We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust

Praise

The theme of drawing to live continues in WE SPOKE OUT: COMIC BOOKS AND THE HOLOCAUST (IDW, $49.99), an anthology of 18 stories from 1951 to 2008, which concludes with an account of the Auschwitz inmate Dina Babbitt, who was spared when Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor, asked her to paint portraits. The book’s self-congratulatory tone lands the wrong way: The “we” of the title does not refer to survivors or witnesses but to cartoonists. Its premise, that these mainstream comics, of which all but two are fictional stories — many featuring fantasy — were received as historical education, often feels like an overstatement (the book also skirts around the titanic success of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” which would have added depth to its claims about the reach of comics tackling the Holocaust). Still, the volume fascinates as a time capsule of what Americans were able or eager to imagine (some stories do not specify that the Nazis’ victims were Jews) about the racism and profound violence of genocide. —The New York Times