Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Alef Interviews: Eli Valley

Inspired by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder‘s MAD Comics, Eli Valley’s brand of satirical cartoons have both delighted and infuriated readers of The Forward for years.  Growing up, Eli devoured the EC Comics roster, eventually eschewing superheros and horror for comics like Peter Bagge’s “Buddy Bradley.”  Eli uses his unique artistic style and razer-sharp wit to unflinchingly satirize the Jewish community.  How unflinchingly?  Enough that one of his comics was blamed for a hurricane.   Yes, an entire hurricane.

Alef sat down to talk to Eli about his comics, his thoughts on Jewish cartoons, and his future tour on the JCC lecture circuit.

*To see full-sized versions of Eli’s art, click on each image.  To see more of Eli’s work, visit www.evcomics.com*

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Why “Jewish” comics?

Eli: In one sense, it’s a way of combining my interests — comics, art, pulp, and obsessive Jewish argument and analysis, especially as it relates to Jewish experience of the past century or so. It’s also just another way of advancing age-old Jewish debates. There have been some truly great comics and graphic novels that delve into Jewish themes and experiences, especially recently, but I haven’t seen many that dive into the kinds of debates I’m interested in exploring, and certainly not with the brazenness and absurdity I savored in the early MAD comics. It’s like a mashup of the sacred and profane, if “sacred” is Jewish intellectual analysis and “profane” is black-and-white scrawlings of chimpanzees and turtles. This is problematic, I know – because some of the personalities I’m satirizing are too lofty to consider comics a worthy medium for debate, and the topics may seem esoteric. But I think that only adds to the tension, and maybe even makes the comics more intriguing to people who are interested in the debates but not in their standard presentation. Years ago I was all set to get a Ph.D. in early 20th-century Jewish intellectual history. On a simple level, I can just say it’s more fun to draw comics, but on another level I like to think that my comics, taken as a whole, provide another way of reading and interpreting the kinds of things I would’ve been immersed in had I wound up spending my days in libraries and archives.

How did you get started in comics?

Eli: I can’t remember when I started, but I do remember I’d do “extra credit” projects in Jewish day school, where I’d draw a weekly Torah portion in comics form. I wish I still had those. It would be nice to update them with more recent ideas and perspectives, with new characters barging into the old panels on the page. That would be fun.

What about your comics is “Jewish”? The content? The sensibility?

Eli: The content for sure, and I think the sensibility too, both in terms of the historically Jewish tendency to question accepted truths, and the more recent Jewish experiments with the absurd, something that forms the crux of much of my work in both the narrative and art. I say “more recent” because I think absurdist Jewish expression became more pronounced with modernity, with the idea and experience of the Jew as “outsider” or “other,” commenting on society from the fringe. What’s interesting to me is that this streak has generally been directed at larger society – the Jew as a minority encountering the larger world. In my work, it’s turned in on itself, commenting on my own community. I think that reflects an interesting transformation in Jewish history, both in terms of the complete integration of Jews into American culture and the ways in which the values and priorities of the Jewish community now reflect the more conservative traditions of larger American society. A Jew is no longer a fringe in America, but a Jew can definitely be a fringe in the Jewish community.

So, do you feel like you have a responsibility with your comics? Are they intended to inform? To educate?

Eli: Neither, I don’t think. I don’t set out to inform or educate, at least not as a primary goal. I think you need to be somewhat well-informed on the issues I cover in order to “get” my comics. I see my comics primarily as a vehicle for self-expression and a reaction to some of the insanity that passes for contemporary Jewish communal politics and life.

Insanity?

Eli: There are a lot of presumptions in the Jewish world about what is good and right when it comes to identity, values and self-conception. Some of it seems rather extreme. Maybe that’s always been the case, but the dissonance between the community’s values and the values of the people it claims to represent feels greater today, especially among people born after, say, 1890. And the stakes feel higher now. My comics are a fun-house mirror held up to that extremism. People who think my comics are absurd or warped aren’t following reality closely enough. My comics are absurd, for sure, but I don’t think they’re more absurd than reality. Here’s an example from reality: a criminal and international fugitive gave the Jewish community’s preeminent organization fighting anti-Semitic defamation $100,000 after its leader wrote a letter to the President advocating for a Pardon. It was an unbelievable sight: the man we trust to fight defamation embodying the most grotesque caricatures perpetrated by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. The man still has his job. How can you satirize such insanity? It’s impossible. In this respect, I’m not a satirist, I’m a stenographer.

You said the stakes feel higher today. How so?

Eli: Jews have more power today than at any other time in the past 2,000 years. But in a lot of ways, we still see ourselves as powerless. Our organizations and leadership, for one thing, haven’t really contended with the responsibility of power. To use another example, has the Orthodox movement done any serious reflection and soul-searching in the decade since the murder of Yitzchak Rabin? Those stakes are pretty high. They involve democracy, the future of Israel, and the most basic human right to be alive. I still think the murder of Rabin was a slow-motion lynching on the part of Orthodox Judaism. The sermons and incitement that preceded his murder created a climate of mass hatred and dehumanization, which itself was a reaction to Rabin’s decision to make a peace deal with Palestinians involving a supposed relinquishing of land. And I don’t think there’s been any real teshuvah since. The rhetoric against Jews who advocate for the emergence of a Palestinian state is the same, and when Orthodox leaders go overboard with incitement, they’re rarely scolded by their peers. This is a dramatic example. In smaller ways, Jewish self-image — the image that the community teaches its youth — can be so far removed from Jewish reality that there’s a real tension there. I like to explore that tension in my comics.

Do you see yourself as forging new ground in Jewish comic-dom, or as part of a continuum of Jewish comic artists?

Eli: I see myself as part of a continuum that was pretty much launched by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, who to a large degree invented the idiom we all work in with the early MAD comics of the 50s. Everything about those early MADs was revolutionary: the subversion of authority, the lampooning of mass-market mediocrity, the lust for narrative insanity, and the eye-popping visual shenanigans. I think all “underground” or “indie” cartoonists (I hate those terms but …) rightfully look to Kurtzman and Elder as the creators of so much of our contemporary comics vernacular. What’s different about my work is that, as I mentioned, I turn it inward onto the Jewish world.

Do you think there’s something inherently Jewish about the comic medium?

Eli: Not really, but if I’m ever starved for employment I’ll pretend there is so I can go on a lecture tour of Jewish Community Centers.

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Read more from Issue 17: People of the (comic)Book.

Tags: Comics, interview

Posted by Rafi, Friday, July 16th, 2010, 2:08 pm, People of the (comic)Book.