The Plot: the Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of ZIon Will EIsner (with an introduction by Umberto Eco) Completing The Plot in the last month of his life, Will Eisner, the great master of American comics, tackled what he regarded as his most powerful work… Eisner hoped that his own graphic account of this outrageous fabrication could reach a mass audience in a way that no academic work possibly could. In presenting this extraordinary history, Eisner takes the reader on a journey that begins in late nineteenth century Paris, where an agent of the Russian secret police stumbles upon an old French philosophical work, which he plagiarizes, often word for word, creating a new document that seeks to implicate Jewish leaders and bankers in a plot to take over the world... the Protocols was first published in Russia in 1905. The forgery succeeded well beyond the propagandistic ambitions of its originators. In time, as World War I engulfed both Russia and most of the Western world in a deadly conflagration, the lie became an internationally accepted truth. Not even the venerable Times of London, which exposed the Protocols as a crude hoax in 1921, could put a stop to the publications, which soon sprang up in dozens of countries. Presenting a pageant of historical figures that includes, among many others, Tsar Nicholas II, Adolf Hitler, and Henry Ford, Eisner powerfully depicts the rise of modern anti-Semitic thought as seen through the spread of the Protocols itself. Written during the height of the Dreyfus Affair, which bitterly divided turn-of-the-century France, The Protocols, as Eisner reveals, was quickly adopted by numerous racist organizations, parties, and religions, be it Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, or Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, despite periodic denunciations and new French revelations, the Protocols continue to be published throughout the Arab, Asian, and European worlds… Will Eisner, who passes away on January 3, 2005, "had an amazing insight into the human condition and the heart of a true club boxer," in the words of Paul E. Fitzgerald of the Washington Post. Born in New York in 1917, Eisner was one of the greatest pioneers of the twentieth-century graphic art…