Expanding upon the Authorized Biography 

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At the Toonseum, a traveling exhibit honors comics pioneer Will Eisner (Pittsburgh City Paper)

Published on May 17, 2012 by in MoCCA, museum, New York City, Spirit, The Spirit, Will Eisner, Will Eisner A Spirited Life, Will Eisner's The Spirit comic book

by Robert Raczka

Will Eisner's "The Spirit"

WILL EISNER’S NEW YORK

continues through May 27.

Toonseum
945 Liberty Ave.
Downtown.
412-232-0199 or www.toonseum.org

Will Eisner’s gifts were legion: He was a talented and fearlessly inventive draftsman; he had a strong sense of narrative without being hobbled by convention; and his insight was built on observation and leavened with wisdom, yielding a nuanced psychology that particularly appealed to adults.

Eisner focused on one place — the New York City that he loved and which provided him with endless inspiration in the form of colorful characters, dramatic settings of street and stoop and rooftop, and off-the-avenue details so evocative that you can practically smell the urine. Recognized as a great comic artist, Eisner was simply a first-rate artist, tempering often-delightful entertainment with empathy for the daily struggles of all, particularly the dispossessed.

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A Tribute To Will Eisner (A Moment of Cerebus blog)

Published on May 14, 2012 by in A Contract With God, A Contract With God: And Other Tenement Stories, Will Eisner, Will Eisner A Spirited Life

A Tribute to Will Eisner by Dave Sims

A Tribute to Will Eisner by Dave Sims

DAVE SIM:
(from ‘My Dinner With Will & Other Stories’ in Following Cerebus #4, May 2005)

…He had invented the term graphic novel at the age of 60 and was then faced with the problem of the limited number of years that he had left to be productive and how he was going to use that time. He freely confessed that one of his big problems was that everything about the human condition interested him, and he could see for himself exactly how narrow the parameters of most graphic novels were. The vast majority were just serialised superhero stories collected under one cover. The fact that that left all other literary themes and subjects wide open for treatment – with the clock ticking – would be the driving force behind the last twenty seven years of his life. Every story that he tackled was new and untrammelled territory. It was no surprise that the subject he returned to, time and time again, was his own background in 1920s and 1930s New York City while still making occasional forays into the vast reaches of untapped literary territory such as Sundiata, A Legend of Africa. It was the New York eras he had lived through that were being lost with each passing year, and he felt an obvious and compelling need – as a member of those era’s dwindling custodial constituency – to document and preserve his recollections of it. The sense of urgency, it seems to me, was what made his choices for him and the sense of urgency compounded itself as his eighties (his eighties!) were disappearing behind him.

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High Society (Cerebus, Volume 2) by Dave Sim

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Great Moments in Comic History: Will Eisner Goes Underground

Published on May 10, 2012 by in Uncategorized

A History of Underground Comics

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By

April 21, 2012

When people talk about the defining moments in the history of comics, they usually bring up events like when Bob Kane met Bill Finger and made Batman, or when Jerry Siegel met Joe Simon and created Superman, or Stan Lee meeting Jack Kirby and coming up with a host of memorable characters. I would like to add one more hugely important meeting to the list: when Will Eisner met Denis Kitchen.

The interesting thing is, this meeting of great minds almost didn’t work out at all. In the 1970s, Will Eisner was already a veteran in the comics industry, having published hundreds of comics including The Spirit (which he penciled and wrote) and numerous other action comics. Denis Kitchen was an up and coming figure in comics, having just started his own “underground” comic publishing group called Kitchen Sink Press. Many of the younger generation of comic artists and writers had come to revere Will Eisner, and perhaps none more so than Denis Kitchen, who ran into Will Eisner at a comic convention and immediately tried to get him to publish with his company.

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The Will to Live (The Chiseler)

Published on May 9, 2012 by in Graphic novel, graphic novels, Spirit, Will Eisner, Will Eisner's The Spirit comic book

Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (Will Eisner Instructional Books)

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I first believed in god at age nine.

I first believed in Will Eisner at age seven.

God left at age 18. I bought my most recent Eisner collection (Hawks of the Sea – his first comic strip) last year.

I know I was seven because when I rifle through the black and white reprints of The Spirit from 1946 I recognize many of the stories. In some cases, I can still recall the color.

The Spirit ran weekly as an eight-page tabloid insert in the Sunday comics. There was nothing else like it: A complete noir story every week, beginning, middle and end. The Sunday comics were the highpoint of my week, and The Spirit was the highest.

Besides his longevity (Eisner died in 2005 at the age of 87), there are any number of reasons to see Eisner as the most influential comics artist of all time. His studio hired and encouraged such graphic stars as Jules Feiffer (whether you like Feiffer or not – I don’t), Wally Wood (I do) and various Marvel stalwarts.

His treatise on Comics and Sequential Art, so far as I know, is still the standard handbook and how-to. His interviews, comments and reprints flowed uninterrupted throughout his lifetime. He invigorated, expanded and legitimized the graphic novel in the 1970s. For biography and background, you can find 20 sites on the Internet that can fill the bill.

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Writing for Comics

Published on May 8, 2012 by in Comic book, comic book artist, comic book artists, comic books, Comic strip, Comic Studies, Comics, Uncategorized, Will Eisner, Will Eisner's The Spirit comic book, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, writer, writers

by Michael Lorenson

April 25, 2012

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (Will Eisner Instructional Books)

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I can’t say I have a whole lot of experience with writing graphic novel scripts, since all I’ve got under my belt are two Script Frenzy efforts, but going from zero knowledge to current knowledge there are some things I’ve found extremely useful and I figured I might as well share them.

First is a book by Will Eisner, called Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. For those who haven’t heard of Will Eisner, he’s the artist for whom the comics industry named their annual awards (The Eisner Awards), and he’s probably best known for his work on The Spirit though his credits run much deeper than just that. He later also turned to teaching and lecturing and is extremely respected in the field. Reading this book, it’s easy to see why. In this one he stays away from basic writerly things like what makes a character interesting, or any of  the nuts and bolts associated with good story writing, and focuses on what makes for compelling visual narrative. There are many ways in which graphic stories vary from prose, and even from movies, that aren’t obvious. At least, they weren’t obvious to me. There are loads of examples, using Eisner’s own work as reference, showing how things like minute changes in perspective, combining elements into a single panel, even details down to the lettering, can affect the user’s perception of the work, and user perception of the work is really what drives a good graphic story. You need to know the backbone of telling a good story before you can tell a good graphic story, but there’s no guarantee that being good at the first will allow you to be good with the second. So doing regular writing homework first is a must, but I think this book should be considered essential to anyone who wants to know how to take their story and tell it in a way that makes the best use of the square inches available to them on a comics page.

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© Will Eisner: A Spirited Life by Bob Andelman
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