Banner Graphic, Volume 5, Number 264, Greencastle, Putnam County, 8 January 1975 — Page 13

English-Language comic strip popular in Israel

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel’s first, and so far only, daily comic strip is a runaway success among everybody except the majority of native-born Israelis. The strip, which lampoons everything from inflation to Arab terrorism, is drawn by an amiable American immigrant and appears in the English-lan-guage Jerusalem Post. “Dry Bones,” as the sixsquare strip is entitled, has become a favorite among diplomats, U.N. troops and Englishspeaking immigrants. But an attempt to translate it into Hebrew in a mass-circula-tion daily flopped miserably and was quickly dropped. “Israelis never grew up with comics,” says the cartoonist, 36-year-old Ya’akov Kirschen. “They don’t relate to word balloons, and perhaps they don’t know where to start reading, since Hebrew runs from right to left.” But the reaction to Dry Bones in English has been remarkable. Kirschen has a sheaf of letters from immigrants thanking him for ridiculing government red tape or rude bus drivers. “I thought nobody cared,” most letters begin. The strip’s most popular character is a tired, paunchy Israeli in his mid-40s who became famous by offering readers a free “protektzia card,” slang Hebrew for friends in high places or “pull.” Hundreds of readers wrote in for protektzia cards. Another strip posed the question: why does Arab guerrilla leader Yasir Arafat always appear to have a three-day-old beard: among the dozens of replies he uses inferior Israeli razor blades. Kirschen, an ex-New Yorker, drew cartoons for Playboy and other magazines. In the 19605, his Jewish conscience aroused, he began drawing what he calls “a radical Zionist comic strip” for underground Jewish newspapers. In 1971 he immigrated here with his wife and three' children. Kirschen arrived with the idea of reviving the Jewish art form in Israel, “but I found that the pressures of society here demanded a morale-boost-er, so I created the strip.” Dry Bones’ outlook is invariably positive. It is named for the story in the Biblical book of Ezekiel, in which God breathed life into dead bones to symbolize the rebirth of the Jewish people. From its beginning two years ago, Dry Bones has reflected Kirschen’s own arduous integration into Israeli society. The first strips dealt only with the bureaucracy, suicidal motorists and alienation from closely-knit Israeli society. Later, it began dipping a toe into Israel’s complex political system and Byzantine financial scandals. The 1973 Mideast War pushed Dry Bones into satirizing the international scene, showing guerrillas hijacking the world, and joking over Israel’s diplomatic isolation. Russian and Spanish-lan-guage newspapers also plan to publish the strip, and perhaps one day Israelis will learn to eniov it. too. Kirschen hopes. Meanwhile Kirschen recently

Expertise

Coin tossing aids charity

ONTARIO, Calif. (AP) - Walter Talleur, Tim Happ and Dean McGougan make the carny operators shudder. They practiced for weeks tossing dimes and quarters into plates, then went to the Los Angeles County Fair to beat the con men at the toss-the-coin-in-the-<lish-and-win-a-prize booths. More than 100 bears, turtles, hippopotamuses, poodles and other stuffed animals they won were recently donated to a home for retarded children in nearby Chino. “We just do it for the fun of it,” Talleur said. “It started two years ago when we just got tired of being gypped. We started practicing so we could win for a change.” In past years the men had won 80 carny

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ATTRACTING FANB-Israel’s first daily comic strip, “Dry Bones,” has become a success in the English-language Jerusalem Post, but attempts to translate it into Hebrew have met with failure. transplanted popular American Menace and the Wizard of Id strips into Israeli situations, bemoaning Israel’s skyshowing Peanuts, Dennis the rocketing cost of living.

Herbal medicine gaining in Mexico

By EDITH M. LEDERER Associated Press Writer MEXICO CITY (AP) - The hawker outside Mexico City’s biggest food market held a bottle of what he said was tapeworms in one hand and a chewing gum herbal cure in the other. He was doing a booming business among a dozen poor peasants. Twenty five feet away, another barker with a louder voice and a different capsule cure but no bottled tapeworms was also lecturing to a small knot of people. The salesman and other vendors of herbal medicine report a lucrative business in natural cures which they claim work much better than pills that doctors dole out. “More people are buying now than ever before,” said Guillermo Valareal, the loud-voiced barker. “Many people are afraid of going to the doctor. The poor can’t afford it but they can afford these herbal medicines. The rich go to the doctor but he can’t cure them so they come here and they are cured.” Dr. Ruben Arguero, secretary of the National Academy of Medicine, said: “In Mexico, herbal medicine is the popular medicine.” He said it is used extensively, particularly in the provinces, and can be helpful for minor ailments and psychosomatic diseases. “In the public hospitals, you find a very large proportion of patients who tried herbal medicine first,” he said. “In the long run, if there’s anything serious they end up at the doctor.” Honorio Ramirez, who says he’s been selling herbal medicines for 17 years, and has expanded his business operations as far as Denver, Colo., said his customers are proof that the natural drugs work. One customer, Elvira Moya,

creatures, which also went to charity. They pulled a trick to increase their take this year. Practicing was a problem. The 9M>-inch pedal plates that appear each year on stuffed animals’ heads were not sold in stores. A makeshift dinner plate target could be used, but without the correctly shaped target the desired precision could not be developed. “We decided to call up the fair and told them we were from the Elks Club and were going to have a Las Vegas night,” Talleur explained. The concessionaire for the coin pitch stands at the Los Angeles fair set aside a stack of coin pitch plates and left them at the fairgrounds for what he

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said she came to buy an herbal salve to cure the pain in her aunt’s shoulder because the doctor could do nothing. “In Mexico, the people have faith in the herbs and the seller is like a doctor,” she said. “The people come. They tell him their problems and he gives them a preparation.” Another customer, Catalina Malfavon, said she’s been using “flor de tila,” the flower of lime trees, to calm her nerves for years “and it’s very good.” She swears by another herb, “pasi florina,” to cure her insomnia. A third customer, Paz Aguirre, bought a long green cactus from Sonora io keep a friend’s cancer of the lung and arm under control. She said the woman had been using this plus rattlesnake skin for a year “and she’s very well now and back at work.” The herb sellers in their stands crammed with burlap bags filled with hundreds of different roots, plants and drugs are very low key. The hawkers, however, try to captivate their audiences with a nonstop stream of words, promises and show stoppers. Valareal first tried pushing his herbal capsules shouting: “They can cure pains anywhere. They will cure phlebitis, bronchitis ... and you can eat anything the good Lord puts on your plate.” After a number of sales, he switched to a little book of Aztec herbal remedies for everything from syphilis and hemorrhoids to heart attacks and diabetes. That sold even better. Ramirez said there are herb cures for virtually every medical problem. “You want to have children? There are plants to have children ‘gobernadora’ and ‘cachanes.’ You don’t want to have children? We're still looking for a plant for that.”

thought was an Elks’ group. After weeks of practicing with plate-topped animals, the trio went to the fair. Their throwing secret? “We balance the coin between the thumb and joined index and middle finger, then throw them in an underhand motion to send the coin in an arch aimed at near the rear plate lip,” said McGougan. “The slight backward spin makes the coins bounce straight up and land in the plate.” Adds Happ, “Most people make the mistake of trying to skip the coin so it ricochets from one plate to another.”

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