Heavyweight & Victory Parade
Presented in partnership with UW-Madison Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies Conney Project on Jewish Arts.
Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory is an analog inkwash comic about situating family Holocaust history in the context of ongoing colonialism, resisting trauma narratives that excuse the violences of the present, and figuring out whether the ghosts you’ve invented to keep you company are really the ghosts you need.
About Victory Parade: One of a group of women working as welders in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rose Arensberg has fallen in love with a disabled veteran while awaiting the return of her husband, Sam, a soldier in the American army serving in Europe. As we follow the bittersweet, heartbreaking stories of Rose and her fellow Rosie-the-Riveters, we’re immersed in the day-to-day challenges of life on the home front as seen through the eyes of these resilient women, as well as through the eyes of Eleanor, Rose’s impressionable young daughter, and Ruth, the German Jewish refugee Rose has taken into their home.
Ruth’s desperate attempt to exorcise the nightmare of growing up in pre-war Nazi Germany takes her into the world of professional women wrestlers—with devastating consequences. And Sam’s encounters with the horrors of a liberated concentration camp follow him home to Brooklyn in the form of terrifying flashbacks that will leave him scarred forever.
Victory Parade paints a deeply affecting portrait of how individuals and civilizations process mass trauma. Magnificently drawn by Leela Corman, it’s an Expressionist journey through the battlefields of the human heart and the mass graves of genocide.
Solomon Brager
Solomon J. Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach in history, media, and gender studies.
Leela Corman
Leela Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator, working in the realm of diaspora Ashkenazi culture. third-generation restorative work, and New York City history. Her books include the graphic novels Victory Parade, a story about WWII, women's wrestling, and the astral plane over Buchenwald (Schocken/Pantheon, 2024), Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), which was nominated for the Eisner, the L.A. Times Book Award, and Le Prix Artemisia, and won the ROMICS Prize for Best Anglo-American Comic and the MoCCA Award of Excellence, and the short comics collections You Are Not A Guest (Field Mouse Press, 2023) and We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016). Her short comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine, Nautilus, The Nib, Bandcamp, and other publications. She is a founding instructor at Sequential Artists Workshop. Raised in New York City, she now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is an assistant professor at Rhode Island School of Design.