Comix Friday, Monday edition: An evening with Neil Kleid, part II

(Apologies for not getting this up on Friday - I wish I could say it was because I was at Comic-Con, but the truth is that some technical difficulties on Friday afternoon prevented me from publishing. If you're reading this, it's working again!)

We're back with Neil Kleid, talking about his latest graphic novel, "The Big Kahn." If you haven't read Part I, do it now!

By day, Neil is an art director for a publishing company. By night, he's a comic artist and writer juggling multiple exciting projects. "The Big Kahn" is an examination of the Orthodox community through the story of the Kahn family, which is turned upside down with the revelation that its patriarch, Rabbi David Kahn, was never actually Jewish. The book comes out this month from NBM Publishing.

Let’s talk about "The Big Kahn." How did you come up with the idea?

It's been about six or seven years now. I wrote it before "Brownsville." It came from a couple of things - at the time, I was a huge fan of "Six Feet Under," and the tone just kind of caught me. Watching it, you sit there and you’re brought into the Fishers' house, and you're brought into a profession that you don’t really know much about and you don't really think about. That's what the rabbinate's like. This could easily be a rabbi's house, or somebody with a job in the Jewish community. There was always the sense that I wanted to do a story with that tone and feel to it. I wanted to do my HBO graphic novel.

But what really kind of inspired me was that I had just read a book called "Matchstick Men," which got made into a Nicolas Cage movie. It's about con men, and it's about kind of a unique, different con man, and that got me interested in the whole idea of lying and cons and running for various scams and books and what have you.

As a writer, in general, what you try to do is take a situation that seems normal, and turn it on its ear. At the time I was looking at my life and at Judaism, I was questioning things, and questioning things that show up in the book. "The Big Kahn" ended up being my story, kind of the dumping ground for all these ideas. The questions Avi asks himself after he hears about his father's lie, that's sort of what inspired the book and then I went from there.

Have you ever had a crisis of faith like Lea and Avi?

When we were in Detroit, we were sort of a lenient family in a strict town. There's a lot going on in the community, especially when you're in a smaller town, that annoys you. There were things that the community would do or the rabbinate would do that I would just kind of say, "What's the point of that?" I started to feel like the community was very close-minded, the community wasn't open to different ideas - especially for someone like me, who wanted to be in comics, who went to a state school, I felt outside everything.

It sort of grew when I moved here to New York, and there was this whole new world that was open to me. I started hanging out with a larger crowd that wasn't Jewish, guys in the comics industry, and it made me question who I wanted to be. Did I want to be the guy who grew up really frum, wearing a black hat, learning every day, going to pray, or did I want to be somebody who was more a man of the world - a guy who can go Saturday night to Brooklyn and hang out in a local bar and hear music with a crowd that’s predominantly not Jewish?

There was a part of me that was really trying to find the world that I was trying to live in. For the first five years I was here, I was sort of riding the line, trying to figure out where my place was. And in that timeline, that was when I was writing "The Big Kahn."

I saw some parts of this book as a critique of the Jewish community, which is why I was surprised when you said that you're Modern Orthodox. Do you see this as a negative portrayal of this Orthodox community?

What you have to understand is, I live in the Orthodox community. So for me, I wouldn’t call it negative so much as I would call it a realist view. There are parts where people are going to turn to me and be like, "Wow, that's pretty cruel," or "That's exactly how it is." People gossip, people lie, people do things in the Jewish community that are not the nicest things in the world.

I’m working on a book right now called "Migdal David." It's about my brother, and my brother is developmentally disabled. It’s about him growing up in an Orthodox community, and him trying to get closer to the community while I'm trying to get away from it.

There’s an aspect of the book where my brother was trying to get into the same yeshiva I went to - this is a true story - and basically was outright rejected because they didn’t know how to deal with him, and was labeled mentally retarded. That terminology was actually used to my parents. He ended up in a dual program with the less religious high school and public school. So each level that was less Jewish was willing to help my brother. So to a guy like me, raging against the machine at the time, there was a sense, like, "Screw you, rabbis!"

The blessing is that I'm able to really explain and set you in a mood and tone of where I come from, but I can also see the warts, and I can tell you about those. Don’t get me wrong - I love being Jewish, I love the fact that my family is Jewish, I love Judaism. But I also know that we're not saints. There's a dark side of Judaism. When I was growing up, it was never discussed. "What are you talking about? Jews? Come on." And you want to turn around and be like, "Dude, it's my friends who are going out drinking and smoking." It happens!

So it becomes less of a storytelling sort of thing and more of an aspect of journalism, where you’re revealing this world and bringing this world to the eyes of the global stage, where people don’t see what happens in the Jewish community.

There’s sort of a paradox in the story that I can't reconcile - that Rabbi Kahn devoted so much of his life to Judaism, he even says in his will that "Judaism helped change my life and atone for many sins," but in being Jewish, he committed such a sin and never atoned for it. If he was such a religious Jew, how could he consider himself a religious Jew if he wasn't a Jew?

I understand where you're coming from, but you have to understand - once you’re caught up in a lie, especially a lie of such great magnitude, that your entire life hinges upon, it's hard to get out of it. It's hard to step back and say, "You know what, I have to explain what's going on here."

Yeah, Jews aren't supposed to lie, Jews aren't supposed to commit fraud, and at some point while he's studying he should sit back and say, "Okay, you know what, Rachel, kids, I gotta tell you, I'm not Jewish." On the other hand, he's a con man, so even deep down inside of him, even though he hasn't been a con man for 40 years, there's still a part of him that's committed to the game.

However, that's the cop-out answer. The real answer is that it's tough to admit when you’re lying, when you're caught up in something with so many lies. You know, his congregation depended on him, and isn't it better than the congregation look to him as a leader and have that benchmark to look to, than him revealing it and all of a sudden destroying the sense of kehillah, the sense of community that he's created these past 40 years? This is what he committed to. This is the life he wanted, the life that he lived, and I guess he felt, at least I'm devoting my life to God. Maybe in that devotion, it'll make up for the life I'm living.

I’m looking at this book from a Jewish perspective, but I don’t know how I would look at it if I weren’t Jewish and didn’t understand what was going on. Were you ever asked to tone it down in any way, to remove super-Jewish references? How are you marketing it to the non-Jewish community?

NBM is very good in that they really let me do my own thing. There's never a sense of, "This is a little toooo Jewish, we can’t really market that." I think in today’s comics market, you can market anything. You’ve got books like "Persepolis," you've got books like "Cairo," you've got books that are set in every different corner of the world, every different race, every different religion - and as a comic book reader who's not always able to see what that world is like, that's fascinating.

Craig Thompson’s "Blankets" I thought was a great book, and what fascinated me about the book, and my one critique about it, was that anyone can write a love story. I wanted to see more about how Christianity affected him, because I don't know much about it. That's why I love "Persepolis," because "Persepolis" really set a plate for me at a table that I'm not usually invited to.

What I try to do with my books is do the same thing, but still make it accessible. "Brownsville" had two challenges - one, that people don’t know much about the inner workings of the Mob, other than what they see in TV and movies, and it also opened up the world of 1920s and 30s Judaism. I tried to recreate the world without resorting to stereotypes - these are regular guys, doing what they do, they happen to be Jews and they happen to be mobsters.

With "The Big Kahn," too, I hope as we go through things are explained to the point where somebody with an outsider's view can walk in and say, "All right, I can walk around in this world and understand why they're having the trouble they're having." I do what I can - there's a glossary in the back of the book that gives you the words you might need to know. But for the most part, I try to make it accessible to people who are not like me.

Did you come up with the name Kahn before titling the book? “The Big Kahn” is the perfect title - how did that come about?

It was originally titled "The Big C-O-N." As I was writing it, I thought, I should name this guy Kahn!

Did they ever have a different name?

They did, and I can’t remember off the top of my head. [pulls up document on computer] I wrote this in 2003. His name was Rabbi David Miller.

How did you connect with [the book's artist] Nicolas Cinquegrani?

I had just seen his work online - friends of mine were pointing to his website, and I sent him a random e-mail: Hey, Nico, this is who I am, this is what I'm doing, would you be interested in doing the book? And it just went from there.

Is he Jewish?

He's not. He’s Chilean.

Were there any things that he might not have known how to draw?

Whenever you’re going to work on a book that's a little more specific, as a writer it's really your duty to gather photo references. I would send him links, I would send him some Hebrew text in PDF form. For Nico it was interesting because he was living here in the city at the time, so when I would say "hey, this is how I want the synagogue to look," he would go where I would tell him.

When did you get in touch with Nico, and how long did it take until the completion of the book?

He’s been working on the book for about a year and a half now. Nico was actually the second artist on board, we have a different artist originally.

What’s it like to start over with a new artist?

It really, really, really sucks. I actually just lost an artist two weeks ago on a project. I’ve been working on what I tell people is my Harry Potter, and this artist is just fantastic. She already did sketches for me, and we started working on a bunch of stuff, and she just decided she wanted to do her own thing. So I’m kind of at square one now, where I have to go find somebody.

Finding somebody who’s willing to commit to starting a project for free is tough. Even if you're just like, "Do five pages so we can package a pitch and send it off to somebody." There are better men and women than I who are out there paying their artists to do pitches. I just can’t afford it.

What’s next for you?

I’ve got a short story in an anthology from Dark Horse comics. They’re resurrecting “Creepy,” which is like one of those classic 'Tales From the Crypt" horror anthologies, and I've got a story in the first issue.

I’ve been working on a webcomic at the Image Comics/Shadowline website - the story is called "Action, Ohio," and it’s sort of a deconstruction of the superhero silver age. The high concept of that is, what would happen if the silver age of comics was used as a coverup to hide the fact that there are superheroes living in Ohio?

I mentioned "Migdal David" before, the story about my brother - that’s probably going to take up the next year and a half. I have a publisher for that, but I can't reveal who it is.

Do you think you’ll ever do anything more with the Kahn family?

Probably not. There are some books that are just stand-alone - you got in, you told your tale and you got out. No one wants to see "Pretty Woman 2"!

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