The Story of Purim: A Comic Book Megillah

By Yosef and Leah Urso

(Morah Leah Publishing, ISBN 9781735194134

Review by Ruti Eastman

The Purim story is one of the most entertaining teaching tools in the panoply of Jewish education that is Torah. I have always loved the story, as did our children growing up. Since I brought up only sons, I came late to the “where are the female faces?” party. We just didn’t think about it. In the community in which our kids grew up, boys and girls didn’t mix; so it seemed that the world was made entirely of boys. But once they married, and especially once they gave us granddaughters, we belatedly started wondering where the girls and women were in picture books designed to tell the stories of women in Jewish history.

In a time when too many religious Jewish children’s books seem to have expunged all females from the story — including the stories of Esther and Ruth! — the delightful and talented husband and wife team of Leah and Yoseph Urso has come to the rescue.

Yoseph and Leah have created a children’s comic book and video that tell the story of Esther, the secretly Jewish queen of Persia who saved the Jewish people from annihilation at the hands of the wicked Haman. With female characters (and female voices in the video), this is the comic book I would have loved for my sons to read, rather than those that either had no women in them, or women who certainly didn’t seem capable of saving an oppressed minority. As Leah pointed out: “Women are often depicted as Barbie doll images. We wanted our Esther to look and behave like a real person.”

Boys can also enjoy the heroic Mordechai. Parents will find the story a pleasurable and informative book to read with their children. In a time when antisemitism seems to be on the rise, it is such a Jewish response to have a comic book that allows us to laugh along with our kids at the villainous Haman who wants to annihilate us.

Yoseph introduced me to details of the process and style he employed in creating the artwork for The Story of Purim: A Comic Book Megillah. “I first created it as a 12-page comic book that could easily be put into our own mishloach manot. I wanted it to be in a 1960s-1970s retro ‘flat’ style. All of the comic books today are so ‘slick’ and 3-D. Great artwork — but I’m a child of the Sixties, and I prefer simple. I’m happy to find out that ‘retro’ is coming back into style in the illustration world. I think this style tells the story simply without technological embellishments.”

I asked Yoseph what determined the material the team would use for the Purim story, as there is a vast compendium of midrashic and other commentary available. “In addition to just enjoying the comic book, we wanted it to be an aid for kids (and adults) to visualize and remember the Purim story. Even as many times as I’ve heard the megillah over the years, I realized that I didn’t always remember the sequence of events in the story correctly, or I would confuse some of the commentary with the actual megillah text. We wanted it to stick pretty close to the simple reading of the megillah, without going off into commentary or weird midrash, like Vashti having a tail, and so on.”

Leah added an important detail. “Of course, we wrote the dialogue from our imaginations, based on the megillah.”