Will Eisner, R.I.P.
It was Steranko who finally introduced me to Will
Eisner. Not personally, although I got to meet both of them and have your
typical neo-to-master conversations with them. No, it was Steranko's History of
Comics that finally told me about the creator of The Spirit, and better yet,
showed me.
It's important to understand that,
growingup in the Sixties, access to anything other than current comics was
extremely limited. No comic book stores, no books, and very nearly no publishers
other than the mainline guys. The only place you could get something like Wally
Wood's Witzend was at a convention--and there was one convention a year in New
York.
Marvel and DC reprinted their old
stuff--but as for anything else, unless you paid dealer's prices
("Forty
bucks for a copy of
Thunda
#1? that guy Rogofsky is insane!") comics
history was closed to you.
And The Spirit
wasn't even a comic book: it was a sixteen-page insert into newspapers--and
nobody had them.
Which brings me to Will
Eisner: Will was an all-around pioneer. He not only consistently broke new
ground in his narrative work, he also refused to play the corporate game that
was the comics industry. Jack Kirby--who is one of the few artists that I'd put
above Will, and only by a bit--worked for newsstand distributed comics most of
his life, and suffered untold slings and arrows for it. Will Eisner struck out
on his own--and was a shadowy legend all the time I was growing up with my nose
in a comic.
Eventually we got exposed to his
full glory--first from the terminally-annoying Jim Warren, then through the
princely Denis Kitchen. And going through the Spirit reprints was like
discovering Citizen Kane for the first time (chopped up into Saturday movie
serial segments.) A lot of the tricks we delighted in from other artists, we
learned, had actually been invented by Ol' Will, and Will did it better.
Will Eisner was intensely serious about
comics--to the extent that made some of us nervous, even as the Chosen Few who
Broke Into The Business. Because he was well aware of the bad compromises we
made for our art in working for Big Companies (something we were all well aware
of in our heart of hearts) and kept urging us as a group to take that plunge off
the cliff, which we were scared to do.
Will
was a cartoonist, and I had friends, both in my fan and pro daays, who couldn't
get into him, because he never had that hard illustrative edge à la
Williamson or Moebius or... But it only took a little shock of growth to realize
what a giant Eisner was. (One of the best things about hanging around
conventions was the education we got, as pros we idolized started putting us
straight as to whom we should
really
be idolizing, like Gil Kane hipping us to Alex Toth or Howard Chaykin savaging
our fanboy asses for not knowing who J.C. Leyendecker was.) And it was that
cartooning that gave his work the effects that no one else produced.
A Contract With
God (once again, groundbreaking in form, an
original comic in perfect-bound book form) had gutshot power and eloquence that
were completely his. (the section the
super, largely visual, particularly with the
ugly crypto-Nazi grieving over his poisoned dog is a sequence I still remember
after more than twenty years.)
I do regret
that when there was a forum on Comics as an Art Form here in Chicago, that I
didn't go (although my brother did.) Of course, I thought he'd be around
forever.
It's great that Will Eisner
eventually got the recognition he deserved; it's too bad comics still haven't
lived up to his example.
Posted: Tuesday - January 04, 2005 at 05:59 PM