TUESDAY, APRIL 4 @ 8:00pm EST:
“JEWS & COMICS: a Past & Present History” webinar via NY Adventure Club!
One day in 1933, printing salesman Max Gaines (nee Ginzburg) came up with a novel idea for newspaper promotion: he took pages of some tabloid-sized Sunday newspaper comics, folded them over twice, and stapled them on the side—creating the comic book as we know it!
That same year, two 18-year-old aspiring newspaper cartoonists from Cleveland, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, created a character whom they hoped to sell to the very newspaper syndicates who worked with Gaines: Superman! Thus began the history of comic books and superheroes, largely created by American Jews like Gaines, Siegel and Shuster, and so many others that followed!
So join comic book and pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (author/designer, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art) as he explores the specific Jewish creation of the American superhero and its antecedents in older, ancient myths—from the Golem to Ben Grimm, as it were—and how they sparked a 20th Century American pop culture explosion that has only gained in prominence and popularity here in the 21st Century!