Terry LaBan is a Philadelphia-based cartoonist who has published comic book series, had internationally syndicated strips and, at the end of 2024, published “Mendel the Mess-Up,” a children’s graphic novel that tells the story of a boy who works to save his Eastern European village from the Cossacks.
“Mendel the Mess-Up,” distributed by Penguin Random House, is rooted in his grandfather’s experience, but not based on it.
LaBan is critically acclaimed and popular with readers young and old, but sometimes, inspiration strikes him in the same way it strikes anyone else: simply.
“The short answer is that it just popped into my head one day,” he said with a smile.
Mendel lives in an imaginary Eastern European country around the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s. He can’t seem to do anything right, whether it’s herd goats or chop wood, but he has the ability to save his community from Cossack invaders when nobody else can. The story is a fast-paced one filled with action and laughs that is aimed at younger audiences, but it also touches on universal themes and includes important tidbits based on Jewish history.
The author, who lives in Wyncote and attends the Germantown Jewish Centre, said that, while his ancestors lived in Eastern Europe during this time period, the way that history unfolded was such that he, and many other Jews, don’t know much about their experiences. For that reason, as well as others, he gets to be creative.
“[The story] is really kind of an amalgamation of the archetypes that live in my head — I like to say the shtetl that lives in my head,” he said. “I can only speak for myself, but I don’t really know much about the life that my ancestors lived in Eastern Europe. There are fragments of things my relatives told me, but they came over very early in the last century. My notion of what life was like is really based on pop culture.”
LaBan said that he was able to cobble together a world for Mendel the Mess-Up to live in based on stories like “The Fiddler on the Roof,” old photographs and more.
“I realized that there’s a sort of archetypal shtetl that exists in me, and I suspect for a lot of other people,” LaBan said.
He said he was interested in creating a “Jewish fantasy world” that doesn’t “correspond to any specific historical place or time,” even as there are elements of it that are recognizable to people.
“Mendel the Mess-Up” has wide appeal, but it is a completely and totally Jewish story. LaBan said that he has always been attracted to telling stories about his people.
“I just [always] loved the notion that I was a Jew, and I loved that we’re an ancient people,” he said.
LaBan wasn’t raised to be observant, but he has become more so as an adult. He was always intrigued by and attracted to Jewish worship and is proud to be a practicing Jew today.
“I’m not a rabbi; I’m not a scholar. I’m not somebody who can contribute to the intellectual tradition of Judaism. But I do have a desire to contribute my two cents — two shekels — to this sort of long, 3,000-year-old conversation we’ve been having,” he said.
For LaBan, an important part of this exercise is framing the story in a way that not just appeals to kids but also speaks to them. The story helps make history come alive and hopefully gives them a better understanding of their forefathers.
“I’m interested in kind of telling kids that these notions that they have, these archetypes, are important, and they’re an important way of understanding yourself and understanding where you come from,” he said. “My story, in a way, was an attempt to sort of place myself in those archetypes as a way of connecting and finding out why they’re important to me, and what I hope is that would kind of be a model for kids to say, ‘Oh, this history is not just something that I read about; it’s actually a living thing in my head — it’s something that I can play with.”
LaBan has found great success as a cartoonist. From 2001 to 2015, he and his wife published “Edge City,” a syndicated strip about a modern suburban Jewish family. He said that during this time he watched what he considers to be the end of a cultural institution.
“I felt like we were really present at the final, kind of closing down of what was once a great American art form. Because during the 15 years that we did this strip, it was a period that newspapers, I think, reached a critical tipping point in popular consciousness,” he said.
Ultimately, what means the most to LaBan is knowing that his work has impacted people, particularly young people. He said that when he was a kid, there were books that he used to carry with him and read repeatedly. Now, he is on the other side of that dynamic.
“I’ve encountered a number of kids that have told me that they love the book and have read it over and over again, multiple times, and that is the thing I really want to hear. When I was a kid, there were certain books that just really took me to a place that I just loved, and that I was really sad when they were done,” he said. “It was my ambition to write one of those books. If a kid reacted to my book the way I reacted to some of those books, then I achieved my goal, particularly if I made them want to do comics themselves.”
