Will Eisner: An Appreciation
In yesterday’s Washington Post, there was a lengthy and remarkably good article about one of the great figures of American art and literature of the past 60 years, Will Eisner. Eisner’s work is not well-known beyond a small community because he works in a medium that is only recently gaining recognition as a legitimate artform. While Eisner refers to himself as a “graphic novelist” (he coined the term, back in 1977) or a “narrative artist,” most people would recognize what he does as comic books.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Eisner is the single most important figure in the history of American comics. At age 87, he is one of the few surviving people who was present at the creation of the medium in the mid-1930s. Simply as a repository of knowledge and folklore from the seminal era of the industry, he is irreplaceable. But that’s only the beginning. When he ran a studio in the late 30s and early 40s with his partner Jerry Iger, Eisner had a hand in creating many memorable characters and gave a start to many highly-regarded young artists, including Jack Kirby, who went on to create Captain America and the heroes of the 1960s Marvel universe who are still so popular today.
In 1940, he launched his best-known creation, The Spirit, which ran in a special 8-page weekly supplement to the Sunday comics in newspapers around the country. Not only was the format of the Spirit section an innovation, but Eisner had the acumen to make a highly unusual business decision at the time and retain rights to the character. So, unlike the poor kids who created Superman, Batman and many other stars in the constellation of American comics, Eisner never lost creative or legal control of his own strip.
Eisner went to fight in World War II, leaving the Spirit in the hands of assistants. When he returned, he went on to produce some of the finest work ever seen, to this day, in the comics medium. The post-war Spirit stories, now being reprinted in complete, full-color editions by DC Comics (starting with Volume 12 of the Spirit Archive Editions), are of such consistently high literary and artistic quality that it’s hard to imagine how a young man still in his late 20s was able to produce them – even with talented assistants – on a weekly schedule.
Eisner’s dramatic art style – occasionally imitated, never equaled – was inspired by the expressionism of German cinema, Orson Welles, and American film noir. If for nothing else, he would be remembered as one of the very top stylists and draftsmen to ever work in the field. His stories were pulpy distillations of O. Henry and Guy DeMaupessant, full of intrigue, adventure, romance and violence, but also possessed of genuine poignancy and humanity. Weaving words and pictures together with awesome assurance, impeccable pacing and the humorist’s light touch for caricature and exaggeration, he produced something entirely new and exciting in a medium that had, until then, been used almost exclusively to depict the exploits of men in long underwear and talking animals.
His very best work explored the farthest possibilities of the comic medium and are startling in their sophistication and accomplishment. All in all, Eisner’s body of work from this era holds up as well as any of the classic American literature of the postwar era, and better than much of what was highly-regarded at the time. Only now is Eisner starting to get credit for his literary and artistic achievement outside the cloistered community of comics enthusiasts.
In 1952, Eisner left the Spirit and the comics industry to spend 20 years producing illustrated equipment maintenance manuals for the US Army. He sat out the horror comics boom and bust of the 1950s, the establishment of the Comics Code, and the revival of superheroes in the 60s. By the early 70s, when comics fandom was rediscovering the early work of the “Golden Age” and the Spirit was being reprinted in black-and-white magazines, Eisner was already an elder statesman, and one would be excused for thinking that, in his mid-60s, his best work was behind him.
But that was only the beginning. Eisner long had ambitions for the comic artform that went beyond the restrictive format of a monthly 32-page pamphlet and the narrow range of genre-based subject matter. In 1977, he convinced Baronet Books to publish a collection of four longer stories based on his childhood growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s and 30s as a deluxe trade paperback. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories was one of the first graphic novels published in the United States, and its critical and commercial success inspired a generation of serious creators (such as Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, and many others) to explore and expand the possibilities of narrative art. Eisner himself went on to publish many more graphic novels – nearly one a year, down to the present day.
He also found time to write two volumes of criticism exploring the techniques of graphic storytelling and the inter-relationship of words and pictures. His insights as a scholar and practitioner of the artform are invaluable, and the books are essential reading for anyone who aspires to a career as a professional comic artist.
For any one of these things – historical figure, artist, writer, businessman, creator of the graphic novel, critic or just general ambassador of the comics medium to a skeptical outside world – Eisner would rank as one of the most important people in the field. But the fact that he combines all of them, and, at the age of 87, shows no sign of letting up, is remarkable. It’s good to see he has lived to enjoy the respect and wider recognition he deserves, as in such profiles as the Post article. It will also be, as always, a pleasure to see him later this summer at the San Diego Comic-Con, where he appears each year to hand out the industry’s annual awards for outstanding work. They are, of course, the Eisner Awards.
9:44:36 AM 
|
|
