Joe Kubert & The Art of "Yossel: April 19, 1943"

Joe Kubert’s graphic novel Yossel: April 19, 1943 is a critically acclaimed comics narrative about art, resistance, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Through evocative pencil drawings, Kubert returns to the 1940s, when the then-young artist first broke into comics publishing asks a classic comic book question: “What If?” A late-career work by a major figure in American comics history, Joe Kubert’s Yossel brilliantly weaves comic book imagination with autobiography and real-world history.   

Yossel was first published in 2003 by ibooks and reissued in 2011 by DC Comics. Nominated for the Will Eisner Comic Book Industry Award for Best New Graphic Album in 2004, Yossel is not inked and colored like most of Kubert’s comics but is instead composed of original pencil drawings with accompanying text boxes. Kubert’s original drawings have previously been exhibited at the Israeli Cartoon Museum and the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, and they are displayed for the first time in the United States here at the Cary Collection.