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Setting fire to a stubborn myth through comics
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By: TED S. STRATTON Staff Reporter
The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By Will Eisner. W.W. Norton & Company. New York. 2005. 148 pp. $19.95.
In January 2005, renowned author and artist Will Eisner unexpectedly died while in the midst of trying to expose a centuries-old fraud: that a cabal of Jews was planning to take over the world. It was, he thought, an almost futile task. What could a single comic book artist do to reverse a lie that had survived, cockroach-like, over decades of discrediting, he often wondered?
"For me, this book represents a departure from pure graphic storytelling," wrote Eisner in his preface to The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his attempt to describe in comic book form the history behind the original Protocols. "It marks an effort to employ this powerful medium to address a matter of immense personal concern." Namely, the rising antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
A pernicious lie
The Protocols were written in 1898 by Matheiu Golovinsky, an operative of Tsar Nicholas II who was living in exile in France. An expert propagandist, Golvinsky was asked to write the piece to prove that the Jews were behind the growing revolutionary movements in Russia.
Supposedly taking place behind the scenes at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the work details how a secret group of Jewish "elders" planned to dominate the world financially and politically.
In 1921 a correspondent for the Times of London printed a revelation that the Protocols were a fake, plagiarized and paraphrased from an earlier French work that didn't even mention Jews.
But even the tremendous worldwide influence of the Times couldn't kill the beast that was the Protocols. Hitler used the book as inspiration for his burgeoning Nazi movement, mentioning it in Mein Kampf. Henry Ford serialized the text of the Protocols in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, later recanting the story.
The book was translated into many languages. Recently, it has become extremely popular in Middle Eastern countries such as Lebanon and Iran.
For an established fraud, the Protocols have proved to be extraordinarily long lasting. As Umberto Eco writes in his introduction to The Plot, "It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth."
A work of graphic history
The Plot follows the style of Eisner's other graphic novels. As in a Disney movie, the villain is always recognizable with a sinister expression or wispy mustache. The heroes, on the other hand, are square-jawed and well groomed. Realistic depictions were never Eisner's strong suit.
Neither was dialogue, which is sometimes so stilted and clichèd it would make George ("Star Wars") Lucas cringe. Characters from the 1870s talk like seedy characters out of a 1940s film noir.
But the dialogue advances the plot quickly, and Eisner excels at storytelling and a smooth, fluid movement of panels. The eye is naturally drawn to the robust outlines on top of ink-washed backgrounds.
The only break in an otherwise riveting story is a 17-page section where Eisner compares the text of the Protocols to the text of the French work from which it was plagiarized. But even this device is used skillfully and cleverly through the eyes of the Times reporter.
At the end of the book, Eisner himself appears as a character, discovering evidence of the Protocols around the country while conducting research on the text. On a San Deigo college campus, Eisner is shocked to find students extolling the tract, and tries to convince them it is a forgery.
The students don't believe him, and Eisner returns home disillusioned, baffled at the ignorance that still exists in the world.
For a former denizen of the funny pages, Eisner had serious motives in much of his work. The desire to end ignorance and stereotypes may have been his greatest goal. Even though he died before his last work was published, his legacy lives on in this stimulating view of one of history's greatest fallacies.
‘Grand old man' of comics
Will Eisner was to comics what Picasso was to painting, a man who explored the limits of the art form and took it outside preconceived boundaries.
A child of Jewish-American immigrants from Vienna, Eisner learned about art from his father, a scenery painter for the Yiddish theater in New York.
In the late 1930's, at the height of the "comics" boom when Superman and Batman were just beginning, Eisner went to work in the industry. He started out writing a weekly black-and-white superhero strip for newspapers called "The Spirit."
Eisner soon discovered that he was more interested in the supporting characters than in the Spirit himself. Thus the inspiration for the first-ever "graphic novel," Eisner's 1978 A Contract With God, was born. The book is composed of four full-length stories in comic strip form about Jews and other immigrants living in a run-down New York apartment building.
Eisner's incongruous pairing of superhero-style drawings with serious, human subject matter led to a revolution in graphic storytelling. Later cartoonists like Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) built on Eisner's idea and created award-winning books. Cartooning's major industry awards were later named after Eisner.
In January 2005, renowned author and artist Will Eisner unexpectedly died while in the midst of trying to expose a centuries-old fraud: that a cabal of Jews was planning to take over the world. It was, he thought, an almost futile task. What could a single comic book artist do to reverse a lie that had survived, cockroach-like, over decades of discrediting, he often wondered?
"For me, this book represents a departure from pure graphic storytelling," wrote Eisner in his preface to The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his attempt to describe in comic book form the history behind the original Protocols. "It marks an effort to employ this powerful medium to address a matter of immense personal concern." Namely, the rising antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
A pernicious lie
The Protocols were written in 1898 by Matheiu Golovinsky, an operative of Tsar Nicholas II who was living in exile in France. An expert propagandist, Golvinsky was asked to write the piece to prove that the Jews were behind the growing revolutionary movements in Russia.
Supposedly taking place behind the scenes at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the work details how a secret group of Jewish "elders" planned to dominate the world financially and politically.
In 1921 a correspondent for the Times of London printed a revelation that the Protocols were a fake, plagiarized and paraphrased from an earlier French work that didn't even mention Jews.
But even the tremendous worldwide influence of the Times couldn't kill the beast that was the Protocols. Hitler used the book as inspiration for his burgeoning Nazi movement, mentioning it in Mein Kampf. Henry Ford serialized the text of the Protocols in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, later recanting the story.
The book was translated into many languages. Recently, it has become extremely popular in Middle Eastern countries such as Lebanon and Iran.
For an established fraud, the Protocols have proved to be extraordinarily long lasting. As Umberto Eco writes in his introduction to The Plot, "It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth."
A work of graphic history
The Plot follows the style of Eisner's other graphic novels. As in a Disney movie, the villain is always recognizable with a sinister expression or wispy mustache. The heroes, on the other hand, are square-jawed and well groomed. Realistic depictions were never Eisner's strong suit.
Neither was dialogue, which is sometimes so stilted and clichèd it would make George ("Star Wars") Lucas cringe. Characters from the 1870s talk like seedy characters out of a 1940s film noir.
But the dialogue advances the plot quickly, and Eisner excels at storytelling and a smooth, fluid movement of panels. The eye is naturally drawn to the robust outlines on top of ink-washed backgrounds.
The only break in an otherwise riveting story is a 17-page section where Eisner compares the text of the Protocols to the text of the French work from which it was plagiarized. But even this device is used skillfully and cleverly through the eyes of the Times reporter.
At the end of the book, Eisner himself appears as a character, discovering evidence of the Protocols around the country while conducting research on the text. On a San Deigo college campus, Eisner is shocked to find students extolling the tract, and tries to convince them it is a forgery.
The students don't believe him, and Eisner returns home disillusioned, baffled at the ignorance that still exists in the world.
For a former denizen of the funny pages, Eisner had serious motives in much of his work. The desire to end ignorance and stereotypes may have been his greatest goal. Even though he died before his last work was published, his legacy lives on in this stimulating view of one of history's greatest fallacies.
‘Grand old man' of comics
Will Eisner was to comics what Picasso was to painting, a man who explored the limits of the art form and took it outside preconceived boundaries.
A child of Jewish-American immigrants from Vienna, Eisner learned about art from his father, a scenery painter for the Yiddish theater in New York.
In the late 1930's, at the height of the "comics" boom when Superman and Batman were just beginning, Eisner went to work in the industry. He started out writing a weekly black-and-white superhero strip for newspapers called "The Spirit."
Eisner soon discovered that he was more interested in the supporting characters than in the Spirit himself. Thus the inspiration for the first-ever "graphic novel," Eisner's 1978 A Contract With God, was born. The book is composed of four full-length stories in comic strip form about Jews and other immigrants living in a run-down New York apartment building.
Eisner's incongruous pairing of superhero-style drawings with serious, human subject matter led to a revolution in graphic storytelling. Later cartoonists like Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) built on Eisner's idea and created award-winning books. Cartooning's major industry awards were later named after Eisner.
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