Starred Review in Publishers Weekly! →

“Journalist Riesman unpacks the minutiae-gnarled debates swirling around comics writer and producer Stan Lee in his eventful, myth-dispelling debut, while also telling a story that will resonate even for those who don’t know Spider-Man from the Red Skull … This detailed, clear-eyed examination pulls back the curtain on one of America’s great storytellers and is sure to reignite debates over Lee’s legacy.”

I’m happy to report that Publishers Weekly has given True Believer a starred review! Read it here!

I'm Writing Another Book!

Hello, all! Just dropping in to share some exciting news: I scored a contract to write a second book! This one is a biography of Vince McMahon, the emperor of professional wrestling. It’s being published by Simon & Schuster, at their Atria Books imprint. No specific publication date yet, but I’m aiming for late 2022. Should be interesting. If you’re in the wrestling world or know things about Vince, please don’t hesitate to drop me a tip through the contact form on this site, by emailing me at abraham[at]abrahamriesman[dot]com, or by calling me at +1-347-651-1139. Wish me luck!

How the Snyder Cut Was Won and Where It Got Us →

In retrospect, it was inevitable. It’s like Brexit or Donald Trump’s clinching of the presidency: first, you hear that it happened; then, even if you wanted it to happen, you’re shocked. These people aren’t supposed to be calling the shots. They’re déclassé outsiders, drunk on atavistic rage and viciously abusive toward their foes — such people are destined to be at the fringe, not the hub of power. And yet, when you stop mumbling your disbelief, you’re stuck with the reality that it happened, that an ancient seal has been broken, and you start to see all the forces that broke it. Soon, you’re kicking yourself for not seeing this certainty sooner.

Jesus, you think. It really happened. They really released the Snyder Cut.

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Interview: Cartoonist Tom Gauld →

“The thing I've realized — the thing which is really important when you're trying to two weekly cartoons every week — is, whenever I have an idea, I need to make sure I get it in the book and get it noted down because you can very quickly run out of ideas or have a bad week with no ideas. So I absolutely need to keep them as much as I can when I get them. I have a long file on my phone of notes, which I tap in when I'm walking along or on the bath or whatever. And I've got a small notebook I carry in my coat, where I scribble things down, and I’ve got my main sketchbook where I'm always writing down notes and things. So it's just a mania these days of keeping notes and having these piles of generally bad or half-finished or half-thought-through or maybe even seven-percent-thought-through ideas.”

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The Logic of the Trumpocalypse →

“I think the immediacy you’re talking about has something to do with the way that Trump’s voice, in the monologue — he’s always kind of a pure reactive surface. So the way he speaks and thinks, it’s very much built as: whatever he’s said will trigger him to talk about something else. So he goes on all these tangents, but they’re all kind of based on whatever he was just saying, as he loses the thread and pings off this way and goes the other way. So, yeah, there’s a movement in his voice that is different from the way that Obama would speak, where he’d speak in paragraphs. Trump doesn’t. He speaks in sentence fragments that ricochet one after the other.“

I interviewed novelist Mark Doten, whose Trump Sky Alpha is an astoundingly insightful and prophetic look at the present mess we’re in. First part can be found here, second part can be found here.

Preorder My Book! →

Hello, comrades! You can now preorder my book, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, at Amazon. Please do that, if you’re so inclined! And yes, that is a photo of my only one-on-one encounter with the subject, back at Wizard World Chicago in July of 1998.

A Short Story Featuring a Captain of America →

A song of ascents. A sickly infant is born in Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital on the seventh day of the month of Cheshvan in the year 5646. The date recorded on his birth certificate is 16 October, 1885. His parents, Jews of Byelorusian extraction, made their way to Austria after the pogroms of four years prior. They are now secular, having abandoned the religion of their forebears out of fear as they left the burning remains of the village from which they came. A hospital rabbi offers to pray for the prematurely withered child during the reading of the week’s Torah portion. The parents politely refuse, but the mother asks what the portion is. The rabbi tells them it’s Lech Lecha. Without speaking, the parents both remember the words with which it begins: Vayomer Adonai el Avram lech lecha m’artzcha umimoladtecha umibeyt avicha el ha’aretz asher arecha. Without speaking, they both know they will name the boy Avram. Without speaking, they both know he will not die in the place of his birth.

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A Jew's Christmas Confession →

I had many of the trappings of Judaism in my life, but they were all half-measures. I was circumcised, but not by a mohel. I went to religious school once a week, but retained little of what I learned. I became bar mitzvah, but I had memorized all the Hebrew phonetically and understood none of what I was saying at the ceremony. I fasted on Yom Kippur, but only some years. I went to Jewish sleepaway camp, but I hated it and left after one summer. I had Jewish friends, but we never talked about Jewish topics. There were lots of Jews in my community, but I had no sense of belonging to a Jewish community. What’s more — and here’s why I’m writing this essay — I did something shameful quite regularly. It’s something I haven’t admitted to anyone since I had my Jewish awakening a few years ago. Just thinking about it makes me feel like a man living under a false identity who’s been found out by a sleuth. I reel at the memory.

I celebrated Christmas.

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Interview: My Rabbi on Star Wars →

This one, Rise of Skywalker — was there a book of the Tanakh it reminded you of?
Hmmm.

Or a story or an anecdote, anything Jewish.
I feel like all the movies are very biblical. Especially this one in terms of the characters themselves. All the characters are the people you’d least expect to be a leader or to be the driving force and redeemer of the world, so to speak. And that’s arguably the most popular biblical trope you find: The underdog is actually the savior. Right? Like in the Torah, every single firstborn son gets pushed down by the younger, weaker son. And think about it: Moses, who redeems the Jewish people, is a slave, comes from a slave family. That’s the premise of a lot of Star Wars characters.

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Interview: Michael Chabon on Jack Kirby →

RIESMAN: We're talking about how artists were influenced by him, but how were you influenced by him? You've written in the past that he's had a huge influence on your storytelling. How does that manifest itself?

CHABON: Well, I think partly in what I encountered just almost immediately when I first encountered him, which was this idea of reinventing mythology for our contemporary world. The idea that our oldest stories could also be our newest stories. I think that was something I just absorbed unconsciously. I think the idea that the contemporary world, including technology, including fabulous technology, could still be described and understood using these really ancient, archetypal characters and narratives. I think that was definitely something that certainly made the contemporary world more interesting to me, narratively, to think of it that way. I think that's one part of it. I think the thing that I still take inspiration from in him is just that seeming inexhaustibility of his imagination. You know, that is just an endless source of inspiration and encouragement to me, and something I guess I aspire to in some way. It makes me see. He was incapable of restraining himself to one idea, and that's been said by many people. It's not an original observation, but like in one issue of Thor from 1967 or '68, or Fantastic Four from that same period, he would pack like seven ideas — for characters, for plot strands — each of which would have contented one artist or one writer, that you could have spun an entire series of one idea out of seven from a single issue that he came up with, in the late '60s when he was really creatively just at his peak. That's inspiring to me, and that's something that ... It set a standard for a kind of richness and a generosity, a kind of overflowing generosity of ideas that was very inspiring to me.

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Sign Up for My Newsletter!

I have decided to start a newsletter. It will come out every week (-ish) and feature exclusive reported pieces, essays, interviews, commentary, and/or recommendations. Maybe even photography, who knows. Sign up now: https://abrahamjoseph.substack.com/

The Forgotten Third ‘Watchmen’ Creator Speaks →

When I ask Damon Lindelof, showrunner for the upcoming HBO series Watchmen, about John Higgins, his mind goes straight to the Beatles. “John Higgins remains one of the unsung heroes of Watchmen,” he says. “Certainly Moore and Gibbons were John and Paul, but Higgins was George and Ringo combined, and his striking colors reinvented the genre every bit as much as Alan’s words and Dave’s pencils.”

Higgins was indeed a hero of the graphic novel that Lindelof’s show riffs on, having been the man who did the coloring for the book. That makes him one of only three collaborators who created the Watchmen comic, along with writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, and he is indeed underappreciated, even by the book’s supporters. But even that bold analogy isn’t enough: It’s more as if Beatles fans assumed the band consisted only of John and Paul and didn’t even know George and Ringo existed, much less that they created music of their own.

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Interview: Damon Lindelof →

The rights to Watchmen, the book, were supposed to revert to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But DC Comics didn’t do that and Moore has historically been furious about it, as have readers who advocate for creator rights. What does it feel like to make a show that a lot of people are going to oppose on principle, independent of the quality of the material? Is that something you think about?
That’s something that I think about a lot. What are the ethical ramifications of this even existing at all when I completely and totally side with the creator? Acknowledge that the creator has been exploited by a corporation? Now that very same corporation is basically compensating me to continue this thing. I ask, “Is it even hypocrisy?” Then I say, as a fan, “Where would I come down on this thing if someone else was doing it? If I heard someone else was doing an HBO series called Watchmen that was not a strict adaptation of the book?” I felt that I’d be really angry about it and then I’d watch it. [Laughs.] I wonder how many of the angry people who don’t think it should exist will actually have the discipline to not even watch it. Those are the people that I really admire. The ones who are like, “This shouldn’t exist and I’m literally not watching it.” That’s an admirable position.

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On the Joker as Arch-Nemesis →

Nowadays, one tends to think of the Clown Prince of Crime as — to borrow a term from video games — the Final Boss of the Batman mythos. He is, as Neil Gaiman put it in a comics story a decade ago, the White Whale to Batsy’s Ahab, the Moriarty to his Holmes. Where Batman pursues a near-fascistic vision of order, the Joker is what Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight refers to as an “agent of chaos.” The two are matter and antimatter, oil and water, an unstoppable force and an immovable object, a mythic hero and a trickster god, or any number of other overwrought metaphors.

While you can certainly tell great stories with other entrants in Batman’s rogues gallery — Two-Face, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, what have you — none of them fascinate the hero and his readers the way the Joker does. There’s a reason he’s the first of DC Comics’ Caped Crusader’s antagonists to get his own movie, which comes out this week: His wanton murderousness is the platonic ideal of everything Batman struggles against. And yet, it was not always thus. In fact, it wasn’t until a now-obscure story was published in 1973 that the Joker turned a corner and started to become what he is now. The tale is called “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” and it appeared in the 251st issue of Batman, which hit stands in July of that year. Written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams, it is one of the most important Batman stories ever told.

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The Brutal Specificity of 'Our Boys' →

The timing of the release of Our Boys couldn’t be more tragically relevant. The ten-part miniseries, which debuts on HBO Monday night, may be a docudrama set thousands of miles away from the United States, but it centers around something that’s all too familiar to Americans in the wake of the recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas: racist, right-wing, politically motivated murder. Although the show’s Israeli and Palestinian creators couldn’t have anticipated that specific juxtaposition, they were long aware of the fact that they were telling a story not just about three Jewish extremists’ real-life murder of an Arab teenager in Jerusalem in 2014, but also about the ways in which nationalist violence rots away the soul of both the Jewish state and the Land of the Free.

“The election of Trump was a crucial point in the development of the series,” says Hagai Levi, speaking via Skype from Israel alongside the show’s two other co-creators, Tawfik Abu-Wael and Joseph Cedar. “Until that moment, we kind of talked about religious people who are extremists or ideological, but when Trump was elected, it was clear to us that we were going to make a show about hate crime.” In other words, they wanted to tell a story that transcended the specific ethno-religious clash between Jews and Palestinians and rose to the level of universality for any place wracked by reactionary prejudice and violence. “There are so many layers underneath what you call a hate crime,” Levi continues. “And what happens when those layers meet incitement and create a perfect storm to create murder?”

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In Memoriam: David Berman

History hasn’t known too many Jewish cowboys, but David Berman was one of them. He crooned with a drawl and a twang, strumming a mere handful of chords in varying order, at once celebrating and mourning all that America had to offer. His verses, whether on the pages of his 1999 poetry collection Actual Air or in the grooves of his half-dozen-ish records, resonated because they were understated — here was a real poet, in possession of enormous verbal talent, who had no interest in showing off.

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