Der Übermensch!!!

Comic Books, Golems, and Super-Jews Christen Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

I think there is very much a case for a lot of the EC Comics material being post-Holocaust. You had a bunch of Jewish creators who were very aware of the fragility of life. Because there were themes that ran through these things and anti-prejudice was one of them. Not taking people at face value, trying to look underneath . . . and not just talking about the fragility of life, but of the status quo. --Neil Gaiman, 2005

While the East Village rock movement now had the perfect band and the perfect club, it still didn’t have a name. Known variously as “street rock,” “New York rock,” and “downtown rock,” it was like a two-headed newborn whose parents are reluctant to legitimize it.

As it turned out, that job fell to one of the least bohemian--and Jewish--members of the still-forming downtown community, a guy from Cheshire, Connecticut, with a name that sounds straight out of Scandinavia (or a porn film): John Holmstrom.

“I’d moved to the East Village in the early ’70s because I wanted to create comic books,” says the PUNK magazine cofounder. “Not only were the rents cheap, it was close to where Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, and Will Eisner had been when they created the genre’s golden age back in the 1940s.”

Growing up in suburban Connecticut in the 1950s, Holmstrom had fallen in love with the still sometimes brilliant products of that rapidly waning golden age. He’d faithfully collected titles in various series like Tales from the Crypt and Batman and Superman. Later, in the 1960s, when others like X-Men and The Fantastic Four appeared, he not only collected them, he also began thinking about studying comic books seriously.

“This was also the era when Robert Crumb and others in the so-called new underground were creating revolutionary comics like Zap and Despair,” Holmstrom says. “These series were more daring, touching not only the drug culture, but on racism, the war, sexual deviancy, and American imperialism.”

At the same time, Holmstrom saw that old masters of the genre, Will Eisner in particular, were taking the form to new levels, creating book-length comic strips with serious stories aimed at adults. Though at the time the term “graphic novel” had yet to come into existence, Holmstrom wasn’t alone in recognizing that something new and exciting was taking place.

“Eisner’s book A Contract with God was one of the first examples, and it is still one of the most startling,” says Holmstrom, who saw embryonic versions of the 1978 novel as early as 1972. “It’s the one that everything from Ghost World to Maus has sprung from.”

The story of a Jewish immigrant who makes a contract with God that he will be ensured a bright future if he engages in good works, Eisner’s “novel” is pitched in the same terrain as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel, both classics of Jewish-American literature that deal with the betrayal of the American dream. In A Contract with God, Frimm Hersh becomes disillusioned with religion after his daughter’s death, then equally disillusioned with the materialism that he uses to replace it, ultimately bribing his rabbi to draw up a new, supposedly binding, legal document with God.

“This time you will not violate our contract,” Hersh screams at the heavens.

But the storm Eisner depicts raging above him is chillingly evocative of Hersh’s fate.

“I knew I had to study with him,” Holmstrom says. “His work was revolutionary. It broke all the rules.”

Heading off for New York at the age of nineteen, Holmstrom enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and convinced Eisner to take him on as his protégé. Studying with the then fifty-five-year-old comic book legend by day and dreaming about creating his own comic-based magazine by night, Holmstrom became increasingly aware that he was working within a kind of tradition, one that was passed down from artisans (the practitioners would have thought it pretentious to call themselves “artists”) to apprentices who were expected to pass it down to the next generation to keep it alive.

In being accepted as a member of this order, this guild without a name, Holmstrom also became familiar with the economic and cultural circumstances that played a role in its development. He learned that Eisner and others like him had ended up in what was disparagingly referred to as “the funnies” because they had been denied entrée into the “higher” realms of artistic expression, such as painting, which were then taught almost exclusively in “restricted” universities.

“Jews couldn’t go to college except in rare instances, and they had to have money to do so,” as Eisner explained (ironically enough, at an academic conference on graphic novels at which he was the keynote speaker). “I didn’t come from that kind of background, so I ended up going into comics instead. I was like a lot of Jewish kids in the business. We had greater ambitions. As a result, we ended up expressing them in our work--and expanding the limits of the genre in the process.”

In expanding comics, Holmstrom saw Eisner and his fellow Jewish artists change not merely the style of the genre but the subject matter as well. Working closely with innovative artist/writer-editors like Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg), they created scenarios in which their superheroes fought not only supernatural villains, but evildoers of a more worldly sort, including Nazis, fascists, and racists (though, interestingly, never overt anti-Semites).

Of course, even if Holmstrom hadn’t known this history, he could have learned as much a generation later when a novel by a Jewish-American writer explored the golden era of comic books and won the Pulitzer Prize for 2002. In Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the story of the rise of comics as an art form is interwoven with the stories of both a real (at least in terms of the novel) and an imaginary Jewish avenger. The “real” avenger is none other than the golem, that legendary Frankenstein-like figure created from clay by the sixteenth-century kabbalist, Rabbi Loew; the imaginary one is Superman, that mythic creature from a dying planet who comes to our own to protect it from evil.

As Chabon makes clear, and as academics had long ago observed, the story of Superman is suspiciously similar to that of the golem, both in the details of its creation and the ultimate form it took. Penned and inked on the eve of the Holocaust by two nerdy-looking Jewish kids from Cleveland, the Man of Steel seemed to embody all the dreams and wishes not only of powerless teenage boys, but of a persecuted people on the brink of destruction--just as the golem had done for generations of Jews in Europe after he was created in response to yet another threat of annihilation.

In fact, the story of Superman could basically be seen as the golem’s story given a Jewish-American context. Come to a brash new land (Earth/America) from a dying old world imploding on itself (Krypton/Europe), Superman is to a great degree the archetypal immigrant. As he grows up in an echt American landscape of midwestern cornfields and blue skies, he soon reveals his special strengths despite himself, only to be coached by his adoptive American parents to hide these beneath a mask of ineffectualness (a schnook’s mask, they might have said, had they known the term) so as not to be viewed as a freak by his “countrymen.” At the same time, however, his adoptive parents advise him to use his powers for good, sending him off to that Jew-York-in-goy’s-clothing, Metropolis, where he will fight crime, injustice, and international Nazi spies while attempting to win the heart--yet never the body--of the All-American Girl.

It’s an absurd, yet absurdly moving story and one that has come in many ways to symbolize the American dream. For we all want to believe that beneath our Clark Kent exteriors there lurks the heart of a Superman, a man of steel who is invincible in the face of fear and always focused on the safety of the country--and, perhaps even more dearly, the woman--that he loves.

It’s a dream that seems to have had a special resonance for Holmstrom, for as he continued working with Eisner and thinking about starting his own magazine, he became increasingly obsessed with the idea of creating a mythic figure that would embody his longings for strength while also being complicated. He didn’t have a clear idea of how this man would look or act or think, but he knew that, in the tradition of the superheroes, he would be bigger than life, while in the tradition of Eisner, he would also be, at least in terms of his feelings, as vulnerable as Holmstrom or any other jerk on the street.

Holmstrom probably didn’t know that New York Jewish intellectual Irving Howe had dreamed of much the same thing back in the 1950s, when he became interested in the disparaged or at least neglected world of Yiddish literature, even then written in a language as dead as Krypton. In its focus on dos kleyne menshele, or “the little man,” he saw his own desire to illustrate “the virtue of powerlessness . . . the sanctity of the insulted and the ignored.”

No, Holmstrom probably didn’t know that. But when he encountered figures who seemed to fit his vulnerable-valiant template, individuals who first entered his room through his record player, then confronted him, bold as superheroes, on the stage of CBGB, he knew he’d found what he wanted. Even if he didn’t know what to call it. Not, that is, until his young buddy, Eddie (“Legs”) McNeil, whispered its name in his ear one drunken night. “Punk,” McNeil said. “We’ll call it Punk.”

“We’ll call it what?” Holmstrom said, wide-eyed.

As much as he loved McNeil, this kid who seemed to embody the spirit of the new movement (no, that was too strong; not the movement, the moment), he knew that his youthful sidekick was often more interested in the sound of his own voice than in what he said. Eddie used beer like a verbal lubricant. That’s why Holmstrom and his other buddy, Ged (George E. Dunn, future PUNK publisher), had been friends with him in high school despite being four years older. And that’s why they were hanging with him while back home from college this summer, doing things like filming parodies of the Three (Jewish) Stooges together. Eddie was entertaining, always getting into drunken adventures, just as they hoped his Alfred E. Neuman–like character Legs would as the magazine’s mascot. Still, Eddie’s--er, Legs’s idea was growing on Holmstrom as he tossed it back and forth between his ears.

“You know, like punk kids, losers, smart asses,” McNeil said. “Besides, it’s eye-catching.”

It’s definitely that, Holmstrom thought. And considering that he wanted his new magazine to be noticed, to be more than noticed, to be like something exploding from the newsstands, an assault on the senses almost, he began to like the name all the more. The simplicity of it, like a curse word, like a fuck you to the establishment, made it a bit like old Americana, an expression from the days of Eisner and his minions.

“OK,” he said. “Punk it is. We’ll have to make up signs for it.”
“PUNK IS COMING,” McNeil said.“Yes, PUNK IS COMING,” agreed Holmstrom.

Of course, now that meant Holmstrom had to come up with what PUNK would look like.

***

As it turned out, creating the image of PUNK wasn’t as difficult as Holmstrom at first imagined. That image had been forming in his mind ever since he’d first moved to New York; ever since he’d begun working for Eisner; ever since he’d begun reading comic books, in fact. Almost from the beginning, Holmstrom had wanted to create a comic that reflected his special circumstances--circumstances that he felt he shared with a generation of like-minded disaffected youth. He wanted something that embodied the mixture of anger and hopelessness, of boredom and restlessness, of humor and ironic detachment that they felt. Something that revealed their disgust with the lies and hypocrisy of the ridiculous hippie movement even as it forced a whole new satiric approach down the reader’s throat. It would be a magazine that was as shocking as it was funny, that brought back the joy of being a kid in the fifties and sixties, when rock ’n’ roll, comic books, and the spread of trash movies made the future seem exciting and fun.

Like a MAD magazine for an older crowd, he thought, something satirical yet goofy and unpretentious. Yes, like that glorified comic book born of the whoopee-cushion branch of socialist-flavored Jewish-American thought--that massive fart in the sacred halls of Nixon, suburbia, fraternity-minded traditional schlock. His new magazine would be brash and unavoidable and abrasive, modern and disturbing and unique. It would be like . . . like . . .

What?
And then Holmstrom remembered the Dictators.

***

All during that summer in Connecticut, he’d been playing their record for Legs and Ged. And all during the following months in New York, he’d continued to do the same. From the moment the three woke up in the afternoon, to the moment they went to bed near morning, that record seemed to be on the stereo, blaring out its message of beer and fun and sex. The Dictators Go Girl Crazy it was called, and it was just that term, girl crazy, like something your parents would say, that it evoked.

Like a comedy skit about backward suburbanites who don’t understand their suddenly wacky teenagers, The Dictators Go Girl Crazy made a madly amusing racket around the Tenth Street “Punk Dump,” filling the rickety windows and poorly sealed brackets with the sound of six smartasses backing themselves with a crunching basic form of rock that seemed at once comic yet brilliant in its deliberate simplicity and strength.

Holmstrom and Legs especially liked the songs “Master Race Rock” and “Back to Africa,” which mocked taboo subjects in a manner worthy of underground comics legend Robert Crumb. At the same time, they loved the rants of Handsome Dick Manitoba that preceded the songs, not to mention the sound of his and the lead guitarist Andy Shernoff’s voices when they shouted down all the old hag women in Miami and stupid guys in Dallas who liked the band because “they didn’t know we were Jews.” The very mention of the word “Jew” on the album was almost as exciting as those songs about anti-Semitism and racism. It was all part and parcel of defiance of accepted convention. Perhaps even more important, it was funny. Most important of all, it rocked.

For all the jokes and breaking of taboos, one of the greatest things about the Dictators’ album was that it sounded like something out of a 1960s car radio or garage. It had some of the sloppiness of the New York Dolls, that one-time-wonder band now petering out on its own raggedness, but it was alive in a way that the Dolls (at least on vinyl) never were, building up its simple songs into faux big moments that seemed to be as tongue-in-cheek as they were thrilling. It was like glam rock wearing dirty boots and a big Afro wig. Or, more exact, garage rock wearing your mother’s combat boots and a late 1960s Jewfro à la Abbie Hoffman.

This music drew on everything from mocking Yippie politics to smirking Fugs-based social critiques to the sneering yet romanticized anger of late VU Lou Reed. It was threatening and exciting, but not in a violent way. You felt stupid if you didn’t get it, and pretty damn superior and clever if you did.

“It was the end of glam and the beginning of punk,” Holmstrom says now.

At the time, though, all he knew was that it was a harbinger of something new, something that he loved. Legs had given it a name, but it didn’t seem to have a context. That quickly changed. As Holmstrom and McNeil went about putting together their magazine and hanging up their posters announcing “PUNK is Coming,” they found themselves spending ever more time at CBGB, seeing there--both on the stage and in the audience--not only the Dictators, but other bands rapidly popping up, such as the Talking Heads, Television, and the Ramones.

Many of these bands had a cartoonish quality--Richard Hell’s (Richard Meyers’s) evil genius contribution to Television, David Byrne’s Clark Kent nerd sensibility in the Talking Heads, Gene Simmons’s (Chaim Witz’s) golem-like character in the CBGB rarity KISS (he wanted to create a band of superheroes that could have protected his mother’s family during the Holocaust, the Israeli-born, Brooklyn-bred Simmons has said.) Still, it was the Ramones who most appealed to Holmstrom and most embodied the outrageous quality that he aspired to.

Dressed in their matching leather jackets and sporting Beatles-cum-lobotomy-patients haircuts, the Ramones took the comic-rough image of the Dictators to its logically absurd next step. They looked like four living, breathing, pogoing comic book characters as they bopped around the stage in various attitudes of lunatic attack.

There was Dee Dee, a kind of Legs McNeil on acid, all childish psycho-killer expressions and innocent lust. Beside him was Johnny, his mulish, apelike mug working overtime as he struggled to play his cheap, absurdly low-slung guitar in a masturbation-fast blur. Meanwhile, behind them, perched up on the drum stool, was Tommy, a little guy with an intense focus that would have seemed disturbing if it hadn’t been for his ridiculously shrunken T-shirt and large sunglasses.

Best of all was the freakish stickman at the center of the proceedings, the one who seemed to be hunching over his microphone while simultaneously lurching at the crowd, the shy, hair-in-his-face, also sunglasses-clad, superpale, supertall, superthin-looking human.

A superhuman perhaps?
A superman?
A super-mensch?
An Übermensch?

Naw. More likely, a super-extenuated, Kafkaesque antihero in the tradition of The Metamorphosis. A super-antihero of the old Will Eisner golem school, epitomizing the weak, the disaffected, and the lost.

***

When the first issue of PUNK appeared, Lou Reed, another antiheroic stickman, was featured on the cover: the patron saint of angry misfits for an earlier era and spiritual godfather to the new punks (even then, many claimed Iggy “Osterberg” Pop should have been the true winner in the godfather sweepstakes), Lou was there pretty much as the result of an accident. The new PUNK trio of Holmstrom, Legs, and Mary Harron (the future director of I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho) had all but tripped over him one night as he sat in the audience at CBGB, then plopped themselves down at his table, uninvited, to tell him they’d put him on their cover if he’d agree to an interview.

“Oh, your circulation must be enormous,” the alter kocker rocker sneered. Yet he played along, putting on his bilious, sardonic guy act for over two hours, even inviting the group that had all but ambushed him to join him for dinner afterward so that he could continue to berate them over burgers and beers.

He was funny and depressing and embarrassing. His presence on the first cover forever associated him with the new movement as a kind of angrily avuncular figurehead. But it was really that other figure that had first seized the imaginations of Holmstrom and Legs who appeared most often in the pages of PUNK over the years. That stick-like, Kafkaesque, super-antihero lead singer of the band Holmstrom found almost synonymous with PUNK. Joey Ramone.

Joey appeared in almost every issue of the magazine, figuring prominently in such classic punk/comic collaborations as “Mutant Monster Beach Party” and “Nick Detroit.” Perhaps even more important, he was represented in both drawings and photos, Holmstrom’s classic rendering of Joey as a rail-thin yet elegant cross between Dracula and a homeless duke making him the perfect punk noir figure for this romantic dark hour of the city.

Considering the fact that Tommy conceived the Ramones with angry Queens-based avengers in mind, and that all of the band members had been raised on a steady diet of comic books, it isn’t that surprising that Joey and PUNK should become so closely aligned. PUNK fit perfectly with the DIY ethos of punk in a JD DUI (Juvenile Delinquents Driving Under the Influence) kind of way that was completely in keeping with the spirit of comic books.

Both comics and punk appealed to the unacceptable yet real feelings submerged in their audiences. Both used their lowbrow content to create excitement, fun, and laughs. Both took more than a small degree of pleasure in being seen as dangerous, corrupt, and verboten by the morality police of their eras, and both were eventually crushed for varying periods of time as a result. No wonder Holmstrom looked to both comics and punk, to the great graphic artists and to the Ramones, Eisner and Joey in particular, as heroic figures as inspiring as Superman. No wonder that the Ramones, and others like them, returned the compliment, incorporating not only the style of comics into their image, but in many cases, the actual comics themselves.

For the Ramones the connection was direct. Holmstrom provided the cover art for their third and, according to many critics, best album, Rocket to Russia (1977). For numerous other bands, the influence, though not as explicit, was there. Just look at the covers of early albums by Suicide, the Cramps, or the Neon Boys (the embryonic version of Television), or at any of the posters advertising bands from the period or even today. The vast majority draw on that early comic book influence, at once innocent yet evocative of Marilyn Monroe–era decadence. Comics reverberate with rebellion and juvenile delinquency and pure visual excitement like the most basic form of rock ’n’ roll pleasure. Just like punk.

***

As Will Eisner himself points out, “I always thought that John [Holmstrom] was doing something wonderful with what he’d learned. He was taking it and giving it back to the kids, bringing rock music and comics together. After all, there was always something very visceral about comics, just as there is about rock ’n’ roll. Both sprang from the streets, the lower classes--rock from the black ghettos; comics from the Lower East Side tenements of my youth.”

***

Or to put it another way:
[ED: SET?]
Faster than a blitzkrieg air force!
More powerful than a jackboot kick-step!
Look up on the stage!
It’s a nerd!
It’s a brain!
No, it’s . . .
JOEY RAMONE!!!

From The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, (c) 2006 by Steven Lee Beeber. Used with permission of Chicago Review Press

 
Growing up in Atlanta, Gee A, Steven Lee Beeber (or "Beeb!" as he was then known) bemoaned not just the fact that none of The Beatles were Jewish, but that Barry Manilow and Neil Sedaka were. If not for the examples set by Lou "the Jew" Reed and Joey "Jewy" Ramone, he might have simply given up and become an accountant.
 
The author of "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret Hstory of Jewish Punk" (just released in paperback) and the editor of the anthology AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (including work by such greats as James Tate, Margaret Atwood, Louise Bourgeois, and the Suicide Girls), Beeber’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, Fiction, Bridge, The New York Times, Spin, MOJO, Maxim, Details, and elsewhere.

He is Associate Editor of Conduit (conduit.org), "the only magazine that risks annihilation," and he also blew sax for the Atlanta-based Gospel-punk band The Chowder Shouters. Once or twice, anyway.
 
Steven Lee Beeber’s website is www.jewpunk.com