Rethinking the Jewish-Comics Connection

by Martin Lund

The publication of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) brought the Jewish–comics connection to popular attention. The novel illuminated the fact that many of the pioneers of American mainstream comics were Jewish. Owing to this history, and to the fact that there today exists a large and growing library of self-consciously Jewish comic books and graphic novels, much has been written about the meaning of the connection. Engaging in a critical dialogue with extant writing on the subject, this thesis argues that much of the popular and scholarly writing on the subject of Jews and comics is historical in the sense that it is a product of its own time, rather than in the sense that it critically investigates the past.

Rethinking the Jewish–Comics Connection presents three studies of commonly cited mainstream comics texts written by Jewish Americans: the character Superman from his first appearance in June 1938 until America’s entry in the Second World War in December 1941; comics writer, artist, and advocate Will Eisner’s The Spirit (1940–1952) and long-form comics (1978–2005); and the first and second series of X-Men comic books (1963–1970 and 1975–1991). Situating these texts in their respective contexts and offering alternative interpretations, the thesis suggests that the historical Jewish–comics connection most clearly emerges as an expression of what it meant, for the writers, to be Jewish Americans in relation to their own time.

413 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Martin Lund holds a Ph.D. in Jewish studies from Lund University in Lund, Sweden. His thesis, titled Rethinking the Jewish–Comics Connection, is a study of configurations of identity in American mainstream comics by Jewish writers and a critical dialogue with the extant literature on the subject. In it, he situates the comics studied within historical American identity formations and Jewish American and American history, arguing that the oft-claimed Jewish–comics connection most clearly emerges as an expression of what it meant for the discussed writers to be Jewish Americans in their own time.

Lund is currently Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Malmö University. His main research interests are religion and comics, the representation of race and ethnicity in popular culture, and the role that the specific ethno-racial and socio-political conditions of geographical place play in textual production. He has published articles and reviews in academic and popular science journals on a range of subjects. Lund's current research focuses on representations of New York City in American comics.