady and dishonest characters. The jews that have given us multiple lifetimes of reading pleasure with their creations: Siegel, Shuster, Kirby, Eisner, Kane, Simon as well as so many others, were true children of the American dream: work hard, follow your dreams, and you can get ahead in America. In this fledgling industry, Jacob Katzburg knew that a kid in Omaha didn’t want to read about Myron Abromowitz becoming a soldier, but Steve Rogers he might. Assimilation was the name of the game. And while it may have gotten a bad name in the last 30 years, if that was what it took to get you out of the lower East Side, then you did it.

Certainly it is easy to draw parallels to what the creation of Superman to someone with Jewish identity, but you could just as easily make the case that Superman is every 98 lb weakling’s fantasy: If they only knew how great I really am, they be singing a different story. And Captain America was punching out Hitler over a year before Pearl Harbor, but those are exceptions to the rule. Batman has pretty much nothing of jewish heritage in his past, despite Bob Kane going to a seder every year. And I don’t recall the letters “THE SPIRIT” dripping down in menorah wax on too many splash pages.

In any case, it is enough, for me, that these books are being written, since they finally focus attention on the long suffering and mostly forgotten, for many decades, early Jewish creators themselves. David quite correctly makes the point that these stories matter since they continue to saturate our culture and touch our lives, regardless of the medium. We should be paying tribute to those early pioneers, jewish or not, since they matter so much to those of us who read and grew up on the comics.