1 Why Don’t We Talk About It?: The Holocaust and Anti-Semitism in Jewish Made Comic Books 1963-1989

“My parents didn’t talk in any coherent or comprehensive way about what they had lived through. It was always a given that they had lived through “the War ” which was their term for the Holocaust. I don’t even think I heard the word Holocaust until the late 70’s but I was aware of “the War ” as long as I was aware of anything. ”- Art Spiegelman1 As Spiegelman wrote in Meta Maus, his parents really did not directly refer to or openly discuss the Holocaust until the late seventies. There was a similar trend in the comics industry. Many of the artists and writers in the early days of comics were Jewish immigrants or born into a Jewish immigrant families. So the question raised is why is to why is no one talking about the Holocaust? Why is there so little discussion of the hardships faced by Jewish immigrants? There are a couple of reasons why these themes do not emerge until later in comics. The Jewish immigrant experience and the legacy of the Holocaust were unpleasant themes not suited for the stringent guidelines of the Comics Code established in 1954. While themes of Jewish identity were discussed under the code they were not openly discussed until the abandonment of the code in the late 1970’s and early 80’s. Comic creators discussed a myriad of different issues through the medium since the first issue of Action Comics. Action Comics No. 1, published in 1938, is considered the first comic book and the beginning of the medium as we know it today. Comics took off almost immediately. Everyone read comics because there were comics for everyone