No spoilers following:Yesterday comic book stores everywhere received an advance preview edition of Dave Sim's Judenhass (German term for Jew hatred), his Holocaust book which will ship to stores in May. I know I've already talked once about this book when it was first announced, but I wanted to give another heads up for people to go to their local comic book store and ask to look at the preview.
Judenhass is every bit as powerful and moving as I anticipated it being. On one level it could be said that it would be hard to tell a story about the Holocaust with that story not being powerful and resonating with the reader (and I'd agree), but I also agree with Dave Sim's opening statement in which he says: "Every creative person should consider doing a work addressing the Shoah (Jewish term for the Holocaust)." I don't think that there's enough stories already about the Holocaust because the more such stories are told, hopefully the hatred some people have for other people based on differences in religion, ethnicicity, and or social status will be vanquished.
In Judenhass, Dave Sim assembles quotes from people throughout history that show that anti-Semitism wasn't just centric to Hitler Germany and by using these quotes over his photorealistic illustrations (the photos Sim used are credited in Judenhass' bibliography) the reader is shown the ultimate horror of hatred. As I mentioned in my February blog entry (titled "Sim's Secret Project 1 Unveiled"), Judenhass is a 56 page presentation for only $4.00, that Dave Sim produced as an affordable book that anyone can pick up and learn more about what led up to the Holocaust (it should be especially easier to introduce this subject to students if instructors used Judenhass as Dave Sim suggests). At the risk of further repeating my blog entry of last month (but really this bears repeating), for those of you who haven't yet visited www.judenhass.com, it's a great site for further information on the genesis and the process involved in the production of Judenhass (the website is designed by Lou Copeland, who also did the digital production for the comic book and was Dave Sim's research assistant). I'd also like to add that the production values throughout Judenhass are of the highest quality (paperstock, binding, and presentation).
2 comments:
Do you know how I culd get an early copy?
Judenhass won't be in comic stores until May. Every comic store got a copy last week for retailers to use in showing customers and then placing orders based on their response.
Some stores may sell their copy, but they're not supposed to as it has a street date sale for May and selling the preview copy defeats Dave Sim's goal of promoting this book to a wide audience.
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