University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Senior Honors Projects Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island 2009 Secret Identities: Graphic Literature and the Jewish- American Experience Brian Klotz University of Rhode Island,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Klotz, Brian, "Secret Identities: Graphic Literature and the Jewish-American Experience" (2009). Senior Honors Projects. Paper 127. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/127http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/127 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island at DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Klotz 1 Brian Klotz HPR401 Spring 2009 Secret Identities: Graphic Literature and the Jewish-American Experience In 1934, the comic book was born. Its father was one Maxwell Charles Gaines (né Ginsberg), a down-on-his-luck businessman whose previous career accomplishments included producing “painted neckties emblazoned with the anti-Prohibition proclamation ‘We Want Beer’” (Kaplan 2). Such things did not provide a sufficient income, and so a desperate Gaines moved himself and his family back in to his mother’s house in the Bronx. It was here, in a dusty attic, that Gaines came across some old newspaper comic strips and had his epiphany. Working with Eastern Color Printing, a “company that printed many of the Sunday newspaper comics sections in the Northeast” (Kaplan 2-3), Gaines began publishing pamphlet-sized collections of old comic strips to be sold to the public (this concept had been toyed with previously, but only as premiums or giveaways, not as an actual retail product).