In the world of comics, Arie Kaplan has written for MAD Magazine, Tales From The Crypt (Papercutz), Cartoon Network Action Pack (DC Comics) and Speed Racer (IDW). For TV, he’s also written for MTV, Cartoon Network and PBS Kids. His book, Masters Of The Comic Book Universe Revealed! is still available from Chicago Review Press. His latest book From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books is an oral history that tracks how Jews created the modern comic book industry. It was published in 2008 by The Jewish Publication Society.

TOM MASON: How did the book From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books come about?

ARIE KAPLAN: Around 2001 or 2002, I was approached by one of my freelance writing clients, Reform Judaism Magazine, with an offer to write a series of articles on the history of Jews in comics. The editors of Reform Judaism figured that I’d be a good fit for this assignment since I’d been writing for MAD Magazine for a couple of years. And they were right. I immersed myself in research, and worked very hard on the series, which was called “Kings of Comics,” and which came out in 2002-2003 (Reform Judaism is a quarterly).

TOM: How was that received?

ARIE: Well, I didn’t expect it to be the runaway success that it was; soon, I got word that various comic book editors were passing around copies of “Kings of Comics” to one another, and folks like Neil Gaiman and Mark Evanier mentioned it on their websites. It was also reprinted in The Utne Reader and in Comic Book Marketplace Magazine. I guess I’d done something right, and it didn’t hurt that I’d interviewed people like Stan Lee, Art Spiegelman, and Will Eisner. Anyway, soon book publishers started asking if I wanted to expand “Kings of Comics” and turn it into a book, which came out last fall (2008). The Jewish Publication Society, or JPS, seemed to really understand my vision for From Krakow to Krypton, and they’ve been immensely supportive of this project.

TOM: You did a lot of interviews and a lot of research — how many comic book creators did you talk to?

ARIE: Well, when I started writing From Krakow to Krypton, I re-interviewed many of the folks that I interviewed for “Kings of Comics,” like Al Jaffee, Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, Jerry Robinson, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman. And I interviewed some new folks for the book, like Paul Levitz and Leela Corman, as well as the family of John Broome. I interviewed a broad range of folks: artists, writers, and editors from the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages. All in all, I think I interviewed 15 people. I would’ve interviewed even more people, but at a certain point, I just had to stop the interviews and start writing the book…or else the book never would’ve come out! Anyway, I also called upon some of my fellow authors and comics historians for help. I’d just pick up the phone and call up Peter Sanderson, Danny Fingeroth, Andy Mangels, or Christopher Couch and ask them questions about some arcane area of comics lore. And what was wonderful was, they were more than happy to help.

TOM: When did all this start?

ARIE: I guess I started researching the book…well, I started researching the magazine series in 2001, so working on this book has really been a continuous process over the course of several years. But I started working on the book in earnest around 2005 or 2006, and that’s when research for the book really started.

TOM: What kind of research was involved?

ARIE: I pored over old letters and correspondence, books on comics history, old newspaper and magazine articles, obscure comics fanzines, books and articles on Jewish history and pop culture history and the history of New York. But mainly, I just spent as many hours as I could interviewing people. For example, I went to Jerry Robinson’s house on three separate occasions with my tape recorder, and each time, I spent a full day there. So as a result, I just have literally dozens of pages of transcripts from the Jerry Robinson interview. I interviewed Al Jaffee over a period of several days as well, and I also spoke to him over the phone after that, for some follow-up questions. And some of my interviewees, like Chris Claremont and Will Eisner, also copy-edited the transcripts of their own interviews. So that was an immense help, because then I could incorporate those interviews into the book, fully confident that I was accurately representing my interviewees. I really tried to make this book feel like an oral history, so the interviews were incredibly important. I also tried to give readers a sense of who these people were: who Will Eisner was, who Stan Lee is, who Art Spiegelman is. And the interviews are a big part of that.

TOM: Why did so many Jews gravitate toward comics?

ARIE: Jews gravitated towards comics due to simple socioeconomic factors. Basically, there were so many anti-Semitic quotas in the 1930s, when the comic book industry began. America was a very different place then. Jews couldn’t get a job at a law firm or a hospital, as crazy as that sounds today. Al Jaffee told me a great story about how he had this friend named Stan. Stan got a job as a bank teller and was the envy of all his friends, who could only dream of such a job. Meanwhile, Al couldn’t get a job in a more lucrative field like advertising or some other area of commercial art — forget banking or something like that — so Al drifted into this new thing, the comic book industry. And it was the same story for so many others. Many of the original comic book creators were the children of immigrants, rather than immigrants themselves. Most of them had parents from Russia, Germany, or Poland, which is partially why the book is called From Krakow to Krypton. They had come from the old world, where they’d known hardship and grinding poverty and anti-Semitic pogroms. Meanwhile, their children, kids like Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, Al Feldstein, Joe Kubert, and Will Eisner, completely embraced this new world of pulp magazines, newspaper strips, radio shows, movie serials, and science-fiction novels…and of course, this newfangled thing, comic books, which was a hybrid of all the junk culture of the ‘20s and ‘30s. And which was lurid and colorful and sexy, and an easy way to escape from the realities of life in a Jewish ghetto in the Bronx or on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

TOM: How did you find the artwork you chose and what went in to deciding what to use?

ARIE: Oh, there was so much artwork to choose from — some of it got left out unfortunately, but the book is still profusely illustrated. Let’s see, Lisa Kirby gave me some wonderful drawings done by her dad, some guy named Jack Kirby. John Broome’s relatives Larry Broome and Marion Broome Pakula gave me a couple of great photos of John. And Joe Kubert, Art Spiegelman, Miriam Katin, Leela Corman, and Trina Robbins gave me some fantastic photos and self-portraits. Al Jaffee gave me two or three self-portraits, all of which I used. I tried to get photos or caricatures of all the comics creators who are prominently discussed in the book, and I think I succeeded, with one or two exceptions. Also, Denis Kitchen was enormously helpful in giving me access to some great artwork by Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Aline Kominsky. I can’t thank Denis enough.

TOM: In the book you talk about how the creators often worked Jewish subtexts into their comics — can you give an example?

ARIE: Sure. Well, one of the big questions the book raises is, is there anything subtextually Jewish about Superman? Did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster intentionally mean to embed Superman with Jewish subtext when they created him? So, in the book I talk about how Superman can be read as a “Golem” figure. For those who don’t know, the Golem is a Jewish myth, about a monster made of clay who saves the people of the ghetto. And he’s sort of like a superhero, in that he’s a creature with great strength who helps the helpless. But I don’t think that Siegel and Shuster had that in mind when they came up with Superman. However, it’s hard to deny one big potential Jewish signifier in the Superman mythos: Superman’s real name, which is Kal-El. Kal-El literally means “All that God is” in Hebrew. And Superman is very angelic, very godlike. So, did Siegel and Shuster name the character Kal-El because of the name’s Hebrew meaning? We don’t know. They never talked about it in interviews, and they both died before I started writing the book. But we do know that Siegel and Shuster had a basic Hebrew school education, and they most likely knew what “Kal-El” means in Hebrew. So it’s possible that they named the character Kal-El on purpose, as a little inside joke. But that’s just speculation. Of course, Jewish science-fiction writers were often doing that in the days before America was as multicultural as it is now. Look at Star Trek, where Mr. Spock’s “Live long and prosper” Vulcan hand signal is the symbol of the Kohanim class in Judaism. And some of the Star Trek writers were Jewish, as is Leonard Nimoy, so that’s hardly surprising.

TOM: The creation of comics by Jews hasn’t been talked about to a great extent until fairly recently.

ARIE: I think that it’s because of a combination of things. For one thing, when The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (by Michael Chabon) came out in 2000, and was a big hit, and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, that certainly ignited a discussion about Jews in comic books. Because that’s what Kavalier and Clay is about; a couple of Jewish comics creators during the Depression. And while comics fans, and people in the comics industry, always knew that Jews had such a big hand in the early comic book industry, the general public did not. But then along comes this prose novel that dramatizes that very fact. And it gets people interested — people who would ordinarily not even pick up a comic book. So, that helped.

TOM: And the movies, too, right?

ARIE: Right. The superhero movie really came into its own (as a genre) during the last decade, with the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and the Bryan Singer X-Men movies. And also in the last decade you’ve seen a flood of movies based on non-superhero comics, like American Splendor and Road To Perdition. Well, Spider-Man, X-Men, and American Splendor are all based on comics that are created or co-created by Jews. And in the case of X-Men and American Splendor, some of the characters in those stories are Jewish. So that brings the whole connection between Jews and comics to the general public, too. People who’ve never read an X-Men comic can see the movies and know that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor, because the filmmakers have adapted the character’s backstory pretty faithfully from the comics. So, that’s another thing that gets folks talking about the connection between Jews and comics.

TOM: Almost everyone in the early days of the comics industry worked anonymously, unable to get acknowledged credit for their work, and a lot of the characters they created all had secret identities. Is that somehow rooted in Jewish culture?

ARIE: Well, I don’t think that the secret identity thing has its roots in Jewish culture, although you could argue that many early comic book creators had “secret identities,” i.e. their professional names and their given names. For example, Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg. But they changed their names for good, practical reasons — usually to get work at a time when there was a lot more anti-Semitism in American society than there is now. But as far as the concept of a secret identity having Jewish roots, I think it’s more that the ancestors of comic book superheroes were characters like Zorro, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Shadow, and the Phantom. And all of those characters had secret identities, so why not give the early comic book superheroes (who were inspired by the aforementioned characters) secret identities? Also, Superman had a secret identity, and he was such an instant hit that it was a no-brainer to give subsequent superheroes (like Batman, Captain America, etc.) a secret identity. Because that was a genre convention by that point, giving your superhero character an unassuming alter ego.

TOM: The comics industry was a late-1930s creation. By 1941 America was at war with Germany and Hitler was a prime target for lots of comics. Superheroes were either fighting Hitler, or German soldiers or Nazi spies. Do you think it’s because that’s the last “good war” with clearly defined villains, or is it a not-so-subtle way for Jewish comic creators to push back, or is it just that all the mass media was fighting the war and comics were just part of the mass media?

ARIE: I think it’s all of the above. Because honestly, as you said, all the mass media was fighting the war. And comics were not only part of the mass media, but an extremely cost-effective way to create pro-American propaganda. I mean, think about it: in a superhero comic like Captain America or Wonder Woman, you can literally have a character who’s dressed in the American flag! But also, what’s Captain America’s origin? Frail soldier Steve Rogers gets a shot in the arm and becomes a musclebound super-soldier who goes out and beats the hell out of Nazis. And as my fellow MAD contributor Peter Kuper pointed out when I interviewed him for this book, what a distinctly empowering image that must have been if you were a young Jewish kid during World War II, and you felt like you couldn’t do anything to help your family members who were being massacred overseas.

TOM: From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books is a great companion piece with Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones and Disguised as Clark Kent by Danny Fingeroth. It’s like a triptych of comics history, if I’ve used the word correctly.

ARIE: Thanks! I think it is a great companion piece, and all three books come at the subject from a different angle. Gerry Jones’s book is more about the early writers, artists, and publishers of comics in the Golden Age, and what led them to work in comics. It’s also about their relationships, friendships, and creative struggles. And Danny’s book covers the psychological underpinnings and Jewish subtext of Golden and Silver Age superheroes. My book is more like a “documentary on paper,” if you will — as I’d mentioned earlier, it’s somewhat of an oral history and relies heavily on the many interviews I conducted — and it covers the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages. Also, it traces the evolution of the medium from 1933 until today. It also deals with all the genres in the comic book medium: not only superheroes, but also humor comics, horror comics, autobiographical comics, war comics, etc. And I think there’s room at the top for all three of our books. Both Men of Tomorrow and Disguised as Clark Kent are wonderful books.

TOM: What do you have going on right now?

ARIE: I’m currently writing the story and dialogue for the upcoming House M.D. videogame (based on the popular TV drama) for Legacy Interactive. In addition, I’m penning a Club Penguin children’s graphic novel for Grosset & Dunlap. Titled Shadow Guy and Gamma Gal: Heroes Unite (and set in the world of the Club Penguin MMORPG), the graphic novel will be available in the summer of 2010. And I just had a two-part story arc called “Archie Is History” in Archie & Friends #132 and #133, which were out this summer.

Thanks Arie, and good luck! You can track Arie’s speaking engagements, public appearances and upcoming writing gigs at his website.

[Artwork: cover to Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton]