A comic about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the document of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory par excellence? Such a serious topic? This can’t go well. And once again you have fallen for a prejudice that the creator of “The Plot. The true story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, Will Eisner, has tried to fight his entire life – sometimes successfully.
Eisner, who died in January 2005 at the age of 87, rightly always saw his comics as more of an entertaining medium that little boys in particular read at school. A view that has now made its way into the mainstream feuilleton – among other things through his work and that of his colleague Art Spiegelman – as can be seen from the numerous obituaries in Eisner’s honor.
Comics as a tool for identity formation
It was the sons of Jewish immigrants like Eisner and Spiegelman who shaped a unique comic culture in the USA. The detailed, dangerous urban canyons in which Batman, the Fantastic Four. Superman or Spiderman showed the American city (mostly New York) through the eyes of Jewish immigrants or their children. Comics were always reflections on identity, origins and being an outsider, into which everyday life as an immigrant often found its way.
Perhaps nowhere better observed than in Eisner’s own superhero creation, The Spirit. The Spirit is actually Denny Colt, a criminologist and private detective who is poisoned by a cobra and therefore presumed dead. But as a masked criminal hunter, he supports Commissioner Dolan (and his daughter Ellen).
In contrast to his peers, The Spirit had to make do without superpowers and only appeared as a peripheral figure in many of the stories that appeared as 16-page supplements in various Sunday newspapers between 1940 and 1952. Eisner preferred to shed light on the wicked everyday world of the villains that his hero eventually brought down, rather than torturing himself through a simple superhero plot with any gimmicks. His drawing style was revolutionary. He used elements of film noir and adopted shutters. Light, shadows and montages and it was not for nothing that he was considered the “Orson Welles of comics”.
Founder of the graphic novel
In the magnificent “A Contract with God” in 1978, Eisner completely dispensed with the superhero component, told the story of individual residents of an apartment building in the Bronx – similar to the one in which he himself grew up in the 1930s – and thus helped the graphic novel genre to flourish Breakthrough. In the graphic novel, like in the novel, thematically complete stories are told, instead of – as was usual in comics – individual episodes of a series with the same protagonists.
The biography of his work, which is only sketched here, gives an idea of why Eisner chose “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as his next project shortly before his death. “With the volume ‘The Plot’ I am moving one step away from pure graphic narrative. “It arose from my efforts to use this powerful medium to address a topic that is very close to my heart,” wrote Eisner in the introduction to his last work, in which he further documents his Jewish roots.
During his research on the Internet, Eisner came across the English translation of the “Protocols,” a text supposedly written by the leaders of the Jewish people, which describes how the Jews wanted to conspire among themselves to take over the world. The real origin of this text was long questioned and was only discovered in 1999 by the Russian historian Mikhail Lepechin, who proved that the text came from 1898 by the Russian forger and provocateur Matvey Golovinsky living in France.
Mysterious paths of history
However, “The Plot” begins in 1864, when the French author Maurice Joly wrote a polemic against the then ruler Napoleon III. When, 25 years later, the Russian secret service commissioned Golowinski to produce an anti-Semitic document intended to stabilize the Tsar’s power, he made liberal use of Jolie’s text and, with a few changes and adjustments, turned it into the “Protocols”.
In “The Plot,” Eisner puts passages from the two texts side by side and reports how the forgery was discovered as early as 1921. However, this initially didn’t bother anyone – at least in Germany. The instrumentalization of the “Protocols” as a justification for National Socialist arguments seems even more absurd. It is precisely in this passage of the book that Eisner succeeds in leading the historical report into a narrative flow (the Nazis were already grateful comic characters in their one-dimensionality in “Superman”).
And so, despite the material that forces him to jump from historical date to historical date and dictates the plot quite precisely, Eisner has achieved a final dark masterpiece in which the paths of history sometimes seem as narrow and mysterious as the urban canyons of New Yorks in his “The Spirit” volumes.
Fight against dark forces
At the end you see Eisner himself handing over his manuscript to his publisher. “So this is finally the end of the story of the Protocols of Zion,” says the publisher. “I believe that despite this courageous, not comical, but tragic book by Will Eisner, the story will hardly be over,” writes Umberto Eco. who is very familiar with the survival of conspiracy theories (“The Foucault Pendulum”), in his short but illuminating foreword.
In any case, Will Eisner – similar to his character Denny Colt aka The Spirit – was resurrected again in “The Plot” to fight the dark forces.