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Modern Marvels: Jewish Adventures in the Graphic Novel

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Monday, September 8

Contract

Monday, October 6

Maus

Monday, October 27

Julius Knipl

Monday, November 17

Quitter

Monday, December 8

Rabbi's Cat

Graphic Novels to Read

[ A Contract With God ] [ The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale ]

[ Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories ]

[ The Quitter ] [ The Rabbi's Cat ]

The graphic novel is an exciting new form of storytelling. Here, five Jewish artists experiment with words and pictures to tell stories of childhood, war, and desire; to conjure up lost worlds, both real and imaginary; and to contemplate history, myth, and the individual psyche.

A Contract With God by Will Eisner

Monday, September 8 at 6:30pm
Butler Room in the JSAC, Augusta State University

Each week during the 1940's, Will Eisner drew "The Spirit", a comic about a masked detective that earned him fans around the globe. He revolutionized comics a second time when, in 1978, he reached back to his own beginnings to produce the first "graphic novel."

Set among 1930s Bronx tenements, these four stories capture the brutal, tender world of working-class Jews. In the title story, Frimme Hersh's daughter suddenly dies, sorely testing the "contract" this self-made man once entered into with God. In "Cookalein," Eisner casts a humorous eye on the amorous, social-climbing tendencies of young urbanites spending a summer in the Adirondacks. Wry, honest, and sad, these four stories showcase Eisner's unique ability to capture character with the quick strike of his pen.

The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman

Monday, October 6 at 6:30pm
Butler Room in the JSAC, Augusta State University

The comic book transfigured, this graphic novel tells the story of Spiegelman's parents, Vladek and Anna, Jews reaching maturity in a Europe on the verge of Nazism, and their terrifying history and eventual survival in the concentration camps. Spiegelman uses the broadest tools of the genre - Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, Frenchmen as frogs, and so on - to make vivid the unimaginable, both to the reader and to himself, appearing as a character in the book listening to his father's story.

A triumph of storytelling in panels, Maus changed forever the way that readers, critics, and artists themselves thought about the graphic novel. In 1992 the Pulitzer Prize committee recognized Spiegelman's groundbreaking achievement by awarding him a special prize for Maus.

NOTE: Maus I and Maus II will be used. The page numbering is different for The Complete Maus text.

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories by Ben Katchor

Monday, October 27 at 6:30pm
Butler Room in the JSAC, Augusta State University

Steeped in a melancholy, gray-tinted world of elevated trains, luncheonettes, and gently decaying tenements, Katchor's perambulating photographer, Julius Knipl, documents a rapidly vanishing urban netherworld. Peopled by men who map the migration of hairstyles and those who belong to the Amalgamated Panty-Waist Fitters Union, his cityscape is a familiar one, albeit with the touch of a demented fairy tale.

This is a world where films like The Wild Aspirin play at the Doloros and wholesale calendar salesmen "enter a state of eslf-induced hibernation" by mid-February. Brilliantly conveying a deep and abiding affection for lower middle-class city life, Katchor, with his blocky ink drawings and wry Yiddish-flavored text, implore his readers to open their eyes to the beauty of the urban landscape.

The Quitter by Harvey Pekar

Monday, November 17 at 6:30pm
Butler Room in the JSAC, Augusta State University

Pekar, the author of the celebrated comic book American Splendor, spent his life quitting before he could fail. Here, he enumerates the ways: an adolescence spent bullying other children in Cleveland, where his immigrant parents owned a small grocery; a lackluster academic career; an unending array of file clerk jobs.

Ostensible covering Pekar's early years, this dark graphic novel tackles everything from his brief stint in the Navy to jazz criticism and mid-century race relations. The gritty and atmospheric artwork by American Splendor collaborator Dean Haspiel perfectly captures Pekar's cantankerous tone. But a surprisingly hopeful message ultimately surfaces. It's possible to find your way in the world, Pekar suggests, even if it takes a lifetime to do it.

The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar

Monday, December 8 at 6:30pm
Butler Room in the JSAC, Augusta State University

After eating a parrot, an aged Algerian rabbi's cat develops the ability to speak and quickly declares his desire not only to be Jewish, but to have a bar mitzvay. The rabbi engages his pet in a spiraling debate, touching on topics such as spelling, parental love, and the very nature of Jewish identity.

French graphic novelist Sfar's delightful, vibrantly illustrated story set in Algeria and Paris in the 1930s, where the encroaching modern world is rapidly shattering many long-held customs and assumptions. And like his human counterparts, the rabbi's cat has some tough choices to make: "Should I stay in this house of Jews who are so elegant you'd swear they were French, with the beautiful rugs and the smell of fine cooking, or follow my master in the rain?"

Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature, a reading and discussion series, has been made possible through a grant from Nextbook and the American Library Association. Additional funding was provided by Augusta State University.