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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The CW is up to four shows that simultaneously take place in the DC comic book universe— that’s The Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow. Tonight will begin their annual crossover, “Crisis on Earth X” as all four shows briefly share the same plot-line, full of wedding veils, one-liners, cheap leather and… alternate universe supervillain Nazis?

To no one’s surprise, the idea of our beloved heroes masquerading under swastika hoods has raised pulses online, although, naturally, one can predict that our beloved heroes will no doubt triumph in the end, pausing along the way to throw a few right crosses into a few Nazi faces. There are several reasons for the skepticism: some are simply tired of Nazis as plot devices; others find it disrespectful to portray Jewish-created icons as their fascist nemeses. Really, it boils down to an ongoing question over how to represent the Holocaust in fiction: is it sacred or is it profane?

This has been an artistic debate since the limping aftermath of World War II, when Crossfire, a deep-in-the-shadows film noir, and Gentlemen’s Agreement, a Very Important Picture, both tackling the specter of anti-Semitism, battled for top prize at the 1947 Academy Awards. (Spoiler: Gentleman’s Agreement won out.) If you ask the Academy voters, year after year, it seems the only way to score points is with Oscar bait—Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, The Reader, etc., etc. It would be cruel to lump them all in the same boat (I will, after all, never doubt the sincerity of Spielberg), but, after a while, you begin to grow cold in the sight of new and shamelessly manipulative emotional Holocaust porn. The same images, gray, ground-up, replayed until rote. The same heartstrings plucked like an out-of-tune fiddle. The same. The same. “Good” German as hero, Jew as object, maybe pummeled, maybe tortured, but always saved, and if not, well, haven’t we learned a lesson about humanity? The same.

But there has always been an alternative—alternate histories. Time and time again, artists have cracked at the skeleton of history to see if they could reset it on a different path. Jews are an introspective lot, so it follows they’ve tried their hands at similar diagnoses: what if Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters had defeated FDR (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America)? What if a Khazar army had existed in the corner of Hitler’s Europe (Emily Barton’s The Book of Esther)? What if Kafka had been saved by a golem hiding in Prague’s Old-New Synagogue (Curt Leviant’s Kafka’s Son)?

Some of these questions have happy answers, as in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller-cum-spaghetti western Inglourious Basterds, which features (spoilers for many of these) Hitler and his cronies gun-blasted in the head. But Jews are a pessimistic lot, too, so often we’re left more uncertain than before (as when the Frozen Chosen of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union find themselves once more homeless and booted from their Alaskan refuge). This may be because these grimmer alternate histories are not really asking what if the Nazis won or lost—that’s a decided point. Instead, the familiarity with the subject allows them a canvas on which to explore wider thoughts.

The Plot Against America, for instance, has renewed life in a world that may not have remembered America First is a tried and true (and failed) phrase. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Simone Zelitch’s more recent Judenstaat both grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by transplanting it to different places and times—the first to an Alaskan territory full of black hatters and the second to a Cold War-inflected Germany, awarded to the survivors after the end of the war.

Both of these novels follow in Crossfire’s tonal footsteps of sculpting their alternative histories in a hardboiled Chandleresque mold (to suggest, perhaps, that you can create as many worlds as you want, but corruption is universal). This structure allows information to be doled out piecemeal and the façade of improvement exposed as just that—a façade. Perhaps the prime example of this sub-genre is Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming, which takes both the World War II alternate history and crime fiction ideas to their electric conclusion by making his protagonist a London-based private eye named Wolf hired by a Jewish femme fatale to find her sister, only to reveal that Wolf is in fact Adolf Hitler in hiding, the German communists having won the election in this version of history. The premise seems preposterous and almost offensive, until Tidhar throws another wrench in the gears and introduces a second perspective—that of a former Yiddish pulp writer, Shomer, who is imprisoned in Auschwitz and dreaming of this whole other reality as an escape. Indeed, in the end, it seems what Tidhar is really exploring is not what ifs, but hows: how do we talk about the Holocaust?

Director Laszlo Nemes, discussing why he felt compelled to shoot Son of Saul in such an immediate style, said, “the Holocaust is becoming a sort of myth… some kind of fantasy world.” Son of Saul of course takes place in our world, but wholly and unabashedly rejects the period piece ghettoization of Holocaust films and turns it into a thriller. A way, Nemes feels, to keep the memory alive. The same could be said of these excursions to actual fantasy worlds.

Before World War II, Jewish comics creators were the first line of defense against American complacency. Supermen in spangled tights ‘kapowed’ and ‘bammed’ their way through failed diplomacy. The sacred meeting the profane. Now, again, when this generation is cottoning on to the underbelly of neo-Nazi movements in this country and elsewhere, it seems these icons are leading the fight. After all, how could Supergirl and the Flash ignore a world succumbed to evil, even if they were ignorant until now, even if it is not their own?

You can’t let the Holocaust grow stale. You can’t let it become period piece and period piece alone. The past has to stay present or else we’ve already damned the future. It won’t rest easy on some stomachs, but when is genocide supposed to?

Photo: Melissa Benoist as Overgirl. By Jack Rowand/The CW

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This week marks the centennial of Jack “King” Kirby, arguably the most important contributor to the art form of comics of all-time. Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg (the son of Jewish immigrants; you know the drill), is mostly known for his iconic artwork for Marvel Comics. Working with the likes of Jewish writers Joe Simon and Stan Lee, Kirby co-created the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Captain America, just to name a few that have had staying power. But some of Kirby’s most fascinating, innovative work is (comparatively) less-well known, coming after he switched to Marvel’s competitor, DC, and began to write as well as draw, now in more direct control over his creations.

The main result of this DC period is the New Gods, a complex, space operatic struggle of good-and-evil, with an assembly of weird characters in convoluted conflicts. It’s certainly not as simply accessible as, say, Captain America punching Hitler in the face. But it’s still brilliant.

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!

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It’s official! The latest piece of mainstream culture to be more Jewish than you expected is Arrow, the TV show about the DC-comics superhero Green Arrow.

There’s no point getting into the nitty-gritty of the plot, but suffice to say, on last night’s episode, characters on the show need to hack alien technology. Ultimately, they are faced with a screen that looks like the matrix, or a screensaver from Windows about ten years ago. One character immediately identifies it as gematria.

Or, rather, he says it heavily accented and exotic sounding, elongating the first syllable and almost rolling the R, a bit like “Gay-matrrria.” Strike one.

“Gematria is the numerology—” he begins, “of the Torah,” another character finishes for him. That would be strike two. It’s from Jewish tradition, certainly, and is often applied to the Torah, but it post-dates the Bible, and is more readily associated with kabbalah.

“For the gentiles and those of us that actually had social lives in high school, what the hell are you talking about?,” Asks a third character. If we’re running with the baseball metaphor (heaven help us), that would be a foul ball, staying on strike two. It’s cute that non-Jewish nerdy teens would be reading up on this sort of stuff, but that seems rather unlikely.

The explanation:

“In Hebrew each letter possesses a numerical value. Gematria” (Gay-matrrria!) “is the calculation of the numerical equivalence of letters words or phrases.”

That’s… actually a pretty apt description for it, yes! Though strike three comes from the lack of explanation of how exactly this translates to a coding language. Something, something, letters become numbers, something something, it makes alien tech go.

One character does point out the obvious— that it’s rather strange that aliens would be using something connected to the “Old Testament” (ugh, that phrase). But perhaps, someone else observes, this lends credence to the theory that a divine presence guides the entire universe.

Sure.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the episode’s writers, Marc Guggenheim, is Jewish. Guggenheim is one of the creators of the show, which may explain details like an underground facility being called “Tevat Noah” to make it sound fancy, or the character of Ragman.

See, Ragman deserves special mention— while he is not as overtly Jewish in the TV show as his comic book counterpart usually is (you know, retcons), he does wear “Devarim rags,” that grant him his powers, so called because they hail from “the ancient time of Devarim.”

So… is the era of Devarim post-Exodus, when that book of the Torah takes place? Or would it refer to the reign of King Josiah in the 7th century BCE, when the book of Dvarim was introduced to the people of Judea (and written, according to some scholars)?

Well, it’s easy (and fun) to tease, but kudos to a modern comic book property for actually having a tie, however strange, to its roots. Green Arrow’s original creator Mort Weisinger was, like almost all comic history greats, a Member of the Tribe. DC continues to trounce Marvel in this department, if in not very many.

Then again, they managed to have a conversation about Jewish tradition without actually using the word Jewish. What’s with the shyness, if you can say the words Torah, gentiles, and Gay-matrrrria? Maybe it sounds more ancient and sci-fi to around the tradition from which you’re borrowing.

That’s OK; you can invoke it next time you have alien technology to hack.

Image via Flickr.

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