Status Updates From The Quest for Jewish Belief...

”This artist doesn’t talk about what I want to then to talk about, so they’re self-centered” is not a terribly scholarly argument.

Much of this book has been descriptive but this is particularly telling - it’s just a recap in broad outline of the comic under ”analysis.”

”The reader” is an overly complicatedqay of writing ”I,” as in: ”The reader cheers Harvey [Pekar] on and hopes for the best for him.”

This is flirting with some pretty racist discourse.

Describing Dreamer as ”the second story in Life, in Pictures,” while technically correct, does not suggest that much research into publication history and context has been done.

Introducing Kafka isn’t a comic...

Magneto: Testament can be treated as a stad-alone work is a novel take.

Insistently and repeatedly pushing against a Holocaust survivor’s atheism because you really think God was in the good people isn’t a great look.

This is twice now the author has completely disregarded the self-identifications of authors as not religious now, because he feels that their works give evidence of God’s intervention.

Since when is Watchmen a ”Holocaust graphic novel”?

Since when is Watchmen a ”Holocaust graphic novel”?

Overall, the selection process and criteria in this book are murky, so it comes as little surprised that Magneto shows up in a book about ”graphic novels” (called a ”genre”) that begins by explicitly dismissing ”traditional” comic books.

And now apparently it’s kinda good that Speigelman’s mother killed herself, because that got him ”drawing seriously”?

You’d think that if Spiegelman was really trying to say that his parents survived the Holocaust so he could be born and make Maus, someone else would have caught it sooner.

Wait... is he... is he now actually trying to use Maus to argue for the existence of Miracles?

The summarizing paragraph on mid-page is a perfect example of how not to write about comics and religion. It manages to both make aesthetic value judgments about the comments but also, in those judgments, tie in evaluations of religious worth. ”These comics adaptations are good and they might bring folks closer to faith” is not scholarship; it’s fannish theology.

When two Protestant ministers use the words ”the Bible” they’re not talking about the Tanakh, they’re talking about the Old and New Testament. They’re treating it as something else, and that’s important to remember, particularly in a book about Jewish identity, rather than conflating it as happens here.