By Abby Ballas, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

“If you have to be a cartoonist, you’ll be a cartoonist,” as was the case for Terry LaBan, who discovered his calling in grade school as “the kid who could draw.” Since then, LaBan has led a successful cartooning career, starting with his work at Ann Arbor News where he composed political cartoons. He has also published works with notable comics publishers such as Fantagraphics, Dark Horse and DC Vertigo, but his longest position was with Egmont, with whom he wrote Donald Duck comics for 14 years for Europe’s substantial Donald Duck fanbase. LaBan spent an even longer period working with his wife, Patty LaBan, on Edge City, a comic centered around a Jewish family modeled after the LaBans. Terry LaBan’s most recent work, Mendel the Mess-Up, reflects his intrigue with historical societies while paying homage to his Jewish ancestry. Mendel the Mess-Up is a wholesome and humorous middle-grade graphic novel featuring a 12-year-old Jewish boy prone to accidentally wreaking havoc within his shtetl (a little Jewish village located in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust).

Mendel is no Mess-Up

Before poor Mendel Scholtz was even born, his shtetl’s local recluse, Starface Matja, cursed him with the Evil Eye, ensuring Mendel’s misfortune. Mendel is now becoming a young man, and all he wants to do is be a productive member of society, but his bad luck has led the villagers to dub him “Mendel the Mess-Up.” When the town gets word that the Cossacks are coming to invade, pillage and slaughter, the residents escape to the nearby caves to protect themselves until the Cossacks are gone. Mendel figures that the best way someone as unlucky as him can help his loved ones is to abandon them altogether, but even this plan goes wrong when he is captured by the Cossacks. The brightest of the barbaric horde and the most eager to prove himself is Pivik, who has what should be a brilliant idea to have Mendel lead him to the missing villagers. With his family and the entire town at stake, Mendel must play to his strengths to turn things around.

To Terry LaBan, Mendel’s is a story about self-esteem. LaBan noticed a pattern in children’s literature, wherein stories tend to showcase protagonists whose resolutions involve setting aside their differences in order to find their places in society and amongst their peers. Mendel’s story is unique, in that Mendel has to learn to accept himself for all that he is, including what makes him different. When he learns to view his curse less as a disability and more as a superpower, he is able to use it to his advantage.

“This story’s about internal self-acceptance, accepting things about yourself that you don’t like and that are really difficult to change. I think we all have those, especially when we’re in middle grade. Mendel can’t fix this thing about himself, but he learns to use it. In fact, he accepts it and decides to work with it instead of against it, and that’s when things start to turn around for him,” says LaBan.

While Mendel is an exemplary character demonstrating admirable qualities such as determination and a love for his community, Pivik is another nuanced character, who seeks to win favor with the other Cossacks. LaBan compares the Cossacks to middle school bullies—he explains that their malicious behavior is done for immediate satisfaction rather than as part of a long-term strategy to sabotage victims. “They just want to have fun, and they just don’t care about other people,” LaBan details. Pivik tries to devise a plan to be the best, most destructive Cossack and finally earn his acceptance among them. Despite his efforts, using his brain over brute force often makes him the subject of the other Cossacks’ humiliation, especially when there is no one else to terrorize.

European Shtetls and American Suburbs

Mendel the Mess-Up may remind some musical fans of Fiddler on the Roof or the other stories by Sholem Alecheim that inspired the famous musical. While his Jewish heritage is significant to him, Terry LaBan had little knowledge of his own ancestors in Eastern European settings, having grown up in a reform Jewish family in the United States. His knowledge of life in shtetls comes primarily from pop culture, such as Alecheim’s stories of Tevye the Milkman, and from photographs. “It always fascinates me to look at the people in the photos because I can see my family and my friends in those faces, but yet they’re in this completely different context,” LaBan shares.

LaBan is a student of history, and humanizing historical characters—some Jewish and some not—is important to LaBan. He is currently working on a story set in the Ice Age. With Mendel the Mess-Up, LaBan wanted to bring the world of his ancestors to life. He hoped to explore more than just their “coming to America” story, which tends to be the sole focus for many American Jews tracing their lineage. As LaBan puts it, Jews in shtetls were not thinking to themselves, “In a hundred years we’ll live like a suburb in America, and that’ll be better.” Nonetheless, LaBan never set out to create a particularly Jewish story; his goal was to create a fantasy setting that would suit the archetypes he wanted to create.

An Adventure for All

Despite its setting, Mendel the Mess-Up is not a book meant specifically for Jewish kids, and readers do not have to know anything about Judaism to appreciate the story. LaBan’s aim had simply been to create an engaging fantasy adventure for all to take pleasure. “I hope that kids who aren’t Jewish can just enjoy it as an adventure story set in an exotic place,” LaBan explains. He does, however, believe that the reading experience may vary between Jewish readers versus non-Jewish ones, especially surrounding the themes of text and study. For Jewish kids, this could be read as the importance of studying the Talmud, whereas other kids may just take away the significance of studying and perhaps a technique on how to memorize what they’ve read—namely the mental “hand” that readers see Mendel use to help him spell out his thoughts on a chalkboard.

Having worked in the cartooning industry for decades, LaBan is delighted to see the market expanding to include a wider variety of cartoons, moving beyond a time when superheroes predominated. He believes this growth in the market is largely due to an increasing popularity of middle-grade graphic novels, which comes as a result of living in the modern world. Kids living in a very visual era are likely more receptive to what graphic novels have to offer, as opposed to previous generations in which paragraphs of text were the main method for gleaning information.

Kids’ interest in visual storytelling shows up in Terry LaBan’s school visits as well. He says that students generally want to know more about certain characters, how to become a cartoonist and how they can create their own graphic novels. To engage his audience, LaBan often does drawing demonstrations, which entertain students while also teaching them about the choices a cartoonist has to make about his characters. At one particular visit, LaBan drew different versions of Mendel to determine which one the kids would empathize with the most.

Evidence of the success of graphic novels and the charm of Mendel the Mess-Up is apparent in its selection as a finalist for the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in middle-grade literature, which includes more than just graphic novels. Recognition of Mendel the Mess-Up was a gratifying experience for LaBan, and he hopes that the success of his book corresponds with a positive experience for the young readers who pick it up, stating, “That would make me really happy, like if a kid reads this and doesn’t want it to end and feels like they can read it over and over and over again, which I’ve heard of some kids doing—that’s really all I want.”

Authors’ Corner is a periodic profile feature in which authors discuss their writing process and the importance of school visits. Worlds of Words frequently hosts these authors for events in the collection. To find out when we are hosting an author, check out our events page. Journey through Worlds of Words during our open reading hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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• Themes: Abby Ballas, Mendel the Mess-Up, Terry LaBan
• Descriptors: Authors' Corner