GAGMAN / Dov Fedler and Joanne Fedler

Information

Author:

Dov Fedler and Joanne Fedler

Date:

Brio Books
February 2022

Author:

Additional Info

GAGMAN

Rights holder: Linwood Messina
Original Language: English

Gagman is a touching and unique tale of survival through unimaginable horror.

A prisoner in a WWII concentration camp discovers a superpower that could keep him alive – he can make the commandant laugh by telling jokes. He must stay funny – or die.

"Gagman is a daring and uncompromising work, both allegory and achingly real — a confronting, haunting, and disturbing descent into hell, drawing on word and image to create a world in which to remain sane one must go mad. Dov Fedler totally inhabits his protagonist, and pushes his craft and his imagination to the limits to expose the horrors of Nazism, and to explore the redemptlive power of art, humanity and humour."
— Arnold Zable, Australian writer, prize-winning novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate.

Dov Fedler, in Gagman, has plunged the reader into a crazy world where the Holocaust collides with Superman and Nietzche and the result is a virtuosic graphic and written allegory. It is a very original take on a highly contested history – who can tell the story of the Holocaust? Through a mishmash of Talmudic scholarship and confronting black humour, Gagman is a way of looking into the abyss. A 21st century Scheherazade, a tale for our times.
— Sydney Jewish Museum

Pushed to the ends of his wit and humanity, Gagman is propelled into a spiralling madness in which he would sell his soul for a gag, simply to live another day.

Evoking themes from The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Fedler weaves the story of a Faustian bargain brokered in hell, where redemption comes in the form of a punchline.

Swapping his yellow star for a tattered comic book, Gagman roams the new world and zeitgeist determined to find answers to the deepest questions about loss, hope and belonging.

Illuminated by Fedler’s haunting cartoons, Gagman juxtaposes humour and pathos and explores survivor guilt, desperation and the search for meaning in the wake of the Holocaust.

Dov Fedler is a cartoonist. He is now in his 70s and has been drawing for more than 50 of those years.

Joanne Fedler is a speaker, publisher and the bestselling author of 14 books, including Secret Mothers’ Business, Things Without a Name and Unbecoming. She is Dov’s writing mentor, editor and middle daughter.

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