People of the Comic Book III: Debunking the Protocols
In 1978, comic book artist and writer Will Eisner introduced the graphic novel with A Contract With God, a sketchbook of sorts, which dealt with his childhood experiences growing up a Jew in a Bronx tenement. Having hence continued in the theme of telling Jewish stories in an extended comic book format, Eisner’s most recent work was Fagin the Jew, which told the tale of Oliver Twist from the Dickens’ character Fagin’s perspective.
Now Eisner is working on The Plot, a graphic novel which “tells the story behind the creation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous Russian forgery that purported to reveal a Jewish plan to rule the world. Mr. Eisner, the son of Jews who fled Europe, has reached into the past to say something about the present: a time, he says, when anti-Semitism is again on the rise.
“‘I was surfing the Web one day when I came across this site promoting The Protocols to readers in the Mideast,’ said Mr. Eisner, 86. ‘I was amazed that there were people who still believed The Protocols were real, and I was disturbed to learn later that this site was just one of many that promoted these lies in the Muslim world. I decided something had to be done.'”