| Will Eisner |
Article Index for Will |
Website Links For Will |
Information AboutWill Eisner |
|
In 1988, the Comics community paid tribute to Eisner by creating the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards , more commonly known as "the Eisners", to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium. Eisner enthusiastically participated in the awards ceremony, congratulating each recipient. BIOGRAPHY Early life and career The son of Jewish Immigrants — his father a former Painter , marginally successful entrepreneur, and one-time manufacturer in Manhattan 's Seventh Avenue Garment District — Eisner attended De Witt Clinton High School. There he drew for the School Newspaper (''The Clintonian''), literary magazine (''The Magpie'') and Yearbook , and did Stage Design , leading him to consider doing that kind of work for Theater . Upon graduation, he studied under Canadian artist George Brandt Bridgman (1864-1943) for a year at the Art Students League Of New York . Contacts made there led to a position as an Advertising writer- Cartoonist for the '' New York American '' newspaper. Eisner also drew $10-a-page illustrations for Pulp Magazines , including ''Western Sheriffs and Outlaws''. In 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist Bob Kane , future creator of Batman , suggested that the 19-year-old Eisner try selling cartoons to the new comic book ''Wow, What A Magazine!''. "Comic books" at the time were tabloid-sized collections of Comic Strip reprints in color. In 1935, they began to include occasional new comic strip-like material. Editor Jerry Iger bought an Eisner adventure strip called "Captain Scott Dalton", an H. Rider Haggard -styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts. Eisner subsequently wrote and drew the Pirate strip "The Flame" and the Secret Agent strip "Harry Karry" for ''Wow'' as well. Eisner & Iger See Also: Eisner & Iger ''Wow'' lasted four issues (cover-dated July-Sept. & Nov. 1936). After it ended, Eisner and Iger worked together producing and selling original comics material, anticipating that the well of available reprints would soon run dry, though their accounts of how their partnership was founded differ. One of the first such comic-book "packagers", their partnership was an immediate success, and the two soon had a stable of comics creators supplying work to Fox Comics , Fiction House , Quality Comics (for whom Eisner co-created such characters as Doll Man and Blackhawk ), and others. Turning a profit of $1.50 a page, Eisner claimed, "I got very rich before I was 22," later detailing that in Depression-era 1939 alone, he and Iger "had split $25,000 between us," a considerable amount for the time. Boardman Books See Also: Boardman Books Although the details are largely unknown, Eisner's artwork crossed the Atlantic at quite an early date. T. V. Boardman, the owner of London's Boardman Books was a pioneer at repackaging American comics for the British market. During the week of October 16, 1937, the first issue of a Boardman tabloid comic in the traditional British format, Okay Comics Weekly, arrived at newsagent's all over England. The content was mostly reprints of American newspaper strips but the first issue sported an original cover by Eisner. '''Okay''' lasted only until February 26, 1938, or a total of twenty issues. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Boardman Books' art director, Denis McLoughlin , reworked a number of Eisner's comic stories, adding splash pages and lengthening them in general, so they would be the right length to reprint in the 3 pence Boardman rotogravure comic series. ''The Spirit'' See Also: The Spirit In "late '39, just before Christmas time," Eisner recalled in 1979, Quality Comics publisher Everett M. "Busy" Arnold "came to me and said that the Sunday newspapers were looking for a way of getting into this comic book boom". In a 2004 interview, he elaborated on that meeting:
Eisner negotiated an agreement with the syndicate in which Arnold would copyright ''The Spirit'', but, "Written down in the contract I had with 'Busy' Arnold — and this contract exists today as the basis for my copyright ownership — Arnold agreed that it was my property. They agreed that if we hade a split-up in any way, the property would revert to me on that day that happened. My attorney went to 'Busy' Arnold and his family, and they all signed a release agreeing that would not pursue the question of ownership" This would include the eventual backup features, " Mr. Mystic " and " Lady Luck ". '', Oct. 6, 1946. Note the innovative use of title design, the mix of color and black-and-white, and the shadowing and texturing that combine for exotic Noir effect. Other '' Spirit '' stories could be whimsical, gritty, folklorish, sentimental, horrific, or mystical, yet always humanistic.]] Selling his share of their firm to Iger, who would continue to package comics as the S. M. Iger Studio and as Phoenix Features through 1955, Eisner left to create '' The Spirit ''. "They gave me an adult audience," Eisner said in 1997, "and I wanted to write better things than superheroes. Comic books were a ghetto. I sold my part of the enterprise to my associate and then began The Spirit. They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he'd have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, 'Yes, he has a costume!'" {Link without Title} '' The Spirit '', a seven-page, urban-crimefighter series, ran with such backup features as "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck" in a 16-page Sunday supplement (colloquially called "The Spirit Section") eventually distributed in 20 newspapers with a combined circulation of as many as five million copies, premiering June 2, 1940, and continuing through 1952. Eisner's rumpled, masked hero (with his headquarters under the tombstone of his supposedly deceased true identity, Denny Colt) and his gritty, detailed view of big-city life (based on Eisner's Jewish upbringing in New York City) both reflected and influenced the '' Noir '' outlook of movies and fiction in the 1940s. The strip is especially notable in other areas. First, it was the story of people, often the little people overlooked in the city's maelstrom. In some episodes of ''The Spirit,'' the nominal hero makes a brief, almost incidental appearance while the story focuses on a real-life drama played out in streets, dilapidated Tenements , and smoke-filled back rooms. Second, along with Violence and Pathos , ''The Spirit'' lived on Humor , both subtle and overt. He was Machine-gun ned, knocked silly, bruised, often amazed into near immobility and constantly confused by beautiful women. Set in the Manhattan ''manqué'' of Central City, the strip featured a big-hearted supporting cast that included the gruff Irish police commissioner, Dolan; his gorgeous blond daughter, Ellen, whose waifish manner belied the occasional vicious uppercut or scathing remark she could throw; and Ebony White, an orphaned African American child who served as the Spirit's sidekick, surrogate son, and kid-appeal Comic Relief , whom the other characters treated with a casual, inherent respect not always seen in the Pop Culture of the time. While Eisner's later graphic novels were entirely his own work, he had a studio working under his supervision on ''The Spirit''. In particular, Letterer Abe Kanegson came up with the distinctive lettering style which Eisner himself would later imitate in his book-length works, and Kanegson would often rewrite Eisner's dialogue. Eisner's most trusted assistant on ''The Spirit'', however, was Jules Feiffer , later a renowned cartoonist, Playwright and Screenwriter in his own right. Eisner later said of their working methods "You should hear me and Jules Feiffer going at it in a room. 'No, you designed the splash page for this one, then you wrote the ending — I came up with the idea for the story, and you did it up to this point, then I did the next page and this sequence here and...' And I'll be swearing up and down that HE wrote the ending on that one. We never agree". So trusted were Eisner's assistants that Eisner allowed them to "ghost" ''The Spirit'' from the time that he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 until his return to civilian life in 1945. The primary wartime artists were the uncredited Lou Fine and Jack Cole , with future '' Kid Colt, Outlaw '' artist Jack Keller drawing backgrounds. These ghosted stories have been reprinted in DC Comics ' hardcover collections ''The Spirit Archives'' Vols. 5 to 9 (2001-2003), spanning July 1942 - Dec. 1944. On Eisner's return from service and resumption of his role in the studio, he created the bulk of the ''Spirit'' stories on which his reputation was solidified. The post-war years also saw him attempt to launch the comic-strip/comic-book series ''Baseball'', ''John Law'', ''Kewpies'', and ''Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy''; none succeeded, but some material was recycled into ''The Spirit''. American Visuals Corporation
During his World War II military service, Eisner had introduced the use of comics for training personnel, in the publication ''Army Motors'', for which he created the cautionary bumbling soldier Joe Dope. In 1948, while continuing to do ''The Spirit'' and seeing and other artists. Other clients of his Connecticut-based company included RCA Records , the Baltimore Colts NFL Football team, and New York Telephone . Graphic novels In the late 1970s, Eisner turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. '' A Contract With God, And Other Tenement Stories '' (Baronet Books, Oct. 1978) is one of the first American graphic novels, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York 's immigrant communities, particularly Jew s, including ''The Building'', ''Dropsie Avenue'' and ''To the Heart of the Storm''. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year. Remarkably, each of these books was done twice — once as a rough version to show editor Dave Schreiner , then as a second, finished version incorporating suggested changes. In the introduction to the 2001 reissue of ''A Contract with God'', Eisner revealed that the inspiration for the title story grew out of the 1969 death of his Leukemia -stricken teenaged daughter, Alice, next to whom he is buried. Until then, only Eisner's closest friends had even been aware that he and his wife, Ann Weingarten Eisner, had a daughter. They also have a son, John. Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of Novel s and Myth s, including '' Moby Dick ''. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published '' Sundiata '', based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West Africa n king, "The Lion of Mali ". '' Fagin The Jew '' is an account to the life of Dickens's character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the sterotyped portrait of Fagin in '' Oliver Twist ''. His last graphic novel, ''The Plot'', an account of the making of the Anti-semitic Hoax '' The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion '', was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005. Academic work In his later years especially, Eisner was a frequent lecturer about the craft and uses of sequential art. He taught at the School Of Visual Arts in New York City, and wrote two books based on these lectures, '' Comics And Sequential Art '' and '' Graphic Storytelling And Visual Narrative '', which are widely used by students of cartooning. Death Will Eisner died of complications from a quadruple Bypass Surgery performed on December 22 2004 in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida . AWARDS Eisner has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Comic Book Award for 1967, 1968, 1969, 1987, and 1988, as well as its Story Comic Book Award in 1979, and its highest accolade, the Reuben Award , for 1988. He was inducted into the Academy Of Comic Book Arts Hall of Fame in 1971, and the Jack Kirby Hall Of Fame in 1987. The following year, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were established in his honor. BOOKS edition of ''A Contract with God''; the concurrent 1,500-copy hardcover release did not use the term "graphic novel" on its cover.]]
FOOTNOTES
REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|