The Arty Semite  How Anti-Semitic Comics Got Replaced  By
Mordechai Shinefield    • Print   • Share Share  Jewish Images
in the Comics: A Visual History By Fredrik Strömberg
Fantagraphics, 304 pages, $26.99  In the epigraph to his second
volume of “Maus,” the seminal graphic novel about the Shoah, Art
Spiegelman quotes an anti-Semitic text: “Mickey Mouse is the
most miserable ideal ever revealed… Healthy emotions tell every
independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty
and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the
animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.”  At this
point, 20 years after its publication, “Maus’s” contours are
indelibly traced. Spiegelman’s novel is not simply a survivor’s
memoir, but a visual broadside against a history of anti-Semitic
images. When he chooses to depict all of his Jewish characters
as mice (the Nazis show up as cats), Spiegelman is reclaiming
derogatory images. That Jews were called rats, and then hunted
as rats, was not simply a coin