TAMARAC, Fla. — What do you do 25 years after creating a new artistic genre? If you are Will Eisner, you do the same thing again in your late 80's.
"A Contract With God," set in the tenements of his Bronx youth and published in 1978, established Mr. Eisner as the father of the graphic novel. Now he has taken the adult comic-book format a step further, with a graphic history that applies his dark, 1930's-style illustrations to real events of a century ago.
This latest work, called "The Plot," tells the story behind the creation of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the infamous Russian forgery that purported to reveal a Jewish plan to rule the world. Mr. Eisner, the son of Jews who fled Europe, has reached into the past to say something about the present: a time, he says, when anti-Semitism is again on the rise.
"I was surfing the Web one day when I came across this site promoting `The Protocols' to readers in the Mideast," said Mr. Eisner, 86. "I was amazed that there were people who still believed `The Protocols' were real, and I was disturbed to learn later that this site was just one of many that promoted these lies in the Muslim world. I decided something had to be done."
Sitting in his studio-office, surrounded by the paraphernalia of 70 years in comics — honorary plaques, statues in the shape of a certain cartoon mouse, an Al Hirschfeld drawing of his profile — Mr. Eisner began his research. It did not matter that he was in a strip-mall office building outside Fort Lauderdale, while other elderly former New Yorkers trooped by on their way to the dentist. He was fighting for justice in a bleak world, the way his most famous comic-book character, the Spirit, did in American newspapers throughout the 1940's.
Soon Mr. Eisner realized that the story behind "The Protocols" was too confusing and myth-ridden to rely on the Internet. Enlisting the help of N. C. Christopher Couch, who teaches a course on graphic novels at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the two began piecing together the facts, helped by a French comic-book fan, Benjamin Herzberg.
Historians say "The Protocols," first published in 1903, were fabricated in Russia by the czar's secret police as a way of undermining a growing social reform movement. Jews figured prominently in this movement, and the police theorized that they could discredit it by making it appear to be a front for a sinister Jewish agenda. Mathieu Golovinski, a propagandist, concocted the 24 fraudulent "protocols" or minutes, of an international meeting of Jewish bankers, journalists and financiers outlining a purported Jewish-Masonic plot to dominate world affairs.
The forgery was revealed in 1921 when the Times of London published a series of articles demonstrating that the actual source for the text was a a French political satire published in 1864 by Maurice Joly, in which Machiavelli and Montesquieu discuss a plan for world domination by Napoleon III.
"Golovinski simply took sections from Joly's `Dialogue in Hell' and claimed they were conversations from this alleged secret meeting," Mr. Eisner said. "In many cases he merely copied large segments of Joly's satire verbatim while substituting the phrase `the Jews' for `Napoleon III."
In "The Plot," which is about 100 pages, Mr. Eisner reveals this fabrication through three different methods that draw on all phases of his 70-year career. In a short introduction he provides an account of how he came upon "The Protocols" and learned the truth behind them.
In the main body of the work he depicts the creation and unmasking of "The Protocols" through a comic-book-like series of panels and text. In the concluding section Mr. Eisner displays numerous excerpts from "The Protocols" alongside examples from the text in Joly's satire.
Like other Jewish artists Mr. Eisner entered comics in the mid-30's because he was restricted from more respectable fields like graphic design or illustration. Yet once he was there, he introduced ambitious techniques and themes. From this platform he developed his new genre to take on more serious and personal subjects. In many of these later works he dwelled on the anti-Semitism that had shaped him. His most recent work "Fagin the Jew," published last year by Doubleday, was an effort to construct a back story to "Oliver Twist" in which Fagin's struggles as a Jew help turn him into a criminal.
Denis Kitchen, Mr. Eisner's agent and onetime publisher, described "The Plot," which is still being inked, as more subtle and intellectual than his other creations. "It's closer to a documentary" than an action film, he said.
One sequence of panels depicts a fateful meeting at a Constantinople cafe between a bearded, valise-toting "White Russian émigré with something to sell" and a mustached, pipe-smoking patron with a newspaper sticking out of his pocket, who turns out to be Phillip Graves, the correspondent for The Times of London who exposed the fraud.
"The great irony of `The Protocols' ' continued existence is that they were proven to be false as early as 1921," Mr. Eisner said, remarking that by now the real story had been relegated largely to the realm of scholarship. "I wanted to create a work that would be understood by the widest possible audience."
