Jews’ comic influence

AMSTERDAM -- When Abie the Agent talked about middle-class life in America or the war -- World War I, that is -- he spoke with a Yiddish accent.

Created in 1914 by Harry Hershfield, the immigrant car salesman was the first Jewish comic book character to be syndicated, and he brought a touch of shtetl humor -- traditional Jewish folk humor -- to the newspaper funny pages.

“Oy gewalt,” he would lament. “It ain’t the principle,” he told an overcharging waiter in one oft-quoted line. “It’s the 10 cents.”

On Thursday, the Jewish Historical Museum in the Dutch capital opens “Superheroes and Shlemiels,” an exhibition of Jewish artists who have brought their collective memory to comic art.

From Superman to the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus,” many of the strips and graphic novels have overt or subtle Jewish themes, from the displaced immigrant in the early 20th century to the terrors of the Holocaust.

“Superman was an American hero. There’s nothing Jewish about him,” says Hetty Berg, a co-curator of the exhibit. But “it comes out in little ways.”

With a messianic mission, the comic hero created by the teenagers Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel in the early 1930s “comes from another planet to save the world. He has a dual identity and leads a double life,” she said. And he doesn’t get the girl.

One story, drawn for Look magazine in 1940 and titled “How Superman Would End the War,” shows the Man of Steel -- before he adopted his skintight blue suit -- grabbing Adolf Hitler by the throat and telling him, “I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock in your jaw.”

He then flies Hitler off to Moscow, picks up Josef Stalin and takes them both to Geneva for judgment by the League of Nations, where they are convicted of “unprovoked aggression.”

The exhibit displays other comic heroes, from Batman and Captain America in the 1930s to the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man in the 1960s, with dozens more in between.

The Jewish nature of the superhero found its ultimate expression in Sabraman, an Israeli spin-off in 1978, employing the word “sabra” for native-born Israeli.

Drawing on loans from 40 artists or publishers, the exhibit was co-produced with the Dutch museum’s counterpart in Paris and first appeared in the French capital.