This Sunday's New York Times featured an article by Steven Lee Beeber about comic book grandmaster Will Eisner and Eisner's latest project, a graphic novel exposing the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Eisner told the Times that the genesis for his latest work was his discovery that The Protocols were still being used to stir up hatred against Jews in the Middle East. 

Originally published in 1903, The Protocols were concocted by the Russian secret service, eager to discredit Jews who were leading reform movements in Russia.  In 1921 the Times of London published a series of articles demonstrating that the actual source for The Protocols was a French political satire published in 1864 by Maurice Joly.  In Joly's Dialogue in Hell the spirits of Machiavelli and Montesquieu discuss the methods by which Napoleon III could take over the world.  Mathieu Golovinski, who worked for the Russian secret service, simply lifted large sections of Joly's text and ascribed the comments to a secret 'cabal' of Jewish bankers, journalists, and financiers plotting to take over the world.

Eisner, who in the estimation of many invented the graphic novel with his A Contract With God (published in 1978), is forgoing fiction for a documentary approach in exposing The Protocols with his new 100-page graphic novel entitled The Plot.  Eisner's new work, which is still being inked, is divided into three sections.  In the first portion Eisner takes a first person point-of-view and describes how he came across The Protocols and then discovered the historical truth behind their creation.  In the second section he documents the story of the creation of The Protocols and their unmasking by the Times of London with a straightforward historical documentary approach.  In the final section Eisner juxtaposes sections of The Protocols with excerpts from Joly's Dialogue in Hell to prove his case definitively.