A colleague who works in this area offers these comments:
It's hard to know what qualifies as a "religious" comic book in the questioner's mind, but here are some thoughts. The only ongoing comic book series in the traditional "floppy" magazine format that I can think of is "Mendy and the Golem," which features and Orthodox boy as the hero (does that make it "religious"?). It had two incarnations, the original in the early eighties, and then again twenty years later (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendy_and_the_Golem). It's no longer being published. I located this list of Jewish graphic novels put up by an Amazon user: http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Comic-Strips-Graphic-Novels/lm/R2HQJ842PT829H. Some of what's on the list is commentary and history, not fiction, but some of it I can vouch for as excellent work: --"The Golem's Mighty Swing," about barnstorming Jewish baseball players in, if I recall, the 1920s --"Yossel," Joe Kubert's accounting of what his own life might have been like in the Warsaw Ghetto if his family had not left Poland in 1926 when he was an infant (Kubert also did "Jew Gangster," which is about exactly what it sounds like) --Will Eisner's "A Contract with God" and "To the Heart of the Storm" speak about the Jewish experience in the pre-WWII America he grew up in --"The Rabbi's Cat" by Joann Sfar is a charming book set among Algerian Jews in the 1930s (Sfar also has an Eastern European Jewish tale called "Klezmer") --"The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Wisdom And Wit in the Wild West" by Steve Sheinkin is funny and entertaining I don't know why this list is missing Art Spiegelman's "Maus" (which the person who made the query might find irreligious anyway). Also not "religious," but well worth reading, is the recently published "How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less" by Sarah Glidden, recounting her Birthright trip to Israel and her struggle to reconcile her lefty politics with what she fears will be pro-Israel brainwashing. _______________________________________________ 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: hasaf...@osu.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
