Pen-Elayne on the Web

"Zis Superman, He Must Be A Jew!"

Supposedly the above quote is a word balloon "spoken" by Hitler in one of the WWII-era Superman comics, but I can't find the exact reference so I may be misremembering. In any case, a couple weeks back Neil Gaiman (link at sidebar) mentioned the cover article from the fall '03 issue of Reform Judiasm, How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry, part 1 of 3, by MAD writer Arie Kaplan. If you buy the paper copy, you get a nice cover illustration by Jon Bogdanove. (Too bad the Riverdale Temple folks didn't hand me a copy on my blogiversary/Arrival Day sojourn up the hill to take in the street fair. And yes, I'll be wearing the "Super Jew" t-shirt tomorrow to NY Is Book Country, to show off to my friends at DC Comics.) I passed the link along to Yahoo's Jews in Comics mailing list, and it elicited an interesting back-and-forth between Leonard Rifas and the article's author Kaplan, who seems to have joined the list precisely to address Rifas' questions which I thought was cool. It's a fairly low-traffic list and the messages can be read fairly quickly and easily, so I'd recommend it to any interested parties, like Mike Sangiacomo who also plugged Kaplan's article on Newsarama today. Hey Budgie, when you gonna join?