Baltimore Jewish Times: How Jews created the comic book

Was the connection between Jewish creators and comic books ignored?:

Look up in the sky: It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a minyan of comic book superheroes and their geeky Jewish creators.

From its inception, the modern comic book has been a friendly domain for Jews, from Marvel's Stan Lee to Maus' Art Spiegelman. Hawkman, the Flash, Thor, Superman and Batman were all created by overactive Jewish imaginations.

But like some dark secret held until the last cryptic panel, the Jewish connection to comics has only recently gotten any serious ink.

Why the Jews? How did the People of the Book become People of the Comic Book?

San Francisco-based writer Gerardo Jones, author of "Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book," says Jews did it by channeling "adolescent boys' primal projections," thus transforming a disreputable enterprise -- the lowly comic-- into a cornerstone of pop culture.

Most of the Jews who breathed life into the comics have origin stories worthy of a comic superhero: Depression-era teens dodging Yiddish hucksters and predatory gangsters, and displaying some superhuman chutzpah.