The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - Hardcover

Will Eisner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060454 ISBN 13: 9780393060454

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

A work more disturbing than fiction from "the father of graphic novels" (The New York Times). "The ultimate illustration of how absurdly comical and cancerous The Protocols has been to mankind."–Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Plot, which examines the astonishing conspiracy and the fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has become a worldwide phenomenon since its hardcover publication, taught in classrooms around the globe. Purported to be the actual blueprints by Jewish leaders to take over the world, the Protocols, first published in 1902, have become gospel truth to international millions. Presenting a pageant of historical figures from nineteenth-century Russia to today's ideologues, including Tsar Nicholas II, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler, Will Eisner unravels and dispels one of the most devastating hoaxes of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Authors

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of Foucault’s Pendulum, The Name of the Rose, and other international bestsellers. He lives in Milan, Italy.

Born in New York City, Will Eisner (1917–2005) was the author of the legendary comic strip The Spirit, as well as fifteen graphic novels and three influential instructional textbooks. The comic industry’s top awards, the Eisner Awards, are named in his honor.

Reviews

Grade 10 Up–Published posthumously, this history of the Protocols is based on new evidence from the post-Soviet opening of the Russian archives. Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian aristocrat exiled in France, wrote the work for the secret police, to convince Czar Nicholas II that Jews were behind the political unrest in Russia and to persuade him to abandon liberal reforms. Golovinski plagiarized The Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864), a satirical essay by French attorney Maurice Joly, implying that Napoleon III's plans for France were Machiavellian. Following the stories of Joly and Golovinski, the scene shifts to Constantinople, where a Russian exile offers to sell copies of the Dialogues and the Protocols to a reporter from the London Times. A comparison of the two documents leads to the publication of an article in 1921 exposing the Protocols as a forgery. Despite this revelation, it continued to be used, from the Nazis to Henry Ford to more contemporary hate groups and governments. Eisner appears as a character: researching his book, discussing why the Protocols survive despite repeated debunking, and talking to college students who distribute it. The artwork is occasionally over-the-top; one of Golovinski's superiors is a crazed, Rasputin-like caricature. The side-by-side comparison of sections of the Dialogues and the Protocols is so long that it risks losing readers completely. Despite these flaws, the book is well researched and, for the most part, accomplishes Eisner's goal of making the information available to a wider audience by using a graphic format.–Sandy Freund, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Eisner's final graphic novel examines the tangled history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda (with its origins in several generations of libel and plagiarism) that's been circulating for the past century. Eisner, who died earlier this year, was one of the patron saints of American comics, and his artwork improved as he got older. The ink-wash drawings here are among his most exquisite work, and his characters have the kind of grandly expressive, minutely observed body language that was his specialty. But Eisner was a far better cartoonist than a writer, and it's puzzling why an artist who thought as deeply as he did about visual narrative decided to take on a project that has no reason to be a comic book. There's basically nothing interesting for him to draw, and he adds nothing to well-documented history. The core of Eisner's book is an endless scene of two men comparing passages from it with Maurice Joly's Dialogue in Hell, from which it was plagiarized; not even the dramatization of their conversation (in a smoky Constantinople cafe) helps. The rest of the work is gorgeous to look at, but suffers from leaden expository dialogue and disastrous pacing, documenting the history of The Protocols without successfully understanding its insidious power.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Besides his 1940s Spirit stories and more recent graphic novels depicting American Jewish life, Eisner (1917-2005) produced instructional strips for the army and other clients. In The Plot, completed shortly before his death, he employed his mastery of the medium to once again educate readers, this time on a subject of personal concern, the anti-Semitic nineteenth-century forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a plan by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Although debunked long ago, Protocols continues to incite new generations of the gullible. By using comics to depict its true provenance as a publication of Russia's secret police to deflect criticism of the government, Eisner hoped to effectively reach audiences most susceptible to its bigoted propaganda. If it is unlikely that the book will achieve Eisner's intentions--those who want to believe outlandish slander may do so despite how thoroughly or vividly it is refuted--The Plot lives as a vivid confirmation of Eisner's belief in the comics medium's potency for simply, effectively conveying ideas. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393060454
• ISBN 13: 9780393060454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160