DC Comics has a new star of his own comic, and instead of going the superhero route, they’ve launched a historical fiction title, exploring homosexuality, art, and political oppression in 1950s America. But the lead character may be familiar to you: It’s Snagglepuss.

That’s right, Snagglepuss, the pepto-bismol colored Hanna-Barbera property most known for exclaiming, “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” now features (following a one-off special last year) in Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles. Here, he’s a star playwright, the darling of the theatre scene and an adoring public. But Snagglepuss has a secret— he’s gay (he’s clearly based off of Tennessee Williams), and in 1953, being outed would mark the end of his career and respectability. With so much at stake, how is he supposed to weather the increasingly stormy political climate? The renowned wit is used to keeping his head down when it counts, but McCarthyism may be moving in…

Because of the artsy New York milieu, Snagglepuss (his close friends call him S.P.) constantly rubs shoulders with Jewish intelligentsia— in the first issue alone, he comforts Lillian Hellman after a harrowing testimony before HUAC, he drinks with Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel (did you know she had Jewish ancestry?), and he introduces his friends to Peggy Guggenheim. (For the record, these characters aren’t rendered as animals; it’s a world of many species. For example, Snagglepuss’s wife is a lion like him, but his lover is a Cuban human emigre who fled his country when police violence against homosexuals worsened.)

Plus, another running thread throughout the issue is the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As in, you even see them strapped to the electric chair, raising the stakes for raising the ire of the government. This may legally be a Hanna-Barbera story, but there’s a reason it’s rated T for Teen.

The writer of this series is Mark Russell, whose other works include comic retellings of the Bible, and a Flintstones comic similar in subversive concept to The Snagglepuss Chronicles. And what’s remarkable about the comic is how earnest it is— the reader is immediately told to accept that 1953 New York has both capital punishment and Huckleberry Hound (yes, the blue dog makes an appearance). In fact, the more absurd elements of the anthropomorphic animals balance out the grim subject matter— if Snagglepuss were human, the comic might be heavy-handed (and the realistic, if slightly uncanny valley art-style helps).

Half-nostalgia, half-critique, Snagglepuss functions in an important locale for American Jewish history. That may not be the point of the comic, but it’s certainly present, intended or no. We can only hope Arthur Miller shows up next.

Issue 2 of Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles hits stands early February, so catch up, and get ready.

Cover art by Ben Caldwell

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Cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein, 27, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the illustrator of the graphic novel Camp Midnight. He graduated from Wesleyan University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he plays in the band Wet Leather.

You grew up in the Los Angeles area. What’s your favorite fictional representation of your hometown?

Bojack Horseman’s been pretty great. I consider it to be one of the more realistic interpretations of LA that I’ve seen, just because LA feels like a surreal animal land.

I think E.T. takes place in Encino, which is where I grew up. There’s that shot where he first lands, and you see the city, which is a view that I sometimes would have driving to school.

Was it always your dream to be a cartoonist?

It was almost always my dream to be a cartoonist. I wanted to be an astronaut— I don’t know how I reconciled that with my fear of flying. But I guess I just thought that space was different. Then I saw the play Taps with my family, and I wanted to be a professional tap dancer. Then I wanted to be in the NBA.

Then I started drawing basketball players and drawing everything, and I was not very athletic or tall. And so my backup dream was to be a comic book artist.

A lot of dreams had to be crushed for you to be a cartoonist!

Yeah. My NBA dream was deferred, but pretty much from nine or 10 onward, I was reading MAD Magazine and Spider-man and dreaming of being a cartoonist.

I was bar mitzvahed, and my theme was superheroes. So that’s how long I’ve wanted to do this.

What was the Torah portion at your bar mitzvah?

It was Sukkot. I went to Jewish day school, so I learned Hebrew… I read seven times from the Torah. I had all this energy and ambition when I was 12, and that’s where I put it.

There were giant inflatable crayons at the party. And I don’t really like sweets, so there was a fake cake. It was a cake you couldn’t eat, with superheroes on it, that I just kept. It was at my family friend’s restaurant, so there was a lot of food. But in retrospect, yeah, I was kind of a jerk to have this fake cake in front of people.

You’ve contributed to both The New Yorker and MAD Magazine. Which had the greater influence on you growing up?

I didn’t read The New Yorker until my senior year of high school. Laurie Lew, our A.P. Language professor, had us get a subscription.

MAD was pretty formative early on. I actually recognized some of the New Yorker cartoonists because they also contributed to MAD… And then I worked for MAD when I was in college, but I was also reading The New Yorker.

They occupy two different places in my life, and I think that MAD really warped my sensibility early on, and really informs the work that I do for The New Yorker.

Shortly after graduating from Wesleyan, you illustrated the graphic novel Camp Midnight. How did you and author Steven Seagle connect?

We had a mutual friend, a guy named Daryl Sabara. He’s an actor; he was the little boy in the Spy Kids movies… He does voices on Steve’s television show, and Steve has a weekly spa day with all the writers, in LA, where they do the pools in the morning and then in the afternoon they write scripts. And Daryl invited me one time.

What was it like networking in a spa?

Well, it was… intimidating. Steve is very established in the comics world, and he leads this group, and everybody seemed to know each other, and I was shy. And I met Steve. He said, “You make comics. Are you good?” And I said, “Yes!” And then he saw my work, and he said, “Let’s do a book together.”

As I remember, you came up with your first New Yorker cartoon at a Passover seder.

I think it was Rosh Hashanah. It definitely was, because it was in September.

What led you to draw a cartoon at that particular Rosh Hashanah?

It was more that Rosh Hashanah was beginning, and I needed to finish my batch [for The New Yorker]. And so that was one of the last cartoons I was doing in the batch. And I didn’t have any time, so I didn’t have time to stress about what a New Yorker cartoon should be about or what it should look like. So I just did something quickly, kind of stream-of-consciousness.

Jews have a long history with comics, from the Superman creators to New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. What makes cartooning the Chosen medium?

For Jews in general, I think, it’s a long and meandering answer that I couldn’t touch on as well as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay… That book has a lot to say about comics and Judaism and Superman as a Moses allegory. [Superman], who was created by Jews: Stan Lee was Stanley Lieber, Jack Kirby was Jacob Kurtzberg. All these Jewish creators making these superheroes with names like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, but these were all their secret identities, these very goyish names. But Superman was Kal-El, which is “All That Is God.”

[For me], I think there was something about the Jewish comedy sensibility that I recognized in MAD Magazine. I mean, they would use a lot of Yiddish terms. I went to Jewish day school; I heard all the old Jewish jokes. So there was something very familiar in MAD.

Something about the Spider-man story, too, about that particular brand of guilt that he always felt, felt familiar to me. There’s a kind of Jewish je ne sais quoi about a lot of the comics I grew up with.

You’ve drawn a number of comics about anxiety and OCD. At this point, would you say mental illness is more of a demon or a muse for you?

I don’t know that those two are mutually exclusive, that it’s a muse and a demon. All of the work that I make is about what I’m preoccupied with, so when I’m trying to find a joke—and I do feel like I’m finding these things, not creating them out of thin air—I sort of go through what’s on my mind. And this is what’s on my mind… It’s an intrusive thought, but it’s a thought nonetheless, and that becomes the foundation of what I’m working on.

Bob Mankoff has a great section in one of his books on cartooning about where different artists get their ideas. Where do yours come from?

When I was a little kid, I had a bunk bed, and I would look up at the wood above my head and all the patterns, and they would turn into these pictures. So I try and stimulate that for myself now. So I’ll take a blank page and make marks across the page until they look like images and turn into jokes.

Now that you’re a freelance cartoonist, what does a typical day look like? How often do you leave the house?

Not as often as I should. I went on a jog today, patted myself on the back. What did I do today? I draw for Amazon’s lit journal called Day One, so I did their cover this morning. And I did two Camp Midnight pages for the sequel. Now I’m working on a render of a New Yorker cartoon I sold. And tonight I will see my friend’s band play.

The New Yorker has published a few themed collections of cartoons, such as The Big New Yorker Book of Cats. If they made a book of your work, what would it be called?

I’ve always wanted to make something that I called a “neuromcomic.”

Neuroses plus romantic comedy? That sounds good.

Thanks, I’ve thought about it too much… There are a lot of breakup cartoons. I think breakups are funny. There are a lot of anxiety cartoons.

My first [New Yorker] cartoon is about somebody in a relationship revealing that they’ve been deceptive about who they really are. So I’d say that from cartoon number one the “neuromcom” theme was established.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Photo courtesy of Jason Adam Katzenstein. Comics by Katzenstein.

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If you haven’t heard of Len Wein, you still definitely know his work. The comics writer and editor died yesterday at the age of 69, after nearly fifty years in the industry. A member of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, Wein may not be a household name like Stan Lee, but he was hugely important just the same, and respected amongst his peers and comic fans alike.

Jews are predominantly associated with the Golden and Silver Age of comics (as in, the early days through 1970), but Wein is a reminder that they’re remained a relevant presence in the industry since.

Let’s go over just a few of his contributions to the world of comics.

• He created Swamp Thing, the horror comic with a brain, a heart, and multiple live-action adaptations.
• He resurrected the X-Men in 1975 after a hiatus of the iconic superhero mutant team. This included one of the first ever appearances of Wolverine, and the introduction of the hugely popular Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler.
• He edited Watchmen, arguably the most important graphic novel of all time.

But let’s take a moment to appreciate one of his more obscure moments— because it’s not every comics writer who decides to bring the Golem to the page.

Strange Tales was a Marvel Anthology series. In Issue #174, from 1974 (during Wein’s very brief gig as Marvel’s editor-in-chief), Wein wrote a story about a Jewish archeologist, Abraham Adamson, who brings young relatives on a desert archeological dig to find the Golem of Prague; Adamson makes it very explicit that the Golem’s purpose is to protect Jews from their enemies. Adamson succeeds in finding the legend, and when he is murdered (by uncomfortable Arab stereotypes, granted), the Golem returns to life and goes on a killing spree, saving Adamson’s family.

The story continued over several issues, and Wein also edited the issue in which Golem fights the Thing, which is amazing because the Thing is Jewish (though it wasn’t explicit at the time) and also looks quite like a Golem himself.

The Golem is not a hugely important comics character, nor does he only appear in this one franchise (a number of writers, Jewish and not, have put the clay creature on the page). But 1974 was a bit early for explicitly Jewish content in comics— this was before Magneto “came out” as Jewish, before Kitty Pryde, before Israeli superhero Sabra.

This story isn’t hugely important (nor is it the first time the Golem appeared in the pages of a comic), but it’s a sort of missing link in how Jewish comics creators expressed their heritage in their works. There had to have been a transitional phase, from needing your your Nazi-punching hero to look so All-American he could have been Aryan to having a girl ward off Dracula with a Magen David. Some of Wein’s famous creations, like Colossus and Swamp Thing, are arguably Golem-like, but here’s the Jewish version of the story in the flesh— er, clay. On the journey from subtext to text, we have this strange little story.

Len Wein was a nerdy Jewish kid who loves superhero comics in the 1950s, and eventually took on the mantle of creation himself. It’s the American Jewish chain of tradition.

Image of Wein via Wikimedia. Comic panels from Strange Tales #174.

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This past weekend in Brooklyn was FlameCon, aka “The World’s Largest Queer Comic Con.”

Think panels on subjects like the future of queer media or the intersection of queer comics and sex education, stickers for attendees with their preferred pronouns, and a lot of gender-bending cosplay. And it’s a perfect spiritual successor to comics’ early days as a Jewish-created medium.

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

The post In Comic Book World, Queer Is the New Jewish appeared first on Jewcy.

Friends, allow me to introduce you to your new favorite comic book bad guy: Marvel Comics’ Zohar. If you’re wondering based on his name whether or not he has anything to do with kabbalah, you are in for a real treat.

Zohar only appears in two comic issues (Moon Knight #37 and 38), but he makes an impression on any Jewish comic reader. Zohar is the alter-ego of Reuben Davis, a rabbi (yes, rabbi!) from Chicago. His creator is Alan Zelenetz, who is not only a comic book writer and film producer, but also a one time principal at the Yeshiva of Flatbush. So unlike nearly every other pop-cultural invocation of kabbalah, the man actually knew what he was writing.

The comic in which Zohar appears is Moon Knight. The titular superhero was born Marc Spector, to one rabbi Elias, Davis’s mentor. Spector is estranged from his family and Jewish background, but he returns to Chicago for Elias’s funeral, and that’s where the trouble with Zohar begins.

Basically, Davis is a student of kabbalah who goes mad with grief and egomania when his teacher dies, and decides that completely reasonable things to do would be:

1. Fully run with the Jewish mysticism he has learned, which amount to actual super-powers (mostly zapping people with electricity), and go by the masked alter-ego Zohar.
2. Steal his mentor’s body to raise it from the dead (well, turns out you can reanimate a body, but it’s more zombie-like than a full-on resurrection).
3. Murder people whom he dislikes, like anyone else learning Jewish mysticism.
4. Purge people’s sins with their deaths, somehow? That doesn’t seem super Jewish, but OK.

Zohar’s costume is completely bonkers. He only appears in two issues, but he apparently has multiple costumes, one in a dark blue/black, and the other red. They robe has some great trimming, and a nice belt, accompanying jewelry, and even has a gratuitous cape! The pointed hood, though, is uncomfortable. Seriously, Reuben, were you even thinking about the implications? Apparently not, because he also stooped to hiring hoodlums to vandalize a Jewish cemetery, swastikas included, to distract from corpse-stealing.

Zohar tries to murder Marc, not realizing that the latter has a secret identity of his own. He then tries to murder a class of Jewish studies students learning kabbalah, at which he also seems to fail pretty spectacularly. Moon Knight suits up and confronts Zohar, whom he defeats by using a mirror to deflect the villain’s mystic zaps. (Others take care of the resurrected Elias by erasing the Aleph from “Emet” written on his forehead, the same way you take down a Golem.)

Zohar is apprehended by the police, and drained of his powers once his mentor is re-buried (or so we think! Please, someone bring him back). But while his stint at supervillainy may be short-lived, he’s a natural at the rhetoric (seriously, even unconscious he still manages to wax poetic). Let’s celebrate him with a few choice monologues:

“The secrets are safe with me, Father of my soul, and through them mankind shall be brought to penance. Tomorrow I begin with Marc Spector. Your sinful and rebellious son must atone by blood.”

“In the name of heaven, do you think Zohar will allow this mystic wisdom to pass into the hands of the sinful and ignorant? Know the divine spark of justice, mortal woman, but live to warn others!”

“No! These secrets must be mine and mine alone! Neither shall the fool know my name nor the void of wisdom utter its majesty!”

“Ha! Violence filleth the mouth of the wicked, but the prating fool shall fall! Now shall I cleanse you all– in the words of the prophet, ‘Though your sins be red as scarlet they shall be white as snow, though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool.'”

In conclusion, bring back Zohar, Jewish mystic melodramatic supervillain of our hearts.

Image of Zohar from Moon Knight #37. Via the Marvel database.

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Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

Get your Kosher Salt fix:
I Don’t Eat Pork
On Forgiveness

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

The post Kosher Salt: A Very Jewish Christmas appeared first on Jewcy.

Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

Get your Kosher Salt Fix: Jesus Christ Superstar and Me
Jews with Tattoos

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

The post Kosher Salt: On Forgiveness appeared first on Jewcy.