Elizabeth Heyman writes for Bleeding Cool:

I knew when Neal Adams began his panel for Holocaust Comics by walking in and announcing, "There's not enough Jews in here!" that my interview with him on his new project was going to be mildly unconventional but extremely entertaining. Standing in the middle aisle while midsentence of his introduction to the cause he even pointed to me and asked if I knew who he was and before I even finished saying his name he interrupted, "Doesn't matter," and waved me off. That's Neal Adam's no BS attitude but that's just the mentality needed to push the new documentary and education program on the world.

Though the petition to retrieve Dina Babbitt's concentration camp paintings from the Auschwitz Museum is nothing new to the comics world, now the artist and his academic partner Dr Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute are coming back with a new documentary titled They Spoke Out which includes motion comics as well as historical photographs and videos. This new project tells five different stories of Americans who fought back in the Holocaust and the creators made it with the intention of changing the way World War II is discussed in schools.

My conversation with the two men (whose relationship is enough reason to cause hilarity) digressed to discuss the Congressional Comic Trials, Neal's experiences writing Green Lantern Green Arrow, and ended with some inspirational advice from Neal's mother as well as his own more hostile opinion.

Bleeding Cool: So just for background, how long ago did you start this project?

Medoff: We began our campaign for Babbitt in 2006. We began a mass petition of comic book creators to support the return of Babbitt's paintings. It was through that petition that Neal and I met and then Neal took a leadership role in the Babbitt campaign.

So it started with the petition and it was tremendously successful. It was 450 comic book creators from around the world including all the top people in the business, Stan Lee on down. Neal and Joe Kubert were sort of the spear heads of the petition and that petition began generating a lot of news media attention. During the course of our discussions during the campaign Neal suggested this could be an effective comic strip to bring more attention to the cause and a comic strip would be effective in bringing more attention to the cause.

Marvel published it in Magneto Testament in 2009. It was kind of a long process given Neal's busy schedule and then it took some time to find a publisher.

Adams: Wait a second, wait a second! It took some time to find a publisher? We offered it for free for anybody who wanted to use and we sent it to the New York Times and we announced anyone could use it. So different newspapers used it, Marvel used it in the back of one of their Magneto books. Then Disney used it.

Medoff: Right, so after the strip was prepared and Marvel published it the New York Times ran a feature story about it and the people at Disney saw the New York Times story and had the brilliant idea that that strip could be turned into a motion comic. That motion comic then was released by Disney. Subsequent to that we expanded the whole motion comic project to five more episodes about other aspects of the Holocaust and about how Americans responded to the Holocaust.

BC: How did you get the idea to go from the Dina Babbitt mission to telling these five other stories on the DVD?

Medoff: So the unique agenda of the David Wyman Institute is to do research on Americans who did speak out during the Holocaust. In other words most Holocaust institutions focus on the killers and the victims, not on the bystanders and the people that who could have helped. Our focus is on the people that could have helped especially in America. So that's what my research focuses on all the time. So I'm writing articles and books on people like La Guardia and other Americans that protested. So we have all these stories. We're the historians who know about these stories but Neal and Disney are the ones who took these stories and brought them into a format that can reach a much wider audience, especially younger people.

BC: What is it about the graphic medium that can give us a better idea of the Holocaust?

Adams: The comic book medium has been a much misunderstood and a much maligned medium. In fact it was so maligned it was attacked by Congress at one point. I guess that in the dictionary they couldn't get out of the C's after communism so they went to comic books. They attacked communism and then they attacked comics. It's called legislation by dictionary. So actually they broadcasted these attacks on comic books and it was very hard for the comic book industry to slip out from under it. But in other countries comic books are used in teaching tools, they're considered to be an art form whether it's in Tokyo or France. So we've really been behind the curve with comic books and I in my early career did comics for advertising. I was always aware from the time that I was eighteen years old that comic books get better readership anytime they take polls in magazines, anytime a comic ad appears it always goes right to the top of the list in readership comprehension and understanding, remembering what product was being sold. Yet, because it's maligned, comic books have been disrespected so all the good work that comes out of it is forgotten in the face of the attacks on comic books. So this form is ignored.

So this form that everyone disrespects is probably the ideal form by which to sell things and do things it's like a commercial on television. It's thirty seconds of just picture and words, picture and words. What do you want to see? Picture and words. Well then an ad in a magazine you see a picture and some words. Well that a picture does not tell the story. It's just a photograph. When you do it as a comic book, even though people may resist it, it's almost irresistible to read and to look at because you're telling a story with pictures and words. Because that medium works so well and people malign it so much it's very hard to bring people to understand why and that it's so good. So we did this comic and we combined film, we combined photographs, drawings of the characters, and when you look at a drawing of a character like Fiorello La Guardia and you look at a photograph and you go oh that's fiorello and you look at a drawing of Fiorello and you go oh that's Fiorello but I can make up a photograph it doesn't have to exist. I can make up a confrontation between two people. It doesn't have to exist and there didn't have to be a photographer there for the artwork to carry you into the story. So you when you watch these things, you see film you see photographs you see drawings and you put them all together in your mind and you get the one story. No one filmed La Guardia doing most of these things yeah they have the one photo of him smashing the stuff but that was a photograph. We made the photograph move. We made the pictures become part of the story. So in the end it's sort of like how do you do history without making a film? And if you're making a motion picture film and someone is dedicating all this money to something that you think is important but they may not think is important at all so the cost of it is very small but you get art and film and research and all this other stuff into a little story and when you watch the story it's no different from watching a historical document but an artist made up a lot of it and so you're believing it as a historical document in a medium that could never be done in another way. It's a new medium. And with that new medium you can tell new stories you can't tell any other way. Let's say whatshisname the Polish guy…

Medoff: Yahn Karsky.

Adams: Yahn Karsky. There's a limited number of photographs of Karsky. What, maybe two?

Medoff: Well he was an underground courier so who was taking pictures of him? Hopefully no one.

Adams: Because otherwise he'd be gone. (Laughs) So we were able to make all this stuff up from the few photos we had and you don't have a sense when you watch it that there was a limited amount of photographs because most of the 'photographs' were drawings. And most of the story was told in a way that couldn't be filmed because the film wasn't there and yet it appears and you as an audience see it firsthand, it seems like it's firsthand but it's done with drawings and film and photographs. There is a medium that could encompass all these things and push them together so you can hear the story. Well we want to hear the story and if we want to hear these stories and they're significant and important well how do you do it? I hate to say, comic books.

But it's not really a comic book. It's another form of the comic book medium and it works and if all things being equal it'll be done more in the future with different things because remember we're not so much a book store goer to people anymore. We do it once in a while but a lot of what we get is from the internet and the internet can move things. So all this technology and this incredible medium comes together into one form—animatics. These stories that we knew to tell and we really need to tell, nobody really wants to see a documentary on the Holocaust. It's too heart rending. You want to see stories that are optimistic with the background being the Holocaust and then if you want to go deeper and study it you go deeper and study it. So here we have a perfect medium for this even though it has application for many things but for us this is the most important and that's all we care about.

BC: So you've been working to get it in schools as well, does this DVD come with a teacher's guide of some sort?

Medoff: Disney has prepared another addition of this which includes bonus materials for teachers. Things like classroom activities, discussions to have with students, so the [DVD] that schools actually purchase has exactly the kind of material that teachers need to adapt it to classroom use. We're doing the same thing with the other comics related project that we're doing so each of them has a teacher's guide. So our book Cartoonist Against the Holocaust is a collection of political cartoons from the 30s and 40s about the Holocaust from American newspapers so that comes with a teacher's guide as well because teachers are looking for ways to actually use it as well in classroom settings.

I did a one page strip with Art Spiegelmen that's also at our booth. It was published in the Washington post so that's at our booth and we give that to teachers to use in classrooms. So we're doing a collaboration with a number of different artists and talking about different aspects we also did a comic talking about Darfur which was in the New York Times and again these are things we give to teachers in classrooms.

This interview has been broken into two parts. The second part will run tomorrow.