Comics, etc.
MUSEUM OF DEGENERATES: PORTRAITS OF THE AMERICAN GROTESQUE
💥 8 Years of comics, 2016 - 2024
🎨 Color comics in full color
📚 Extensive histories, notes and backstories
🤯 Massive introduction
🔖 >250 pages
Reviews:
“There is no better comics artist built for this moment than Eli Valley … In the great tradition of Jewish writers and artists who refuse to be silent in the face of hatred, violence, and condemnation, Valley is not just willing to fight; he’s eager and enthusiastic about bringing the fight to his enemies…
Just as Valley’s work is thematically tied to this historical moment of madness when Zionists made common cause with antisemites to vilify artists, radicals, and dissidents, his visual style dates back over various highlights of graphic art from the past century, including the "degenerate" art hated by both Nordau and the Nazis — the surrealists and dadaists of the 1920s (Valley himself claims George Grosz and Otto Dix as influences), Jewish-American cartoonists of the 1930s and '40s, the lurid crime and horror comics of the 1950s (which can be seen in the book’s colorful and aggressive EC-styled cover), the grotesqueries of Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, and a handful of the underground artists of the ’60s and ‘70s. But he has a sharp, rough edge all his own, operating in blazing primary colors, portraying his subjects as literal monsters of the id, all appetite and grievance, human corpses in various states of decay cannibalizing the living to maintain their own undead vigor…
Almost no one is spared in Valley’s savage portrayals, and he does not choose to employ much in the way of subtlety or subtext. Only the victims are portrayed as recognizable and human as they are led into various meat grinders by the skeletal limbs, throbbing veins, and mad, sparkling eyes of their persecutors. Each piece is accompanied by blocks of text that explain the circumstance, background, and reasoning behind the cartoon. These are as calm, cool, and reasoned as the illustrations are provocative, assaultive, and vicious. For what Valley is doing is simply flipping the script of a century of antisemitic propaganda; with clear intention and lethal effectiveness, he portrays the powerful people who harm the weak and scapegoat others for their own misdeeds as misshapen, preternatural things, and the innocent people who suffer at their hands as, if not heroic, at the very least recognizable. He humanizes those who those leaders demand we see as less than human, and forcibly strips everything human away from the people who have declared themselves above common humanity.
Vividly shocking, revealingly detailed, and with no interest whatsoever in playing a game of respectability or sophisticated obfuscation, Museum of Degenerates is a pure distillation of the work Eli Valley has been doing as perhaps the clearest moral voice coming out of the comics world in the present moment. Commitment and conviction saturate every illustration on every page in a media environment where far too many people are afraid or unable to say what they mean with any directness. It is a funny, infuriating, astonishing, antagonizing, and alarming book that will win him few friends in the current moment but is exactly and precisely the kind of art that is needed to meet it.” — The Comics Journal
“We live in reactionary times: convicted criminals lead governments, nationalism surges, and liberal institutions cling to civility as the world burns. Moral discourse collapses into branding, atrocity is spun as policy, and many respond with restraint, offering analysis tempered by detachment. Cartoonist and writer Eli Valley does not.
His new collection, ‘Museum of Degenerates,’ gathers eight years of blistering comics, accompanied by essays that trace a lineage of reaction and resistance. Valley targets not just the usual villains – Trump's fascist alliances, war-hungry neocons, Israeli politicians, pro-Israel pundits like Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and AIPAC, and tech authoritarians like Elon Musk – but also so-called liberals who capitulate to power or cloak violence in the language of virtue. From RBG and Nancy Pelosi to Israeli protesters chanting for democracy while ignoring the occupation, no one is spared.
Valley rose to prominence in ‘The Forward’ and ‘Jewish Currents,’ where his unsparing satire of Jewish and American power structures drew both acclaim and outrage. Drawing from George Grosz, Otto Dix, Yiddish caricature and MAD magazine, Valley has developed a visual language that doesn't just mock power – it exposes its anatomy. Liberalism becomes a hollow theater of principles; Zionism, a machinery of erasure. This is not metaphor. It's dissection.
His work is dense, researched and relentless, elevating the grotesque by dragging it into full view. At a time when language fails, Valley refuses euphemism. He draws what others won't say, and dares you to look.” — Haaretz
“A fascinating compendium of Valley’s incendiary efforts to portray the repulsive underside of U.S. politics. With his intense and unrelenting satirical vision, Valley seeks to condemn contemporary fascism, Zionism, and corruption wherever he finds it—and he finds it often. His wide range of targets includes Republicans, their high-ranking enablers in the Democratic Party, Christian Zionist fundamentalists, genocide purveyors such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and a cast of assorted creeps such as Roy Moore, Stephen Miller, and David Duke.
Across his body of work, Valley uses vulgar language and imagery to great effect. His aesthetic is strikingly reminiscent of the early twentieth century political artists George Grosz and Otto Dix, whose harsh geometric styles rendered their subjects viscerally unpleasant to look at…
All of this is tough stuff. The genocide in Gaza, the continued massacres by settlers in the occupied territories, and the duplicity of AIPAC combine throughout Valley’s work in ways that validate his dark and haunting vision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his work has been subject to vicious attacks by right-wing Jewish supporters of Israel, who have labeled him a “kapo” and a “self-hating Jew,” among other slurs. For these critics, Valley writes in the book’s commentary, “the sole barometer of Jewishness and of attitudes toward Jews is Israel”…
Two hundred years after Daumier and others helped to pioneer the genre, the political cartoon remains an artistic weapon of attack, capable of holding truth to power. Valley wields his editorial pen effectively and devastatingly. We need brilliant, perceptive artists like him—and others—if we are to see these jackals for who they truly are.” — The Progressive
“Eli Valley was a dangerous artist long before Donald Trump’s Christian nationalists took power, openly aspiring to a near-future apocalypse in Israel—or rather, post-Israel, minus Jews who decline to convert. In the introduction to this newest work, Valley says of his already famously (or notoriously) satirical work that his critics hate him most for calling upon memory. Memory that “has come alive, history is both metaphor and alarm, and past trauma [that] has the power to illuminate and help mobilize against our current catastrophe” (p. xi).
That is: collective memories that have been twisted into justification for things otherwise beyond any moral defense…
There is no one quite so savage as Valley when he gets riled up—no one, at least, in the history of visual satire. Valley puts himself in front of an ideological firing squad, chest bare, daring them to shoot. Or rather, to keep shooting—because he also speaks for the non-Zionist, anti-Zionist Jewish community, a group more hated, by far, than actual, verifiable antisemites…
But there is more to say about Valley and the soul of his work, which he sometimes describes as a kind of Jewish prayer. The wonderfully humorous character of his drawings—perhaps unmatched in satirizing the rich since the German artists of the Weimar years—frequently offers more pain than laughter. Valley suggests that he draws upon Psalm 130:1, “From out of the depths, I call to you,” referencing the cantor or yorid, who literally descends a few inches to a lower point on the pulpit, so that he may lift up the spirit from the depths (pp. xvi–xvii). The depths are not pretty. Valley explains that he is going to maintain his commentary with each cartoon, recalling what he did and why. He is descending, in prose as well as pictures, in order to lift up.
Sometimes, he is ruminative, wondering whether a different set of visual choices might have been better. Sometimes—actually, very often—he is really, really funny.” — Counterpunch
