Alright, I survived day one of WonderCon.
I brought in a bit of a haul, but my biggest catch was a personally autographed copy of
Jobnik! by Miriam Libicki. It's the author's autobiographical experiences as a
jobnik (person with a desk job) in the Israeli Defense Force, told not as a political testimony or commentary on war itself, but rather an examination of the day-to-day life of a young recruit against the background of a world
submerged in politics and war.
There is a growing corpus of comics works by Jews dealing with Jewish themes, and its roots are deep: the term "graphic novel" caught on after it was used by Will Eisner on the cover of his
A Contract With God, and Other Tenement Stories, a classic comic illustrating stories of the Jewish diaspora in America. Many of the foundational artists and writers of American comics, indeed including the inventors of the superhero, were Jewish.
Jobnik! joins Joe Sacco's
Palestine and
Footnotes In Gaza as personal experiences of the Israel-Palestine situation told by Jews, although Libicki takes a different tone and says that she does not intend to respond to Sacco, but rather simply to relay her persona experience. She does a good job at that.
