Every Picture Tells A Story (washingtonpost.com)

Every Picture Tells A Story (washingtonpost.com):

"Every Picture Tells A Story
His Pen and Wit Sharper Than Ever, Graphic Novelist Will Eisner Takes On Religious Intolerance

By Paul E. Fitzgerald
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page C01

Since his Depression-era days in New York's boiler-room comic strip factories, Will Eisner has pushed the limits of art as storytelling device."

Unraveling a Hoax

Eisner's current work-in-progress is another assault on prejudice.

He says "The Plot," scheduled for publication by Norton next year, unravels "the twisted threads behind the Russian anti-Semitic forgery that has come to be known as 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.' " Recently released Russian documents provide additional validation of his basic premise, Eisner says. He feels a sense of urgency because "fanatic Islamic elements are reviving this long-discredited and fraudulent document today and are giving it wide circulation to fan anti-Jewish hatred."

The trail of "The Protocols" is so long and convoluted that Eisner felt obliged to do a good deal more research than usual, enlisting two scholars in his digging.

Eisner says his treatment of "The Plot" is a "dramatization, with some inventiveness based on probability." The characters tell a tale that begins in 1864 with a French political satire published by Maurice Joly and titled "Dialogue in Hell," describing a discussion between Niccolo Machiavelli, the coldblooded Italian political theorist, and the French philosopher Montesquieu about a plan for world domination by Napoleon III. Eisner says research establishes that in 1903 Mathieu Golovinski, a propagandist and operative for the Russian czar's secret police, copied, word for word, extensive segments of Joly's satire, changing it only slightly to reflect a Masonic-Jewish plot. "It was then given wide circulation in Russia in an effort to discredit a growing movement for social reforms in which many of the leaders were Jews," Eisner says.

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