By Joe Eskenazi
Published 11/30/2007
Arts & Leisure
New Jersey Jewish Standard
There really isn’t a literary equivalent to comic book pioneer Will Eisner. As a teenager in the 1930s, he founded a superhero-factory comics company during the medium’s primordial days. And nearly 50 years later, he penned the first successful adult comic book — the “graphic novel.”
It’s as if an aging Johannes Gutenberg had knocked out “On the Road.”
Eisner died in 2005 at 87, but that didn’t hurt his career one bit — seven collections of his work have been released since his death.
Perhaps the most personal is “Life, in Pictures,” a nearly 500-page compendium of five Eisner stories written between 1985 and 2003. Subtitled “Autobiog-raphical Stories,” the book could just as well have been named “Those Anti-Semitic Bastards.” The overtly Jewish Eisner grew up and broke into an obscenely cutthroat comics business at a time when “kike” had not yet been sanitized into “the K-word.”
