Ohio Maltz Museum's exhibition for Jewish comics contributions

NPR-WOSU covers an exhibition of Jewish comics contributions at the Maltz Museum in Ohio. It was also organized by a historian who was involved in getting a NYC street named after Jack Kirby:

“Icons in Ink, The Jewish Comics Experience,” on view at the Maltz Museum in Beachwood through Aug. 23, is a revelation and a celebration, albeit with some limitations and questionable aspects.

The show’s core material is conveyed through colorful, large-scale graphic layouts resembling magazine pages that reach from the height of one’s knee to above one’s head. The layouts are filled with text and reproductions of pages from comic books. It’s an eye-grabbing approach that produces visual overload at times. Also, transitions from one section of the show to another occasionally lack continuity and flow.

But when it comes to the core goal of highlighting Jewish contributions to comic book history, the show delivers fascinating and sometimes surprising insights.

Organized by Roy Schwartz, a New York-based pop culture historian, the exhibition opened in 2023 at the Center for Jewish History in New York and is now in the middle of a five-year national tour.

It brims with Schwartz’s zeal to highlight the Jewish roots of what he described in an interview as “a unique American art form,’’ and “the bastard child of literature and art.’’ His expertise includes having written the 2021 book, “Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero.’’

For Cleveland, Schwartz and the Maltz expanded the show to highlight the city’s role in the evolution of comic books, in collaboration with Samantha Baskind, the Cleveland State University professor of art history known for her extensive scholarship on Jewish contributions to the visual arts.

Hidden meanings of Superman

Naturally, Superman, the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish high school students in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood who invented the “Man of Steel’’ in the 1930s, is a major focus.

Superman’s birth on the doomed planet Krypton and his parents’ effort to save him by launching him to Earth is a familiar tale. It may not be widely appreciated, however, that the story echoes that of the finding of Moses, and that Superman’s name at birth, Kal-El, is a Hebrew phrase often interpreted as “voice of God’’ or “vessel of God.”

Superman’s powers evoke the myth of the Golem, a massive, Samson-like humanoid purportedly molded in clay by a 16th-century rabbi Prague to defend Jews from pogroms.

As the show points out, Jewish fans have certainly understood such signals.

Somehow, I'm not so sure they do, seeing how some of those who stick with leftism are so hostile to Israel, their country of origin, that it's hard to believe at this point they care about any "signals". Speaking of which, this exhibit features at least 2 comic creators who decidedly aren't worth seeing there:

Also featured in the Cleveland section of the show are printed works and original drawings from Harvey Pekar’s ironic and self-deprecating “American Splendor” series, Peter Kuper’s hilarious “Spy vs. Spy” episodes in Mad Magazine and Terri Libenson’s Jewish-centered narratives in series, including “The Pajama Diaries.”

Cleveland Heights native Brian Michael Bendis is represented by outstanding works including a spectacular 2006 ink drawing for an Avengers episode depicting an explosion on a crowded street in what could be Downtown Cleveland.

When somebody as awful as Bendis is included, despite how overrated and atrocious his writings were on - but not limited to - series like the Avengers, something is terribly wrong. What's so "outstanding" about his cheap approach to science fiction? It's also troubling that somebody like the late Pekar was included, despite his negativity to Israel that he practically wove into a GN titled "Not the Israel my Parents promised me". These are the kind of "creators" whose works we need to see? Nope.

Conspiracists and paranoiacs might see the show as piling on more evidence for the hate-filled fantasy that Jews supposedly control everything from Wall Street to Hollywood.

On this, it's bizarre said conspiracists would want anything to do with Jewish creations, if that's how they feel, and have no interest in producing their own entertainment products that hopefully aren't laced with prejudicial visions. And then, in a very sad hint at where this NPR affiliate really stands, they say it needs an "update":

It’s also striking, given its attention to the social and political context of comic books in prior decades that “Icons in Ink’’ doesn't bring its story fully into the present.

The show’s generally triumphal tone feels oddly off-key amid the recent uptick in anti-Semitism on the left and right, and the post Oct. 7 backlash against Israel.

Debate over Israel’s military conduct in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon, or settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, has inspired authors and pundits of all political persuasions.

“Icons in Ink’’ hasn’t been updated to reflect the turmoil. It could be said that because the show was organized in 2023, there hasn’t been enough time for a significant response to current events from Jewish creators of comic books or graphic novels to warrant attention.

But it seems to be a missed opportunity that the show doesn't mention the conflicted feelings about Israel that Pekar explored in “Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me,’’ published in 2012 as one of his last books.

There’s also no mention of the three-page spread criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza published in The New York Review of Books in February 2025 by Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the Holocaust-related graphic novel “Maus,’’ whose work is otherwise lauded in the show at Maltz.

Such publications and others like them represent an intriguing opportunity to revise “Icons in Ink’’ as it continues to travel. The exhibition argues successfully that the Jewish experience in comics needs to be understood more deeply.

Given that goal, some freshening could make the show even more relevant and up-to-the-minute. After all, as the exhibition demonstrates, Jewish comic book creators and graphic novelists have been pulling no punches for decades in messages both overt and subtly coded.

When they insist Sacco's a recommendation, and no right-wing creators like the late Joe Simon are mentioned at all, or even Will Eisner, that speaks volumes as to where they really stand on this. It's actually amazing Pekar's screed didn't turn up at the exhibit, but even so, he's hardly somebody I'd consider a perfect choice any more than Spiegelman. Also note how the news site omits issues like Jews being murdered by the Religion of Peace, and all they care about is making Jews look like the sole ones responsible for anything bad happening post-October 7, 2023, while obscuring the more serious issues caused by said religion.

I'll give Schwartz and company this: they may have deliberately avoided some of these issues because they realized Pekar's POV was divisive, and it wouldn't do any good post-10.7.2023 to bring something like that into the mix. Even so, if they didn't bring in something that could provide a more positive viewpoint on Israeli issues like a Japanese mangaka's publication, then it's otherwise a defeat, though not in the way NPR wants to frame it. What they say about the exhibit in that context is shameful, and if that's their position, why'd they even bother to cover the project?