As the Sydney Jewish Museum put it, « Gagman is a 21st century Scheherazade, a tale of our time. » It’s the tale of a man who survives the Nazi concentration camps by telling jokes to the commandant. Each time he lives to see another day, another prison does not. And so ultimately it is about survivor's guilt to the extreme and explores how we make meaning in a post-Holocaust world.

The author, Dov Fedler, was one of South Africa’s most beloved and preeminent political cartoonists before his retirement in 2016. He first imagined Gagman while in an Israeli hotel room in 1986 and the story has never stopped evolving since then.

There were so many drafts and versions that Dov lost sight of how to piece it all together. He also had experienced powerful bursts of selfdoubt: is he qualified to write a story about the camps? And is it okay to use humor to do so? And so Gagman spent many years stored away in boxes until 2018 when Dov became determined to finish what he had started. That’s when his Sydney-based daughter Joanne Fedler, an internationally bestselling author, stepped in to sort through those 17 drafts in order to help craft what is now a complete manuscript, 35 years later.

Gagman is not a graphic novel but a novel with some illustrations that complement the story; they do not tell the story.