With Paul Levitz listening at right, Chris Claremont discusses his comic book character Magneto, left photo, a child survivor of Auschwitz. On the table before them is a copy of Superman: The Man of Steel. Photo by Marilyn Silverstein
May 06, 2008
Speaking at Princeton University, two Jewish superheroes of America’s comic book industry described a genre with deep Jewish roots, but one that only in recent years dared to tackle deeply Jewish themes.
Paul Levitz, president of DC Comics, and Chris Claremont, longtime writer of Marvel Comics’ Uncanny X-Men, spoke April 29 before 40 students and community members crowded around a conference table at Princeton’s Scheide Caldwell House.
The two experts were there at the invitation of Andre Benhaim, assistant professor of French and Italian at the university, who joined them for the informal discussion. The program was the culminating event of Benhaim’s freshman seminar, People of the (Comic) Book: Jews and Their Images in American and French Popular Culture.
The rambling conversation that ensued ranged from the earliest days of the comic book industry to the current phenomenon of comics in literature and as literature — most prominently exemplified by Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the golden age of comics, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.
“The thing I would bring out is that we’ve gone through an astounding revolution in comics in my lifetime,” observed Levitz, a writer and editor most noted for his work on The Legion of Super-Heroes and The Justice Society of America series.
“This was a medium that for most of its first 30 years wasn’t even presenting itself as a WASP medium,” he said. “Neither the characters nor the creators were allowed a religion or an identity in any fashion.”
Most of the early creators of comics were first-generation immigrant Jewish kids, Levitz said, and most of the comics publishing houses were run by entrepreneurial Jewish families — an enterprise at “the bottom of the food chain in entertainment.”
Levitz added that he knew Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, fairly well in their later years.
“Now,” interjected Benhaim, “there is a raging debate to decide whether Superman is Jewish or not — at least in France.”
“The bulk of superheroes,” said Levitz, “reflected not so much an identity as Jews or even Holocaust issues, but a sense of social justice. They were very much left of center. There was a very great class consciousness in the material.
“These [writers] were all Jewish men, but none of them were very Jewish in the sense of racing to the temple or of being particularly learned in Talmud or Torah,” he said. “What they brought was a Jewish sense of family and the Jewish sense of argument.
“You see it much more in the second generation — our generation of guys,” he added. “We had grown up with a little more education. You first see prayer in The Sandman. Neil Gaiman brings in the Sh’ma as Death enters the room. You saw nothing of that in the early material.”
To a very great extent, said Claremont, that same lack of identifiable ethnicity prevailed among 1950s television comics as well. “It was a very generic, secular kind of existenc
e,” he said. “There were no Jews, no Catholics.”
“The writer’s room for Your Show of Shows was so heavily Jewish, infusing Jewish humor into American culture,” said Levitz, “but it was not labeled.”
“The thing is,” said Claremont, “it laid a foundation — a fairly broad, fairly solid foundation — for us to build on and to take more daring steps into exploring: Why can’t this character be Jewish? Why can’t that character be Catholic?”
In fact, he said, the back story he created for his character Magneto, arch adversary of the X-Men, was that of a child survivor of Auschwitz. “More with X-Men than with anybody else, my tendency was to ground certain characters in certain historical events,” he said. “He grows up in Auschwitz and proceeds from there and it’s a fact of his life.
“The specificity of it allows you to say certain things,” he added. “The problem is, as publishers and audiences get farther and farther from that event, there might be a tendency to not be as comfortable with taking it seriously.”
As the conversation continued, Benhaim passed around a copy of The Complete Story of the Daring Exploits of the One and Only Superman, a 1998 hardcover collection of comics published on the 60th anniversary of the first Superman comic book.
“What I find really compelling is this 60th anniversary issue of Superman,” he said. “It’s a rewriting of the original story that appeared in Action Comics in 1938. But it also re-infuses history in this work by sending Superman to the Warsaw Ghetto, trying to save the Jews there in 1942. This issue was praised by Holocaust scholars as an efficient way to convey history to younger readers.”
Levitz and Claremont appeared at Princeton under the auspices of the university’s Freshman Seminar Program, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Department of French and Italian.
“This is a wonderful apotheosis for the [freshman seminar course], with two of the most prominent personalities of America’s comics industry,” Benhaim said.
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