In the 1930s two down-on-their-luck cartoonists, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, perhaps recalling the legendary Jewish story of the Golem of Prague, created a character called “Superman.” The two cartoonists, both Jewish, one from United States, the other from Canada, had pioneered a new genre in the comics industry, the super-hero narrative. Shortly thereafter, Will Eisner, who had a long an enduring career as a cartoonist, created “The Spirit.” Other cartoonists followed, including the renowned Jacob Kurtzberg who transformed his named into the more Clark Kentish “Jack Kirby.”
The comic book introduced a narrative form that would, in one evolutionary branch, eventually evolve into the graphic novel--that is, a sustained narrative with identifiable characters, a well-developed protagonist, and a unifying plot. The protagonist, though in comic book form, was certainly not “comic” in the conventional sense, although he (and sometimes she) was almost always troubled by both social crises and a crisis of self-identity.
