In her 1989 self-published work, Does God Eat Us?, a lightly illustrated prose work, Terry explores questions related to her Jewish identity. She was the first woman cartoonist admitted to the National Cartoonists Society, in 1950. Terry was best known for her syndicated newspaper cartoon strip, Teena (1944-1964), about a prototypical American 'teen' girl. In addition, some Jewish women worked as cartoonists in the United States in the mid-twentieth-century, often publishing uncredited work with large publishing houses these early comics did not engage directly with Jewish subjects (except, on occasion, via plots about World War II).Įarly Jewish women comics pioneers include Hilda Terry, born in 1914 in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Brooklyn-born cartoonist Will Eisner, who popularized the term “graphic novel” in the late 1970s with his books of comics recounting Jewish-American immigrant life, most notably included Jewish women characters in his stories, though they were usually depicted in heavily stereotyped, often derogatory ways.

These acclaimed works led many comics historians and practitioners to recognize an often-heavy correlation between Jewish creators and producers, Jewish subjects and themes, and twentieth-century comic books, comic strips, and cartoons.īut even as comics historians unearthed a genealogy of Jewish male creators in comics, Jewish women remained almost absent from any such history, except as occasional side-characters. Recent attention to connections between comics, graphic narratives, and Jews can be largely traced to the publication of two North American literary texts that subsequently received Pulitzer Prizes: Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II (1986, 1992) and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).

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