An American comic book illustrator once feted for a portfolio including Batman and Wonder Woman covers has found a new calling in the Holy Land – drawing the everyday good and bad guys he sees on all sides.
Michael Netzer's own life is laden with drama: Born Mike Nasser to US-Lebanese Druze parents, he found in art a release from childhood polio, worked for franchises including Marvel and DC Comics, learned he had Jewish roots and moved to Israel, ending up in the settlement Ofra.
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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 passersby of all stripes, for free.
"I have seen … it seems to me like 9 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 US President Donald Trump weighs in on a long-stalled peacemaking initiative.
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-On" ("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."
