300 pgs. color | $29.99 hardcover | W: Stephen Weiner & Dan Mazur; A: Dan Mazur
Will Eisner is one of the giants of cartooning, or “sequential art” to use a term he used himself. Among other things he created the wildly inventive comic The Spirit, popularized the term “graphic novel,” and, for better or worse, developed the “studio system” method of producing comics quickly by splitting tasks over numerous specialists: writer, penciller, letterer, inker, etc. And of course his name lives on in the prestigious Eisner Awards (a.k.a. the ”Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards”).
But memories can be short so we are past due for a graphic biography of the man. Will Eisner: A Comics Biography by comics historian Stephen Weiner and cartoonist Dan Mazur fills the bill nicely and offers a lot of detail about the early comics industry (both the technological and business aspects) and the urban immigrant experience in early 20th century America. That last topic may sound tangential but it’s really not: immigrants and urban dwellers are regularly demonized by politicians today, and since we’ve been a primarily suburban country with a high level of segregation by race and economic class for decades, many people have no real experience to counter the caricatures polluting our national airwaves. Vicarious experience is not a substitute for real life but it’s certainly better than nothing.
Eisner was born in 1917 in New York City, the child of immigrants from what is now Ukraine. He found an outlet for his imagination in drawing and became entranced by the comics pages of the newspapers he sold to help support his family. Eisner attended DeWitt Clinton High School* in the Bronx, where he took formal art classes and drew cartoons for the school paper but left without a degree out of economic necessity.
A few years in the school of hard knocks convinced Eisner to form his own publishing company with his friend Jerry Iger, and they became successful enough to hire more cartoonists and develop the studio system of comics production. In a historic miss, Eisner & Iger turned down Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, which became a surprise hit for DC Comics and set off a superhero boom in comics. Eisner countered with Wonder Man, mainly remembered today for being sued out of existence, but did learn one important lesson from the Superman saga: to retain the copyright for any characters he created.
Eisner split with Iger to create a Sunday comic book series for the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, for whom he created his most famous character, The Spirit. He created comics-based educational materials for the military during World War II then returned to The Spirit, collaborating with a number of artists including Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood, and Jerry Grandenetti. He also got married, founded a company to produce educational materials, and became a suburban dad.
After some years out of the comics fold, a 1971 meeting with underground comics creator and publisher Denis Kitchen brought him back. The Spirit appeared as a character in Kitchen’s Snarf and Kitchen Sink Press later reprinted some of Eisner’s Spirit stories as well. The tragic death of his daughter from leukemia motivated Eisner to start creating new comics as well, resulting in one of his most famous works, A Contract with God. He taught at the School of Visual Arts and continued creating comics into his 80s, dying following quadruple bypass surgery in 2005.
Eisner’s life (1917-2005) spans some of the most influential years in the comics industry, and he was an innovator on both the artistic and business side of things. This flexibility allowed him to survive cataclysmic changes in the publishing industry (if you’re old enough to remember when most people got their news from daily papers that left ink on your hands, you know what I mean). Dan Mazur’s realistic pen and ink art with occasional color highlights and washes is a perfect fit for this volume, which focuses on telling Eisner’s story within its historical and social context. Mazur splashes out now and then with a full-page spread and sometimes shifts to a more expressive mode, but most of the story is told within fairly conventional, well-designed frames and clean, purposeful art. His imitations of Eisner’s work are also quite good: in fact, I like some of them better than Eisner’s own work.**| Sarah Boslaugh
*Not to sound like a broken record, but politicians love to attack public schools, despite the fact that that’s where most Americans are educated. Or maybe that is the reason.
**I’m not a fan of Eisner’s art in his later “serious” books like A Contract with God, which I think retains too much jokey comic strip design to suit the subject material, but I’m in the minority here so don’t take my word for it—check it out for yourself.
You can see a sample of the artwork for Will Eisner: A Comics Biography on the nbm web site.
