ITUNES TERMS AND CONDITIONS: The Graphic Novel
Masterful comic artist R. Sikoryak has created one of the most unique works ever. Ever. ITUNES TERMS AND CONDITIONS: The Graphic Novel.
Sikoryak is known for his ability to faithfully reproduce the style and characters of many famous comic book and graphic novel creators. What he has now done is take the entire long, dense and absurdly legalistic mandatory iTunes Terms and Conditions and made it the text of a graphic novel. One new page a day is being released on Tumblr.
Each page is done in a different style (from Chester Gould (Dick Tracy) to Herge (Tintin) to Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) to Charles Schulz (Peanuts) to Dan DeCarlo (Archie) to Todd McFarlane (Spawn) to Scott Adams (Dilbert) and on and on). The featured "hero" of each page is, naturally, Steve Jobs.
You can read an interview with Sikoryak in The New Yorker.
It is an astonishingly simple idea to the point of genius. All it takes to turn the ridiculous (such as the iTunes T&C) into the sublime is artistic vision and talent. Thanks to Sikoryak for gifting us with his.
In the Beginning, Again
This Sabbath, the annual cycle of Torah readings starts all over again. Again. Back to the beginning. Genesis (Breisheit), Chapter 1.
In the beginning….Well, you probably know how it goes. But don't be jaded by familiarity. And don't avoid it or be put off by belief that this and all the Genesis stories that follow are neither history nor science. So what? These are big stories and we need big stories. Not to be used as clubs to beat us up (though there is that), but as invitations and portals to bigger things. If not, then why are so many watching Hunger Games or Downtown Abbey?
Instead of learned discourse, here is something much more fun. R. Crumb, one of the great comic artists (beginning with his classic underground comics in the 1960s—Mr. Natural, etc.), published his Book of Genesis Illustrated in 2010.
(If you don't like pictures or Crumb's illustrations, you might just try the excellent translation of Genesis that Crumb used, by Robert Alter)
Take a moment, whatever your inclinations, and allow yourself to be awed. Whatever you think is awesome, the sudden appearance of everything is more awesome than that, however you explain it. And for those who are waiting to see the Big Guy with the long beard–you know you've just gotta have it–here it is.
Moses on Krypton, Superman in Egypt
The story of the Exodus and Passover is a story of freedom, faith and return from exile. It is also a story about the universal question of identity: who am I?
According to the story told in the Book of Exodus, Moses is born a lowly Hebrew, a child of slaves. Set afloat by his mother to avoid Pharaoh's slaying of the first born, he is found and given the Egyptian name Moses. He is raised as Egyptian royalty, though as a baby he is fed at the breast of his Hebrew mother.
It is never clear in the text when or how he first finds out about his heritage. We only know that he does discover that he is a Jew. He flees to Midian and marries Zipporah, who bears him a son. The name chosen for their son tells a story, the story of Moses and of the Jewish people. The name is Gershom, meaning "I have been a stranger in a foreign land." (Exodus 2:22)
This famous phrase leads to a question: exactly which land is Moses a stranger in? Is he a Hebrew who has been a stranger in Egypt, despite living his entire adult life as a great Egyptian? Or is he an Egyptian suddenly identified with a people he never knew as his own?
A clue is found in the stories about Moses as a speaker. Twice Moses tries to tell God that he is speech challenged. When directed to address the Jews, Moses claims to be "slow of tongue" and "heavy of mouth." When told to speak to Pharaoh, Moses describes himself cryptically as having "uncircumcised lips." Some interpreters attribute this to an actual speech impediment, perhaps stuttering. But a different view is that Moses is trying to tell God something sensible: Moses does not speak Hebrew very well. And why should he speak Hebrew, when he has spent his life as an Egyptian?
At this point, we leave Egypt for a trip to Cleveland in the 1930s. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are a couple of nerdy Jewish teenagers with a love of science fiction and a talent for comic book art. They had grown up with the stories of the Bible, including the tales of Moses. Consciously or not, they mixed these together into a comic book creation that would become a modern cultural icon: Superman.
In the Siegel and Shuster version, there is no infant floated off in a basket to avoid his death, and no Egyptian princess to find and adopt him. Instead, the Kryptonian infant Kal-el (a version of the Hebrew phrase Kol El, "the voice of God" or "all of God") is rocketed off in a space capsule to avoid the planet's destruction. The capsule crashes on Earth, and he is found and adopted by the Midwestern couple, Ma and Pa Kent.
The biblical infant is raised as an Egyptian and given the Egyptian name Moses; Kal-el is raised as an earthling and given the Midwestern name Clark Kent. The time will come for both of them, Moses and Clark Kent, to reclaim their true identities in order to tap into great power, to become super-men.
But this reclaiming of identity is not without difficulties. The man born Kal-el struggles with his disguises: Is he Superman pretending to be Clark Kent, or is he Clark Kent who has a second identity as Superman?
These particular stories of exile and identity are only two of many such stories in history and in popular culture. It is a story that repeats itself again and again, not only among the Jewish people in ancient and modern times, but among all people in all times and circumstances.
Think of the Jews in the midst of their Exodus, chronically uncertain about who they were and where they belonged. As much as they wanted to follow their faith and their leader to a promised place, their adopted home for generations—even if not by choice, even under the oppressor's thumb—had been Egypt.
Think of Moses, caught between two worlds. Yet the struggle for identity turns out to be a source of strength for him. All that he accomplished could never have happened if he had been only an Egyptian or only a Hebrew. It was through his being both, and through his trying to resolve that seeming contradiction, that the events of the Exodus transpired.
Think of ourselves. We may believe that by staying in one place and simply holding tight to an unchanging way, we can maintain an identity free of questions, and we can avoid being strangers in a foreign land. But that is impossible. Those around us are constantly changing and the world around us is constantly changing. The land we think of as familiar becomes foreign to us, and we find ourselves strangers in it.
Being a stranger is unavoidable, and it can be a good thing. Like Moses, we discover who we are only when we question who we are in the particular place and time we inhabit. Along with the divine direction that he heard, it is this burning question of identity that drove Moses to do great things. It is a valuable lesson for all of us as we retell the story of the Exodus this Passover.