Will Eisner Champion of the Graphic Novel ( PDFDrive )

the seemingly countless graphic novelists and serious comic artists working today got where they are largely because of Will Eisner.” Eisner would have smiled, appreciating the sentiment, and perhaps even more, the credentials of its source. Eisner’s fellow artists and writers eulogized him as well, both at a memorial held, fittingly enough, on New York’s Lower East Side, the center of the Jewish immigrant tide that Eisner had chronicled, and in print. Selections from those illustrate this chapter but represent only a handful of the outpourings after his death. Eisner himself commented on one occasion, “I want to be remembered for cutting a path in the woods.” Above and next: Comic Book Artist vol. 2, no. 6, 2005. Testimonials about Eisner poured in after his death on January 3, 2005. Among them were these pieces by Craig Thompson (Blankets), Shawn McManus (Fables), and Everett Raymond Kinstler (official portrait artist for presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, as well as a comics artist).



The Plot came out, complete with a foreword by philosopher and author Umberto Eco, signifying the importance both of the volume as a chronicle of a long historical tragedy and of Eisner as a creator. But without Eisner to help publicize it, The Plot reached no wider audience than those graphic novels from his previous publishers. Norton repackaged and reissued Eisner’s library of graphic novels, and they remain in print. One more educational volume was published posthumously, Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative (2008), the final project on Will’s drafting table, which was completed by Pete Poplaski, a talented designer and artist who had worked with Kitchen for many years. Two other landmarks of Eisner’s life were celebrated in 2008, three years after his death. DC completed the twenty-four volumes of The Spirit Archives, which preserved the run of his legendary stories from the newspaper sections (two final volumes collect the daily strips and later pieces of his work); and his longtime friend Frank Miller directed The Spirit movie. While Eisner didn’t live to see the film released (or to hear the criticism that greeted it), he would have been immeasurably pleased to be connected to the first major motion picture directed by a cartoonist from comics—one who got the assignment in large part because of his work in comics. Eisner’s achievements have also become recognized in the art world on new levels after his death. Not only have there been solo exhibitions at museums devoted to cartooning—the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art in New York (MoCCA), San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, and Pittsburgh’s Toonseum— but Eisner was also one of the Masters of American Comics (along with his former studio artist Jack Kirby, fellow teacher Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, and others) in a major touring exhibition that began in 2005, traveling from coast to coast to museums as prestigious and varied as the Hammer in Los Angeles and the Jewish Museum in New York City. The original artwork for graphic novels has become valued as serious art, with one of Frank Miller’s covers for The Dark Knight Returns selling for almost a halfmillion dollars, and a lovely Spirit splash going for about $50,000. Eisner passed away at an interesting time for graphic novels; like Moses, he glimpsed the Promised Land but did not quite get to step into it. He had seen Spiegelman win a Pulitzer (to his simultaneous joy and a touch of jealousy); bookstores promote graphic novels and add sections devoted to them (though he would have preferred them to be shelved within literature); and a rising tide of critical respect for the form (if accompanied by occasional critical anguish that it had happened). But many of the other developments he worked toward would only happen in the years immediately after his death. Jeff Smith’s Bone (2005)

would move from self-published collections to editions from Scholastic Books, reaching hundreds of thousands of children—the first comics work to accomplish that goal; and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) would be published by the esteemed New York publisher Houghton Mifflin, to great acclaim, then brought to the stage at the Public Theater and for a Tony- nominated run on Broadway. When it was in development, Eisner had encouraged cartoonist and educator James Sturm to found the Center for Cartoon Studies, but he didn’t live to see it open and begin awarding its first MFA degrees. But Eisner is spiritually present there nonetheless, as Sturm reports, speaking of the Will Eisner Free Lecture series held jointly by the center and Dartmouth College, one that is also sponsored by the foundation Will and Ann set up, which their family continues. Sturm (an Eisner winner himself) explains, “What Will represented was taking comics seriously, both as an art form and commercially.” As this book goes to press, every major American publisher has a graphic novel program within one or more of its imprints. The New York Times has a graphic books bestseller list. And comics and graphic novels can be studied at dozens of major universities. In 2013, the New York Public Library’s main branch held an exhibit called The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter, curated by noted historian Leonard S. Marcus, and it included A Contract with God with a 1969 quote from author John Updike: “I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.” Eisner might have preferred the exhibit not be one of children’s’ books, but the location (both for its dignity and proximity less than a mile from his old Tudor City studio) and the quote would surely have made him smile.

Famous Comic Book Creators autographed trading card, Eclipse Enterprises, 1992. In a series of 110 cards, it is only fitting that Eisner was No. 1.

Surely Eisner would have smiled at the New York Times the week this manuscript was being completed, with a massive and complimentary review of Frank Miller’s work on Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The Times examined its importance and comics lineage at the same time that Miller’s publisher Dark Horse issued an omnibus collection timed to capitalize on the release of the second Sin City motion picture, co-directed by Miller. The issue also featured on its cover a glowing review of Jules Feiffer’s Kill My Mother, the Pulitzer Prize– winning cartoonist’s first noir graphic novel, published almost seventy years after he went to work for Eisner. Eisner’s contributions to the evolution of the comics form are legion. There are many other artists whose art style inspired others. There are a handful of artists who have crossed over to serve as important educators, or who have codified the theory of their art. There are even fewer who have done work that broke the established molds of their form, opening new ground for others. Fewer still have established new business models that other artists have been able to follow. Eisner, and only Eisner in all of comics, did it all. The parentage of the graphic novel is, to some degree, split among many fathers of the successful birth of this vital, creative form. Stepping over the ancestors who gave us traits we recognize, Harvey Kurtzman did the first recognizable prototype, Will Eisner did the first that the creative community rallied around, and Art Spiegelman did the breakthrough book that finally earned the literary recognition Eisner had been demanding for decades. All three were inspirations for generations of cartoonists, writers, and artists. But only Eisner adopted the fledgling form and nourished it in academia, among the retailers, and in his own creative community, without limiting his encouragement to work that reflected his own style or taste. Only Eisner was completely ready to have his creative children grow up and pursue their own ideals, as long as they helped earn the world’s respect for his chosen medium. Surely the truest test of fatherhood is doing all you can for your children and then being content to step back and bask in their accomplishments—the exact posture and smile that Will Eisner showed year after year on the stage of the awards that bore his name. There is an endless debate about the “great man” theory of history versus the “historical forces” theory. And if it cannot be resolved for events of world- shattering proportions, it is unlikely to be resolved for the evolution of the graphic novel. But perhaps it is enough to say, like Denny Colt emerging from Wildwood Cemetery, that Will Eisner’s spirit continues to walk the world of comics and make it a better place.

Self-portrait, mid-1990s. Next five images: Original art for “The Last Hero,” an unpublished Spirit story, 1996. Shown here, the first four pages and the last page.











APPENDIX WILL EISNER AND THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: THE 2013 SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON PANEL To celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of A Contract with God, an illustrious panel gathered at Comic-Con International on July 20, 2013, to discuss Will Eisner’s influence on the comics world. Here is an edited version of that very special hour, featuring Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Coraline, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane); Denis Kitchen (The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen, and Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, and Eisner’s art agent and literary executor); Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, Making Comics, and The Sculptor); and Jeff Smith (Bone and Rasl), moderated by this book’s author, Paul Levitz. PAUL LEVITZ: Will’s life is well documented, as befits a figure who made a tremendous impact on our field, often in unconventional ways. Most brilliant artists and writers make the totality of their impact through their work, but Will went beyond that. But what is it about this guy? Why are we all here? He did some good comic books a thousand years ago on The Spirit, but I don’t think that’s why we’re still talking about him. DENIS KITCHEN: If Will Eisner had just done The Spirit, he’d still be a legendary guy in comics, because it was amazing in the context of 1940 to ’52. He took a break in the middle of it and went to the Pentagon and developed educational comics, something not accepted at the time. He did it so well that PS magazine is still used by the army today. By the time I met Will in 1971, he was technically out of the comic book business. I met him not because I sought him out, but because he sought me out. He had heard that underground comix had a different way of doing business— creators with freedom, return of original art, control of the rights, especially the

distribution, which was nonreturnable. The businessman [in him] was intrigued by that, so he began peppering me with questions. He didn’t really want to talk about the old days; he was forward-looking. It’s easy to say that he was an innovator. He started doing comics again, and by 1978 he did A Contract with God. You can’t say it was technically the first graphic novel, but it certainly was the first modern graphic novel, and it changed this industry forever. And then, at an age when a lot of his contemporaries were retiring, he created twenty more. PL: I’m going to come back to that first graphic novel, but Scott comes into this from a very different direction, as the theoretician who in many ways picked up the baton from Will in his analysis. SCOTT McCLOUD: Will was completely different from anyone else that I knew in his generation. I would occasionally be privileged to see him argue with those guys, and it was really funny. I saw him arguing with Gil Kane about Maus. Will thought it was important for any number of reasons that we now recognize as valid; Gil (though a very smart guy and a wonderful debater) thought it was just so badly drawn. Gil couldn’t get past that. When I encountered Will for the first time, I was really young and just beginning to broaden my horizons beyond X-Men and Daredevil. I found these old Spirits, and I thought they were fantastic. The stuff that Will was doing in the early forties was a revolution, but the kind of revolution you can’t even recognize until years later. What he did three separate times was, he was leading an army into battle before the army was ready or even knew it was an army. The revolution with The Spirit that I recognized as a kid was that he was one of the first people to recognize what to do with the page. When they were making comics in the late thirties, they were taking old comic strips and slapping them together on the page. They didn’t understand that you could do something with the bigger canvas, and Will did. And he did all kinds of things, things that people would take decades to figure out how to follow up on.

Detail, cover of The Spirit no. 11, Kitchen Sink Press, August 1985.

Splash page for “Life Below,” The Spirit no. 404, February 22, 1948. This version was modified for inclusion in The Spirit Magazine no. 4, Warren Publishing, October 1974. Eisner’s incorporation of the logo into the artwork, and his composition of the splash pages connecting to the story, were his trademarks. More than fifty Spirit splashes showed this style, and the following pages show a selection of some of his best.

The next revolution was that nonfiction comics revolution. We still don’t understand all the things that he saw as possibilities decades ago. He thought we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg for nonfiction comics, and I think we’ve still only seen the tip of the iceberg. We’re only really just now beginning to exploit the possibilities he saw. Then there was Contract, maybe not technically the first graphic novel, but his was the shot across the bow that gave people the sense of what that could be. The fact that he did another twenty was remarkable. The man was already retired when he started that third revolution. JEFF SMITH: I also got to know Will’s work through the Warren Spirit. I loved his drawing. His over-the-top caricature. The amount of emotion that was flying through his characters. That was also the first comic I saw that had some sense of continuity from story to story: I think the Spirit got his shins shot by a bad guy, and for three other stories he had to hobble along on crutches. As a kid, I thought, that’s so interesting. You saw Batman, and he got hurt, but he’s all back the next issue. What I think made Will special—at least it was for me as a relatively young guy getting into the field—[was that] he was so interested in what new people were doing. He wasn’t just interested; he had to know what was going on. He was very quick to give you a pat on the back, or a smile, or encouragement. I just think that means the world, and I believe in passing it on. I learned from him that that’s important. I feel the same way, and I try to go out and see what’s new. PL: Back to that first graphic novel. I spent the afternoon with Jules Feiffer a few weeks back, who is working on his first noir graphic novel [Kill My Mother], which he looks at as channeling Will and Caniff. We began talking about Tantrum, a graphic novel Jules did at about the same time as Contract. In many ways Tantrum is more of a modern graphic novel; it’s one story, adult themes, and Jules was more of a public figure, to Will’s occasional frustration. Why didn’t this matter as much as A Contract with God? Part of it, I think, is, when I asked Jules why he didn’t do another, he said it hadn’t been a great success, and he simply went on and did other things. It’s not that Contract was a great commercial success, either, but Will didn’t give up. What does that tenacity mean as an artist? You’ve each done projects that were against the tide at the time: Bone, Zot!, the undergrounds had everything going against them at the time. How does tenacity make a difference in how we change the world as artists?

Splash pages for “The Hallowe’en Spirit of 1946,” The Spirit no. 335, October 27, 1946. “Slippery Eall,” The Spirit no. 392, November 30, 1947. “Glob,” The Spirit no. 458, March 6, 1949.

JS: I think part of it is as simple as, Will was a comic book guy, and Jules was an outsider, and we had more of a connection to [Contract]. There was something magical about taking that name “graphic novel,” which I don’t like, but it was floating around earlier on other things; putting it on that book at that time clicked —though I don’t think it clicked at the moment. I think it clicked in retrospect. I was aware of Contract and read it, but I didn’t like it as much as The Spirit, even though I think it’s brilliant now. For me, it was like when you saw that next generation of comic book people, like Spiegel-man, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Dave Gibbons; they actually said I’m going to do a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s when A Contract with God [mattered]. I know Frank Miller has told me that it was what made him want to do it. Dark Knight and Maus are what made me want to do it, and I think there’s a pretty clear cause. I think it was because Eisner was a comic book guy … there was more connection from us to him than there was to Feiffer, not in terms of respect, but in terms of love. SMcC: One of the things about Tantrum was that when it came out, it would show up on the shelves alongside the other collections of Feiffer’s cartoons, and it looked at home. It looked like it belonged. Will did things that didn’t necessary look like they belonged yet. People could say: That looks interesting, but I don’t have a category for that yet; I don’t have a bit of shelf space in my head to put this thing in. Neil, do you remember Tantrum? NEIL GAIMAN: I remember Tantrum. I was seventeen, and I bought it with my own money. Because Tantrum was full pages, it didn’t feel like comics. Tantrum was absolutely a graphic novel, but it doesn’t look like one. Each panel fills a page. Also, the story, which is basically the psycho-sexual oddity and odyssey of a forty-something-year-old man who gets so upset with being an adult that he holds his breath until he’s two years old again, and goes around trying to get piggybacks and belly rubs from beautiful women. DK: There were psycho-sexual moments in Contract, too. People forget how dark it was for the time, in 1978. Contract was definitely first. Will was attending a press conference announcing Tantrum, and Jules said, “This is the first book of its kind …” and he saw Will in the audience, stopped in midsentence, and finished, “… other than Contract with God.”

PL: You look back even to Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels, and it’s not a seamless evolution, but a long evolution to the graphic novel. So if Contract isn’t the first, yet we look to Will as the father of the form, is it that fatherhood is not simply giving birth, but adoption, rearing, and the encouragement of the child to find their full potential? One of the things that made Will different from other cartoonists was the way he organized his life to reach [out] to others working in the form, including the kind of relationships he had with us to goad us into taking the next steps. NG: The most interesting thing about arguing with Will was, you’d come up with something really cool or brilliant, and you’d explain to him why whatever you’d thought of or suggested would fix everything in comics. He would nod, and then he’d explain when they’d tried that in 1947. And explain why it didn’t work.

“The Fortune,” The Spirit no. 363, May 11, 1947.

Splash page for “The Thing,” The Spirit no. 426, July 25, 1948.

Having learned more or less everything I knew about writing comics from Will, buying Comics & Sequential Art and studying it as my textbook because there wasn’t anything else; trying to do something that was good enough for Will, and then once I’d done, I think, Signal to Noise [1992], one of the most peculiar things I’d ever done, and giving that to Will very nervously, saying it’s not the kind of stuff that you do and it’s not the kind of stuff that you like; then running into him in an elevator and having him talk for five minutes, telling me what he thought about Signal to Noise. Realizing that there weren’t that many people of his generation who would have even been interested. He was willing to embrace. He looked on us as the logical place where things were going to go, not as comics being the thing that he did. He wanted it to expand. SMcC: And he had the patience to wait as long as it took. He understood that some changes might just take decades. If so, that’s fine, we’ll keep the conversation going until then. PL: This is a very influential panel. Each of you at this table has made remarkable differences in comics, above and beyond your personal creative work. You made decisions that changed the field: Jeff, with his self-publishing, then finding a way to work through Scholastic to reach out to a wider audience —perhaps the first time a major publisher was successful that way, certainly with the children’s market. You can argue for Pantheon with Persepolis or Maus, but [those were] not as radical, because those projects weren’t continuously available in self-publishing; they’d been available, and then Pantheon took over. Scott was doing Understanding Comics, which had no logical publishing audience at the time. The easiest book to sell to a publisher is something like a book that has succeeded, only a little better. When you go in and say there really hasn’t been anything like this and the world needs it, the publisher goes, “Oh, god.” I speak as a former publisher. You can have great success that way, but more often tremendous failure. That changed the game in many ways. Denis, you published that first book. SMcC: Actually, for the first month, Kevin Eastman, then Denis. Funny thing was, I just wanted Will to like it. I didn’t know who else was going to read it. He was nice enough to give me one of those back cover quotes, but he was the only one to mention comics as a literary form. Neil and my friend Steve Bissette had to harangue me into even including a chapter on writing.

NG: When Scott was doing Understanding Comics, I would get these great minicomics versions of the chapters. I read the whole book, and I don’t know if I harangued you, but I remonstrated with you. SMcC: Very politely. NG: I was very, very polite. I just pointed out that there was an enormous hole in your book, and it was flawed cripplingly with nothing about the value of literature and storytelling. SMcC: But it was funny, that was what Will picked up on—the promises of the literary [aspect]. That was something he held so dear, that even though I was clearly so interested in mechanics, the parts, the machine of storytelling, to him the heart of it was storytelling itself. And that was something that continued to be important to him. I remember Will touring SPX, one of the first little art comics shows. Everybody had their little minicomic, these sixteen-page things, Day-Glo, with leather, all these experimental things. He was concerned, saying, “Where’s the content? Where are the stories?” And I was able to tell him, all these kids with their little sixteen-page minis are all working on two-or three-hundred-page graphic novels. One of those kids was Craig Thompson [who did Blankets]. PL: Circle back to influence. You’ve changed the way creators work, the way the conversation is defined. In much the same way that Will did, but the weird thing was, he was of a different generation. In that first generation, Joe Simon was probably the next-best businessman, and he never really spent any time telling us how to do things better. He did things his way. If you asked Joe a question, he was enormously giving, generous, but he was content with his way. You’ve talked about Will’s curiosity. Let’s talk about [his] restlessness. NG: I interviewed Will. The last really good, long conversation we had was onstage, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. And we talked for an hour, and the truth is, the bit of the conversation that I remember, that I took away, because it was the one place where things got magic for me, was asking Will why he kept doing it. Why are you bringing graphic novels out now, at an age when all of your contemporaries are retired, or are dead, or both. Why? What drives you? And he started talking about a film he saw once, in which Kirk Douglas played a trumpet player who was looking for the note [Young Man with a Horn]. The idea was, if he kept playing his trumpet, he would find this note, and the note would

be this perfect note that you would blow, and there would be nothing wrong with it, and once you had blown it, you were finished. He described his entire career as being in search of that note. He would hear this thing somewhere up ahead, and he was always convinced that with the next project he could hear the note. That he could play the note. And he wouldn’t need to do anything after that. But he’d do the project and finish it, and he’d look at it, and the note would keep moving. I took that away, and I still treasure that when I think about Will, about questing for the note.

“Fox at Bay,” The Spirit no. 491, October 23, 1949.

Splash page for “Money, Money,” The Spirit no. 391, November 23, 1947.

JS: Will provided a pretty good example of how to do a career. I looked at Will and said, I wanna do it that way. He’s still active. So many people retire or stop working, for whatever reason, but Will was still extremely active and doing really good books. I thought To the Heart of the Storm was really great. I thought that was one of the best graphic novels put out. And he was still present; he was still around. That’s the model. Why stop as long as there’s some imagination, some spark, some story? Then you’re interested in life and having fun. I think he’s a great model for how to do this. SMcC: I’d even go one step further and say that he was certainly a role model for me in terms of his career, but also on a personal level. He was pretty much the whole package. I saw the relationship he had with Ann for all those many years, and I wanted very much to have that kind of relationship with my wife, and so far I’ve been lucky enough to have that with Ivy. I liked his attitude about the future, about embracing change, being curious about change. Not always agreeing with all of our crazy new theories, but always ready to debate them, and just keeping a tremendously constructive, positive, and optimistic (in the good sense of the word, not deluded) attitude toward life. And I’ve tried to incorporate that into my own sensibilities. DK: And that he was always intellectually curious. When I first met Will, my generation had a “don’t trust anyone over thirty” attitude. Will was hardly a typical older guy. I’m much older today than he was when I first met him. I had long, straggly hair and bell-bottom pants, and he was in his suit and vest and tie. The thing with Will that, certainly in his generation of cartoonists, no one else, except Harvey, no one else was even willing to read underground comix, the kind of things I was publishing. I’m sure there were other exceptions. Will not only looked at them, they influenced him. Most specifically, in the early seventies he began looking at these, and he didn’t do Contract with God until 1978. It was people like Justin Green and Joe Jackson who were doing autobiographical material that Will found very influential. He was happy to talk about it, and he was happy to correct them. He was open to reading that kind of material and not dismissing it. NG: Do you ever think it would have been interesting if Will really had done the autobiographical comic that he should have done? He flirted with it. You can see him waving at it …

DK: The Dreamer is the closest. NG: And The Dreamer is like a greatest hits. Not the autobiography, but I’ll give you a few tossed-off things. DK: He pulled his punches on it. Those of you who have it, it’s only about fifty- six pages, and it started out about twenty or twenty-four, and I pushed and pushed for him to expand it. He said, “Enough.” He pulled his punches on it. It’s the one book I had to tell him I was really disappointed with, because he was too much of a gentleman to tell the truth about these scoundrels he was in business with in the emergence of the comic book industry, because many of them were still alive or their relatives were. He didn’t want to say they were crooks even when he knew they were. NG: You got better stories out of Will at night in a bar, or in his house over a coffee. And even then—it was only after he died that I got to talk to Ann and learned some of the things that had happened in their lives, especially some of the tragedies that had happened in their lives, that I realized how much he had kept inside, buttoned down inside that suit. How much more interesting, more powerful some of the places where he flirted with his [auto]biography [would be], if he had told some of those stories.

“Hangly Hollyer Mansion,” The Spirit no. 369, June 22, 1947.

“The Deadly Comic Book,” The Spirit no. 457, February 27, 1949.

“Night on the Waterfront,” The Spirit no. 586, August 19, 1951.

“It Kills by Dark,” The Spirit no. 613, February 24, 1952.

DK: One time when I asked him why he couldn’t do a biography, he said, “I’m not like Crumb, I can’t let it all hang out.” SMcC: There were some genuine tragedies. It was part of that big bang that helped inspire Contract, but it just remained painful, and he didn’t want to revisit it. PL: Peculiarly, Will was both a creative cartoonist and a businessman. Certainly the most successful businessman of that first generation in comics, and as smart a businessman in terms of seeing a model for success as a cartoonist as we have had for decades afterward. It’s an interesting argument that part of why Will has the influence he has is because of that business approach, when so many of the artists who were approaching the graphic novel—Harvey Kurtzman, Gil Kane, Jim Steranko—were approaching it fundamentally as storytellers, while Will brought a businessman’s logic. “I can’t get anyone to publish this from the list I’d like to be published by, so I will covertly help fund Baronet doing it.” Toward the end of his life: “I need to get a major New York publisher behind me.” We worked out an unprecedented deal for Will to buy back copies DC had printed of his books so he could relicense his backlist titles to W. W. Norton & Company, which would help him get their support on The Plot. How weird is it to have been those two things, and how much did it matter that when Will was doing the graphic novels, he already had economic freedom of choice, and he used it?

Splash page for “The Wedding,” The Spirit no. 414, May 2, 1948.

JS: On this panel I’m probably the closest to having followed the do-the-comic and sell-the-comic business model, and he did give me quite a bit of advice. When you do follow it, and you do think it through, I remember even thinking about Will when Scholastic approached us about reprinting Bone and putting it into the schools and bookstores. I remember saying to Scholastic that one of the things is, you’re going to have to put the book with other books, not in that little ghetto with Dungeons & Dragons. I was channeling Will. That was what Will thought. This is a moment when I had a little bit of credibility and power, and they agreed. You do have to think that way—force yourself to strategically place things. DK: I think what you touched on about Will having the economic freedom to do Contract with God is important. He was fifty-five and had sold his business, essentially retired from his commercial/educational comics business. Unlike a struggling cartoonist who has to make the rent and feed a family, Will could take the time. That’s a distinct advantage … not to take anything away from the bravery of it. NG: Surely what’s every bit as important as that is the way that he set up the publishing model that gave him The Spirit. I encountered Will for the first time at age fifteen in a proto-comic shop in a basement that wasn’t open properly, but I pleaded. On the wall in this basement they had a copy of the Harvey comic of The Spirit no. 2 … I didn’t know what it was, but the cover looked good, so I bought it. I had absolutely no idea that these comics were done in the 1940s. As far as I was concerned, they were the best storytelling I’d run into in comics, ever. It was cool, and it was interesting. That was when my interest [in] and love of Will Eisner’s work started. Those comics, the Warren reprints, the Kitchen Sink reprints … only existed because Will, unlike pretty much everyone else of his generation, had not sold his baby. He figured out that he had this thing, and he was publishing it, and he created it for this publishing model, and he owned it. His only great regret was that he used the original art to keep [the original] zinc [printing] plates, which he bought at great expense, apart and fresh and clean. Thus destroying most of his original artwork. DK: Will asked me to store a pallet of zinc plates for him; he had stored it in New York at New York rates for many years, and he asked to ship them to Wisconsin, where I could store them for free. These things weighed literally tons. I moved

them so many times and they were so heavy, I threatened to change the name of my company to Kitchen Zinc Press. But he [had] that Depression mentality. I’m going to keep those zinc plates; long after the technology was obsolete. Still have them, if anyone … PL: Maybe the place to end is the lessons he taught: Be curious. Encourage others. Use your powers wisely; if you have economic power, if you have negotiating power, use it with a long-run point of view. Know what your aspiration is, not what you may achieve on this project or the next, but know what you’re working toward … NG: Share knowledge. Be collegial. One of the most interesting [lessons], because in comics, especially because we’re all freelance, we have a tendency to regard knowledge as precious things that must be kept to ourselves. Details of anything from contracts to what you’re working on. Will encouraged sharing information, sharing knowledge, sharing what we do. That was huge. JS: I totally agree.

“Lilly Lotus,” The Spirit no. 476, July 10, 1949.

SMcC: That collegiality, that sense of sharing across generations, that you’re in an ongoing conversation with artists young and old, and even departed, and even some artists who may not have been born yet. It’s all part of the same cultural conversation. JS: But he had artistic aspirations. He thought of it as art. He believed in controlling it. He believed it should be something personal, something worth doing. Control your own art was a big thing he taught me: You own it. You own the copyright. SMcC: In fact, that’s another revolution that hadn’t even begun when he was already thinking about it. DK: In 1941, Will was interviewed by a Philadelphia newspaper, and he told the reporter, “This is a medium capable of being a literary and art form.” At a time when the reporter was kind of skeptically saying, this young man is so pretentious as to say this comic book could be taken seriously. But he was talking about this way, way before. If you read it out of context, you’d think he was saying it in 1979 … but it was Will in 1941. PL: I’d like to thank you as a group for carrying forward Will’s spirit … not the character, but the attitude. We don’t point out to our readers who the village elders are; much more of it is visible behind the scenes. The people who are on the panel today are all people who are generous, sharing, and making a difference, in the spirit of Will Eisner. If, ultimately, there’s an influence to be had by Will Eisner, it’s his work. It’s his role modeling, as so many have alluded to, but it’s also people carrying on his attitude and making comics a better place.

FURTHER READING A WILL EISNER BIBLIOGRAPHY A complete compendium listing all of Eisner’s work would be a book in and of itself, if it’s even possible to separate his efforts from those of his various studios. Here are the key volumes in his career: The Building. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1987. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. City People Notebook. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1989. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. Comics & Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. New York: Baronet Press, 1978. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. The Dreamer. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1986. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. Fagin the Jew. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Reissued by Dark Horse Books, 2013. A Family Matter. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1998. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009. Gleeful Guide to Communicating with Plants to Help Them Grow. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1974. Gleeful Guide to Living with Astrology: An Everyday Manual for Coping with People, Events, and Afflictions through Astrology. Researched and edited by Ivan Klapper. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1974. Gleeful Guide to Occult Cookery: The Saucerer’s Apprentice. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1974. Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1996. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008.

How to Avoid Death & Taxes … and Live Forever. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1975. Incredible Facts, Amazing Statistics, Monumental Trivia. Edited by Ivan Klapper. Research by Jason Hanson. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1974. Invisible People. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. Last Day in Vietnam: A Memory. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2000. The Last Knight: An Introduction to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine Publishing, 2000. A Life Force. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1988. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. Life on Another Planet. Introduction by James Morrow. Originally published as Signal from Space. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009. Minor Miracles. New York: DC Comics, 2000. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009. Moby Dick by Herman Melville. New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine Publishing, 2001. The Name of the Game. New York: DC Comics, 2001. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. New York: The Big City. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1986. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. 101 Outer Space Jokes. New York: Baronet Publishing, 1979. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Introduction by Umberto Eco. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005. The Princess and the Frog by the Grimm Brothers. New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine Publishing, 1999. The Spirit Archives, Vol. 1–26. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2009. The Spirit Archives, Vol. 27: The New Adventures. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2009. Sundiata: A Legend of Africa. New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine Publishing, 2002. To the Heart of the Storm. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1991. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. The White Whale: An Introduction to Moby Dick. Tamarac, FL: Story Shop, 1991. Will Eisner Reader: Seven Graphic Stories by a Comics Master. Princeton, WI:

Kitchen Sink Press, 1991. Reissued by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. Will Eisner Sketchbook. Introduction by Alan Edelstein. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995. The Will Eisner Sketchbook. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2003. PRINCIPAL SOURCES Virtually every work touching on comics history discusses Will Eisner and his contributions. The volumes particularly consulted for this book, or quoted from, include: Andelman, Bob. Will Eisner: A Spirited Life. Milwaukie, OR: M Press, 2005. Benson, John (editor). Panels no. 1, 1979. Brownstein, Charles (interview conducted by). Eisner/Miller. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2005. Cooke, Andrew D. (director). Will Eisner: Portrait of A Sequential Artist. DVD. Montilla Pictures, 2010. Cooke, Jon B. Comic Book Artist no. 6. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, November 2005. Couch, N. C. Christopher, and Stephen Weiner. The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel. New York: DC Comics, 2006. Eisner, Will. PS Magazine: The Best of The Preventive Maintenance Monthly. Selected and with an overview by Eddie Campbell. Preface by Ann Eisner. Introduction by General Peter J. Schoomaker, USA (Ret.). New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2011. Eisner, Will. Will Eisner’s Shop Talk. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2001. Inge, M. Thomas (editor). Will Eisner: Conversations. Conversations with Comic Artists Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Steranko, James. The Steranko History of Comics, Vol. 2. Reading, PA: Supergraphics, 1972. Yronwode, Catherine, and Denis Kitchen. The Art of Will Eisner. Introduction by Jules Feiffer. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1982.

THE WILL EISNER COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AWARDS BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM, 1988–2014 Best Graphic Album 1988 Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (DC Comics) 1989 Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland (DC Comics) Best Graphic Album: New 1991 Elektra Lives Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley (Marvel Comics) 1992 To the Heart of the Storm by Will Eisner (Kitchen Sink Press) 1993 Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (VG Graphics/Dark Horse Comics) 1994 A Small Killing by Alan Moore and Oscar Zarate (Dark Horse Comics) 1995 Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 2 by P. Craig Russell (NBM) 1996 Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse (Paradox Press/DC Comics) 1997 Fax from Sarajevo by Joe Kubert (Dark Horse Books) 1998 Batman & Superman Adventures: World’s Finest by Paul Dini, Joe Staton, and Terry Beatty (DC Comics) 1999 Superman: Peace on Earth by Paul Dini and Alex Ross (DC Comics) 2000 Acme Novelty Library no.13 by Chris Ware (Fantagraphics) 2001 Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics) 2002 The Name of the Game by Will Eisner (DC Comics) 2003 One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry (Sasquatch Books) 2004 Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf Productions) 2005 The Originals by Dave Gibbons (Vertigo/DC Comics) 2006 Top 10: The Forty-Niners by Alan Moore and Gene Ha (ABC/Wildstorm) 2007 American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (First Second Books) 2008 Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly) 2009 Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions) 2010 Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)

2011 (tie)Wilson by Daniel Clowes (Drawn & Quarterly) and Return of the Dapper Men by Jim McCann and Janet Lee (Archaia) 2012 Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand adapted by Ramon K. Perez (Archaia) 2013 Building Stories by Chris Ware (Pantheon) 2014 The Property by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly) An Eisner Award, the comic book industry’s equivalent of an Oscar, handed out annually at the San Diego Comic-Con in recognition of creative achievement in more than two dozen categories.

INDEX A Adams, Neal advertising. See commercial comics Alien (Goodwin and Simonson) Alley awards Alyn, Kirk The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon) Amazing Spider-Man (Quesada) American Medical Association American Visuals Anderson, Murphy Andru, Ross Aquaman Arbus, Alan Army Motors Arnold, Everett “Busy” “At the ‘Forgotten’ Ghetto” (Eisner) B Baily, Bernard Ballantine, Ian Balsam, Martin Barks, Carl Barry, Lynda Baseball Comics (Eisner) Batman (comic book) Beatty, Terry Bechdel, Alison Bell-McClure Syndicate Bendix, William Berg, Dave Berger, Karen Berger, Mitch Bester, Alfred Bierce, Ambrose Bissette, Steve Black X (Eisner as Willis B. Resnie) Blackhawk

Blankets (Thompson) Bolland, Brian Bone (Smith) Bridgman, George The Building (Eisner) Building Stories Buscema, John Busiek, Kurt Byrne, John C Cabarga, Leslie Campbell, Eddie Caniff, Milton Capp, Al Cardy, Nick Carlin, Mike Catron, Mike Cavalieri, Joey Cerebus (Sim) Chabon, Michael Chadwick, Paul Chaykin, Howard Chesler, Harry “A” City People Notebook (Eisner) Clampett, Bob Clampett, Ruth Claremont, Chris Clifford (Feiffer) Clinton News Clowes, Daniel Cole, Jack Colton, Norman Comic Book Artist, vol.

comics in the 1960s and 1970s

awards copyright and credit issues effect of, on young people fandom. See also comics conventions nonfiction

perception of artists

retailers