THE OUTSIDER

Take a walk with The Outsider, a secret history of comics, set within the moving biography of legendary comics artist, Bernard Krigstein. Comics in the 1950s is a nowhere medium for journeymen and artistically frustrated illustrators. At least that’s what Bernie Krigstein — an out-of-step painter slumming in the sleazy comics industry to make ends meet — thinks. What starts as an escape attempt from the rut of cranking out comics takes successive leaps into tales of labor organizing and fighting tenaciously to realize the artistic potential of the medium. The Outsider is a story about dedication, frustration, ambition, anger, integrity — the 1950s comic book industry — all told in vivid, painterly strokes of melancholic blue. Joseph D’Esposito explores the Jewish roots of comics and its lineage of Black, women, and other unsung participants (such as Matt Baker, a Black pioneer of the graphic novel). In the political hotbed of postwar America, the personal and the political weave vertiginously, culminating in “Master Race,” written by Al Feldstein and elevated into one of the few serious early comics works by Krigstein’s formal innovations.