We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust

Rafael Medoff, Craig Yoe (Editor), Neal Adams, Stan Lee (Introduction by)

$49.99

Publication Date: April 17th, 2018

Publisher:

Yoe Books

ISBN:

9781631408885

Pages:

280

Description

Crucial comic book stories about the Holocaust and interviews with their artists and writers, with a cover drawn especially for this book by Neal Adams.

An amazing but forgotten chapter in comics history. Long before the Holocaust was taught in schools or presented in films such as Schindler's List, the youth of America was learning about the Nazi genocide from Batman, the X-Men, Captain America, and Sgt. Rock. Comics legend Neal Adams, Holocaust scholar Rafael Medoff, and comics historian Craig Yoe bring together a remarkable collection of comic book stories that introduced an entire generation to an engaging and important subject. We Spoke Out is an extraordinary journey into a compelling and essential topic.

About the Author

Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., and author or editor of 17 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

Craig Yoe is a father and makes books and art. USA Today calls Yoe “The comic book genre’s master archaeologist!”

Neal Adams is an internationally renowned comic book creator whose groundbreaking work on Batman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, and other characters helped revolutionize the comics industry.

Stan Lee is publisher emeritus of Marvel Comics and co-creator of such iconic comic book characters as Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.

Praise for We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust

The theme of drawing to live continues in WE SPOKE OUT: COMIC BOOKS AND THE HOLOCAUST (IDW, $49.99), an anthology of 18 stories from 1951 to 2008, which concludes with an account of the Auschwitz inmate Dina Babbitt, who was spared when Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor, asked her to paint portraits. The book’s self-congratulatory tone lands the wrong way: The “we” of the title does not refer to survivors or witnesses but to cartoonists. Its premise, that these mainstream comics, of which all but two are fictional stories — many featuring fantasy — were received as historical education, often feels like an overstatement (the book also skirts around the titanic success of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” which would have added depth to its claims about the reach of comics tackling the Holocaust). Still, the volume fascinates as a time capsule of what Americans were able or eager to imagine (some stories do not specify that the Nazis’ victims were Jews) about the racism and profound violence of genocide. —The New York Times