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 Michael Netzer's own life is laden with drama: Born Mike Nasser
to U.S.-Lebanese Druze parents, he found in art a release from
childhood polio, worked for franchises including Marvel and D.C.
Comics, learned he had Jewish roots and moved to Israel, ending
up in a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Fluent in Arabic as well as English and Hebrew, Netzer, 63,
paints portraits or superhero reproductions on commission to a
clientele that he says includes Palestinians - an unusual
interaction for a religious settler.
He also takes to the road every few weeks, sketching passers-by
of all stripes, for free.
"I have seen ... it seems to me like nine million heroes and
villains in Israel. I see them all the time," he told Reuters in
his attic studio in Ofra.
"It's like people are the most interesting thing that there is.
And I look at the face and I see, you know, God looking back at
me."
One of his subjects, Endy Jber, a 24-year-old conservative
Muslim woman from the Israeli Arab village of Abu-Ghosh, seemed
to agree. After she sat for him on a Jerusalem pedestrian
thoroughfare, she assessed the pencil-sketch result and said:
"He's amazing. He expresses his soul through the picture."
Netzer says he is no stranger to sectarian strife, having lived
in post-1970s Lebanon. He acknowledges the tensions between
Israelis and Palestinians, cresting again as U.S. President
Donald Trump weighs in on a long-stalled peacemaking initiative.
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Trump himself has elements of a comics archetype, Netzer suggests.
"He's fighting a war with China that could be seen as a just war. So
there's something about him that's very heroic to the people who
(back him). On the other hand, look at how he's risen to be the
antithesis of a hero, of a good guy, it seems."
Though he left his mark on the comics canon - claiming a 1981 strip
he drew as the inspiration for a famous Spider Man movie scene of
the superhero kissing his girlfriend while inverted - Netzer does
not seem to miss the commercial form.
In the 1980s, he created an Israeli comics superhero - "Uri Ohn", or
"Virility Uri" - whose nemeses tend to be concocted villains rather
than representations of Israel's real-life foes.
"I've become sensitive to the use of propaganda, my art being used
to advance an idea that I may or may not be attached to," he said.
"And this is probably one of the reasons that led me to slow down
... I try not to upset people."
(Writing by Dan Williams; editing by John Stonestreet)
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