Loti Smorgon Gallery
03 May – 30 August 2009
Superheroes & Schlemiels: Jews & Comic Art
An exhibition created by the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Paris)
In cooperation
with
the
Joods Historisch Museum (Amsterdam)
This interactive exhibition will show how the comic strip has contributed to contemporary Jewish collective memory. A schlemiel is a bumbling fool in Yiddish, and some of the earliest comic books
were written in Yiddish. It was young second-generation American Jews who created Superman, Batman and Captain America.
Superheroes & Schlemiels features reproduction and original works by Joe Shuster and
Jerry Siegel (Superman), Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (Fantastic Four and X-Men), Will Eisner
(The Spirit and A Contract With God), Harvey Kurtzman (MAD) and Art Spiegelman (Maus).
Also included are original never-before-seen works by local
Australian Jewish comic artists:
Nicki Greenberg, Lazarus Dobelsky, Andrew Weldon, David Blumenstein and John Kron.
The exhibition traces comic-strip figures from 1910 to the present day.
The first comic strips make clear the ordeals faced by Jewish immigrants
in their attempts to integrate within American society.
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‘Monster my Sweet!'
Batman
Joe Kubert1982
Reproduced with the
permission
of
The Joe Kubert School
of Cartoon
and Graphic Art
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