A colleague who has considerable expertise in this field offers these comments.
As huge a fan of Will Eisner's work as I am, I have to say that I found "The Plot" to be a disappointment. Unlike most of his work, this one is dense in a way that I thought made it hard to read -- it is very text-heavy at times and it tells a circular story of the propagation of the Protocols by those who know them to be false, the discovery of the falsehood, and the redistribution of the lies in the face of debunking (this may be historically dead on, but it doesn't make for enlightening reading, IMO). On the other hand, the reviewers on Amazon give it raves. If people are looking for other Jewish-themed graphic novels, I'd suggest Eisner's groundbreaking "A Contract with God" (Jewish immigrant experience) and perhaps his "To the Heart of the Storm" (anti-Semitism); and he also has one called "Fagin the Jew" which I have not yet read but have heard good things about. There's also Joe Kubert's "Yossel," in which he imagines what his life might have been like in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 if his family had not left Poland when he was an infant in the late 1920s -- it's enormously powerful -- and to a lesser extent, his "Jew Gangster." He also did an interesting, but not entirely successful, comic book miniseries about his WWII character Sgt. Rock, titled "The Prophecy," which has a strong Jewish element and has been collected in a single volume. I have not read "The Rabbi's Cat" by the French cartoonist Joann Sfar, but hear that it's quite good. _________________________________________________ Dr. Don Weinshank Professor Emeritus Comp. Sci. & Eng. 1520 Sherwood Ave., East Lansing MI 48823-1885 Ph. 517.337.1545 FAX 517.337.1665 http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weinshan Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
