Neil Fein's Blog

The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
by Will Eisner

"It opened a whole new world for me," he says. "The teens who had been my early readers for 'The Spirit' were knocking on the door of middle age and I knew that it would require mature subjects to continue to hold their attention. It was an opportunity close to my thinking and a new area of challenge."

Will Eisner, 2004. From an interview in the Washington Post.



You're dealing with an old vampire that will not die in spite of all the absolute proof of fraudulence.

A California Librarian, 1993. From The Plot, 2005.



In Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the Protocols was just a bit less popular than the Bible.

Stephen Eric Bronner, from the Afterword.

In the manner of full disclosure, I own many "comic books" and take them very seriously as both an art form and a plague of superhero junk. Mr. Eisner's past works are among my favorites. His decision to publish this history in comic form was brave but unsurprising.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are infamous writings defaming the Jews of the world, claiming conspiracies to control the world. It has been used as justification by the Nazis, Tsarist Russia, and currently by Arab governments in the middle east. The PLO teaches it to schoolchildren, and Henry Ford printed a newspaper disseminating it. All this despite their having been proved a forgery in 1921.

But is this a history text or a popularization of the story of this document? The Plot is the story of, first, the creation of the Protocols from earlier works published in, unsurprisingly, France. It moves on to the use of the Protocols in various locations, and the various proofs of forgery and plagiarism.

Although Mr. Eisner doesn't breathe much life into the stories of the initial writing of the Protocols, the story of Philip Graves, a journalist who traced their authenticity (or lack of such) is fascinating, as is the reluctant Swiss coverage of the German publications of the Protocols. The book is categorized as "History", not "Graphic Literature" or the current nom-de-what-have-you for bookstore comic books. This volume, however, tries a little too hard to make the subject matter seem important, from the introduction by Umberto Eco to the very endpapers themselves. Unfortunate, as The Plot can stand on its own very well.

As a librarian said to Mr. Eisner in California

Much of this story has the taste of inevitability; there are no surprises. It is an important story that every Jew and non-Jew should read, and an important, if not exactly expected, final work by this master of sequential art.

Tags: books