Jan. 07, 2005 - 10:29 a.m.
As you may or may not know Will Eisner died on January 3, 2005. He is the grandfather of the graphic novel and without him I wouldn�t be able to find the creations of Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (among others) at my local borders.
From http://deniskitchen.com/docs/bios/bio_will_eisner.html
WILL EISNER is recognized internationally as one of the giants in the field of sequential art, a term he coined. His career spanned nearly seventy years and eight decades, beginning with contributions to Wow, What a Magazine while still a teenager in 1936, followed by the start of his buccaneer saga Hawks of the Seas the same year. From 1936 to 1939 the Eisner & Iger Studio provided a steady supply of content to publishers at the virtual onset of the comic book industry. Their staff included such future luminaries as Jack Kurtzberg (later Jack Kirby, co-creator of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four), Lou Fine, Bob Kane (creator of Batman) and Mort Meskin. While partnered with Jerry Iger, Eisner created Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and soon after created Dollman and Blackhawk. Eisner also famously turned down a crude submission called Superman by equally young creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. An autobiographical account of those formative years can be found in Eisner's The Dreamer.
In 1940 Eisner sold his interest in the comic book packaging company to Iger and created his most famous character, The Spirit, a masked crime fighter. The Spirit was the lead feature in an unprecedented format: a 16-page color comic book that was inserted in Sunday newspapers, the first of numerous Eisner innovations. At its height The Spirit insert appeared in twenty major market newspapers with a combined circulation of 5 million readers each Sunday, quintupling the circulation of America's best-selling monthly comic book.
From 1942-45 he served three years during World War II as Warrant Officer in the Pentagon. There he created motivational posters and pioneered the use of cartoons for instructional purposes with the publication Army Motors. His innovative approach, combining hard information within cartoon plots proved so effective that he privately contracted the Army in 1951 to produce P*S, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly and continued to do so for many years afterward. He formed American Visuals Corporation in 1948 to supply similar educational comics to clients ranging from the U.S. Government's Job Corps to General Motors. He also produced a wide array of cartoon-based educational materials for schools across America.
Eisner returned to The Spirit in late 1945 and continued producing it till 1952. Though he "retired" the character that year, it has rarely been out of print since. The seven and eight page stories he wrote and drew each week are regarded as classics of the form. The first comic book reprints were issued by Quality Comics from 1944-50, followed by Fiction House 1952-54, Harvey Comics 1966-67, Kitchen Sink Press 1973 (the "underground" Spirits), Warren Publications 1974-76 (Spirit magazine) and Kitchen Sink Press again from 1977 to 1998 (in various comic book, magazine and book formats). Since 2000 DC Comics has undertaken an ambitious program to reprint all 645 stories in color hard covers as The Spirit Archives.
More than a dozen years after he was already tabbed "a national treasure" by former assistant Jules Feiffer in 1965, Eisner created a new genre: the graphic novel. He coined the term with his seminal 1978 work A Contract with God. Countless fellow professionals were inspired to follow, creating America's fastest-growing literary genre. Eisner produced nearly twenty additional graphic novels, including A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue, To the Heart of the Storm, Family Matter and The Name of the Game --- roughly a book per year.
Eisner taught comic art classes for years at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and authored two definitive instructional books on the medium, Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling, both perennial sellers with over twenty reprintings.
Since 1988, one of the comics industry's most prestigious awards, The Eisner Award, is named after him and presented annually before a packed ballroom at America's largest comics convention in San Diego. Nominees are selected each year by blue ribbon committees, with winners selected by a vote of comics professionals. Will Eisner has modestly accepted several Eisner Awards over the years, as well as several Harveys, the other prestigious industry award named after his close friend, the late Harvey Kurtzman. In 2001 Eisner surely broke some sort of record by winning separate Harvey Awards for works created sixty years apart: the 1940 Spirit Archives won "Best Reprint" while his then newest graphic novel, Last Day in Vietnam, published in 2000, won for "Best Graphic Novel." Eisner has also won numerous international awards.
In May 2002 Wizard magazine named Eisner "the most influential comic artist of all time." Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winning novel Kavalier and Clay is based in good part on Eisner. On June 3, 2002 Eisner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Federation for Jewish Culture, only the second such honor in the organization's history, presented by Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman. A film documentary about Eisner's career is underway from Montilla Pictures (Andrew and Jon Cooke). Eisners most recent graphic novel, Fagin the Jew, a reinterpretation of the villain in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, was published by Doubleday in Fall 2003.
His last completed work, THE PLOT: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in May 2005. Umberto Eco has written the introduction to the book.
THE PLOT: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion unravels one of the most pernicious hoaxes of the twentieth century. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious piece of anti-Semitic propoganda created and disseminated by Russia's secret police 100 years ago, purported to be a blueprint written by Jewish leaders for taking over the world. Although the Times of London revealed in 1921 that The Protocols was a hoax, millions continue to believe its fictitious plot is true. Now, a new generation, fueled by anti-Semitism and the many Internet sites that spread hateful messages, has adapted the text to suit its purposes.
THE PLOT: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion explains how and why the Protocols were crafted and presents a pageant of historical figures, from Tsar Nicholas II to Henry Ford to Adolf Hilter. THE PLOT exposes the twisted history of the Protocols document, from 19th- century Russians to modern-day Klan members to Islamic fundamentalists. By setting the record straight, Eisner hoped he could raise public consciousness of anti-Semitism throughout the world and draw attention to the nefarious ways in which governments use propaganda to influence public opinion. Arrangements have already been made for THE PLOT to be published in eight countries, and Eisner himself was making arrangements for an Arabic translation.
Fourteen graphic novels comprising The Will Eisner Library will be re-issued by Norton, beginning with The Contract with God Trilogy, combining three titles which focus on a single mythical block in the Bronx (A Contract with God, Dropsie Avenue and A Life Force), with new art and commentary by Eisner. This trilogy is scheduled for publication in November 2005.
DC Comics, Inc., which just released The Will Eisner Companion, a career overview by Christopher Couch and Steven Weiner) will continue to publish The Spirit Archives (currently up to Volume 15) and has acquired the right to produce new editions of The Spirit by contemporary writers and artists. No line-ups or details have yet been announced.
Coming from Dark Horse Comics in 2005 is Eisner/Miller: One on One, a wide-ranging dialogue between Eisner and Frank Miller (Dark Knight, Sin City) and Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, a biography by journalist Bob Andelman.
A career-spanning art exhibit, The Will Eisner Retrospective will open at MOCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) in New York City in May 2005, followed by galleries at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, The University of Massachusetts in Amherst and possibly additional venues.
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Will Eisner died January 3, 2005, following complications from open heart surgery.
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All Text � Denis Kitchen
(This was an article Neil Gaiman wrote for the Chicago Comics Convention tribute to Will Eisner in 1996. I got it off his blog at www.neilgaiman.com which you should check out.)
The first Spirit Comic I bought was the Harvey Spirit #2. I bought it from Alan Austin's shop, which was not a shop but a basement with occasional opening hours, in those antediluvian days of 1975 when there were no comic shops, somewhere in South London.
It was the last day of school. And instead of doing all the things we were meant to do on the last day of school, I snuck out of school and got on a bus with my friend Dave Dickson, and went off to South London. Dave was a lot smaller than me, and had hurt his foot recently. (I have not told anyone this story for fifteen years. But back when I did tell it, if Dave was around he would leap in early and tell people he had hurt his foot, at the beginning of the story.)
On the way to the shop I was mugged, very badly. Badly is probably not quite the word I want to use. Ineptly might be closer to the truth. The mugger was only a little older than we were, skinny and extremely nervous. He was trailing along behind us.
"Eh," he shouted. We carried on walking.
"Eh," he said again. We were getting further away from him.
He ran alongside us and shouted, "Hey! I've got a knife in my pocket. Give me your money."
I looked him up and I looked him down and, with the arrogance and refusal to be impressed of a fourteen-year-old boy, I told him, " You have not got a knife in your pocket."
"Yes, I do."
"You don't."
"Do."
"You have not got a knife in your pocket." I mean, he didn't have a knife. I was almost certain that he didn't have a knife.
"I do."
"No, you don't. Show it to me. If you've got a knife, let's see it."
I started to suspect that I was going to win this particular argument. At any rate, he said, "Look, whether or not I've got a knife in my pocket, give me your money."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because," I said flatly, "it's my money. Not yours. Now go away."
And he seemed ready to leave, when Dave Dickson, who was quite terrified (and who had hurt his foot), stammered out the first thing he had said during the whole mugging. He said, "How much do you want?"
And our mugger turned back to me and said, "How much have you got?"
I thought about this. I had forty English pounds on me: money I had saved up over the whole term, saved for this end-of-term comics-buying blowout. More money than I had ever had on me at one time in my whole fourteen-year-old life. (It would probably have been equivalent to about a hundred 1975 dollars.)
"I've got 20 pence on me," I told him, grudgingly. "But I need ten pence for the bus home."
"Give me ten pence then," said the mugger.
So I did, and he went away.
"You weren't a lot of help," I told Dave.
"I hurt my leg," he said. "So I couldn't run away. It was all right for you. You could have run away."
When we got to the basement comic shop, it was closed. We knocked on the door until it was opened.
"Go away," said Alan Austin. "We're closed."
"But," I said, "I came all the way here from Croydon, and we got mugged and I've got all my money for the whole term with me!"
I think it was the mugging that impressed them, more than the money. Anyway, they let us in. I bought lots of old comics, but all I remember now Creepy #1, and The Spirit #2.
We read them on the bus, on the way home. I thought the Spirit was the coolest thing in the whole world.
"I'm Plaster of Paris, the toast of Monmartre, I stick to my man until death us do part!" That was one of the stories in there. I had no idea that the stories I was reading were over-thirty-year-old reprints: they were as up-to-date and immediate as anything I had ever read.
I had always wanted to be a writer of comics: now I decided I was also going to be a comic artist when I grew up, and to celebrate this decision, I drew a picture of the Spirit with his shirt ripped and everything. I sent it to Comics Unlimited, a British Fanzine. The drawing came back with a letter from Alan Austin, telling me that they had recently improved the standard of their fan art, and now they had people like Jean-Daniel Breque drawing for them, and they were sorry they couldn't print it. I decided that I wouldn't be a comics artist when I grew up after all.
By the time I was seventeen I had stopped buying comics. There was nothing I wanted to read that I could find in comics any more; I became quite grumpy about the medium. Except for the Spirit. I kept reading and buying Spirit reprints - the older Warren ones and the current Kitchen Sink ones. The stories never palled and the joy of reading them never faded.
(A couple of years later, as a young journalist, I was very jealous of my schoolfriend Geoff Notkin who was studying at the school of Visual Arts in New York, under Will Eisner himself. This seemed almost unfair somehow, like getting God in to run your Bible Studies Group.)
And then time went on, and all of a sudden, I was writing comics.
Since being a comics-writing person, I have met Will on many occasions, all over the world: In Germany and San Diego and Dallas and Spain.
I remember watching Will receive an award for life-achievement in Germany, the thrill of seeing a thousand people on their feet and clapping until their hands hurt and then we still clapped, and Will looked modestly embarrassed, and Ann Eisner beamed like a lighthouse.
The last time we met was on the north coast of Spain, where the world fades out into a kind of warm autumnal haze. We spent almost a week together, Will and Ann, and Jaime and Koko Hernandez, and me, a tight-knit fraternity of people who spoke no Spanish. One day Ann and Will and I walked down along the edge of the sea. We walked for a couple of miles, talking about comics, and the medium, and the history of the medium, and the future of comics, and the Spirit, and the people Will had known. It was like a guided tour of the medium we loved. I found myself hoping that when I got to be Will's age I could be that sharp, that wise, that funny.
I told Will, when we were walking, that even when I stopped reading comics I read The Spirit, and I told him that it was his Spirit stories that had left me wanting to write comics, and that the Sandman, like the Spirit, was conceived as a machine for telling stories..
But I didn't tell him that a drawing of the Spirit began and ended my career as a fan artist. Nor did I ever tell him just how badly I was mugged, on my way to buy my first Spirit.
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