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 off as an attempt to escape the rut of cranking out comic pages day after day, takes bold and 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.

Creator 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 post-war America, the personal and the political weave vertiginously, culminating in the magnum opus tale, “Master Race,” written by Al Feldstein and elevated to one of the few serious early comics works by Krigstein.