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In 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist ], future creator of ], 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 ] reprints in color. In 1935, they began to include occasional new comic strip-like material. Editor ] bought an Eisner adventure strip called "Captain Scott Dalton", an ]-styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts. Eisner subsequently wrote and drew the ] strip "The Flame" and the ] strip "Harry Karry" for ''Wow'' as well. In 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist ], future co-creator of ], 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 ] reprints in color. In 1935, they began to include occasional new comic strip-like material. Editor ] bought an Eisner adventure strip called "Captain Scott Dalton", an ]-styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts. Eisner subsequently wrote and drew the ] strip "The Flame" and the ] strip "Harry Karry" for ''Wow'' as well.


===Eisner & Iger=== ===Eisner & Iger===

Revision as of 03:58, 7 June 2006

William Erwin Eisner (born March 6, 1917, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States; died January 3, 2005, Lauderdale Lakes, Florida) was an acclaimed American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an instructional medium; for his leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of literature with his book A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories; and for his educational work about the medium as exemplified by his book Comics and Sequential Art.

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.

Wow, What a Magazine! #3 (Sept. 1936): Cover art by a teenaged Will Eisner

In 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist Bob Kane, future co-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

Main article: 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,"Template:Fn later detailing that in Depression-era 1939 alone, he and Iger "had split $25,000 between us,"Template:Fn a considerable amount for the time.

Boardman Books

Main article: 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

Main article: The Spirit

In "late '39, just before Christmas time," Eisner recalled in 1979Template:Fn, 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 interviewTemplate:Fn, he elaborated on that meeting:

"Busy" invited me up for lunch one day and introduced me to Henry Martin said, "The newspapers in this country, particularly the Sunday papers, are looking to compete with comics books, and they would like to get a comic-book insert into the newspapers". ... Martin asked if I could do it. ... It meant that I'd have to leave Eisner & Iger was making money; we were very profitable at that time and things were going very well. A hard decision. Anyway, I agreed to do the Sunday comic book and we started discussing the deal was that we'd be partners in the 'Comic Book Section', as they called it at that time. And also, I would produce two other magazines in partnership with Arnold.

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 had 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"Template:Fn This would include the eventual backup features, "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck".

File:Spirit - Oct. 6, 1946.jpg
A classic Eisner cover for The Spirit, 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!'"

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-gunned, 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. Template:Fn

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". Template:Fn

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

Premiere issue of the U.S. Army publication P*S (June 1951), designed to be a "postscript" to related publications. Art by Will Eisner.

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 television and other post-war trends eat at newspapers' readership base, he formed the American Visuals Corporation in order to produce instructional materials for the government, related agencies, and businesses. One of his longest-running jobs was P*S: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, a digest-sized magazine with comic-book elements that he started for the Army in 1951 and continued to work on until the 1970s with Mike Ploog 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 Jews, 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. Template:Fn

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 novels and myths, including Moby Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African 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 stereotyped 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

Trade paperback edition of A Contract with God; the concurrent 1,500-copy hardcover release did not use the term "graphic novel" on its cover.
  • A Contract with God (1978, Baronet Books ISBN 0894370359; DC Comics' reissue ISBN 1563896745)
  • Will Eisner Color Treasury (1981, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 087816006X)
  • Spirit Color Album (1981, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160027)
  • Spirit Color Album, v2 (1983, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160108)
  • Spirit Color Album, v3 (1983, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160116)
  • Life on Another Planet (1983) (ISBN 0878163700)
  • Comics and Sequential Art (1985) (ISBN 0961472804)
  • The Dreamer (1986) (ISBN 1563896788)
  • The Building (1987) (ISBN 0878160248)
  • A Life Force (1988) (ISBN 0878160388)
  • Art of Will Eisner (1989 2nd ed, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160760)
  • Outer Space Spirit (1989 Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160124)
  • To the Heart of the Storm (1991) (ISBN 1563896796)
  • The Will Eisner Reader (1991) (ISBN 0878161295)
  • Invisible People (1993) (ISBN 0878162089)
  • Dropsie Avenue (1995) (ISBN 0878163484)
  • Christmas Spirit (1995 Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878163093)
  • Spirit Casebook (199x Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160949)
  • Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1996) (ISBN 0961472839)
  • The Princess and the Frog (1996) (ISBN 1561632449)
  • All About P'Gell: Spirit Casebook II (1998 Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878164928)
  • A Family Matter (1998) (ISBN 0878166211)
  • Last Day in Vietnam (2000) (ISBN 1569715009)
  • The Last Knight (2000) (ISBN 1561632511)
  • Minor Miracles (2000) (ISBN 1563897512)
  • New York: The Big City (2000) (ISBN 1563896826)
  • The Spirit Archives:
    • Volume 1 (2000) (ISBN 1563896737)
    • Volume 2 (2000) (ISBN 1563896753)
    • Volume 3 (2001) (ISBN 1563896761)
    • Volume 4 (2001) (ISBN 1563897148)
    • Volume 11 (2003) (ISBN 1563899892)
    • Volume 12 (2003) (ISBN 1401200060)
    • Volume 13 (2004) (ISBN 1401201490)
    • Volume 14 (2004) (ISBN 140120158X)
    • Volume 15 (2005) (ISBN 1401201628)
    • Volume 16 (2005) (ISBN 1401204066)
    • Volume 17 (2006) (ISBN 1401204171)
  • Will Eisner's Shop Talk (2001) (ISBN 156971536X)
  • Fagin the Jew (2003) (ISBN 0385510098)
  • Hawks of the Seas (2003) (ISBN 1569714274)
  • The Name of the Game (2003) (ISBN 1563898691)
  • The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2005) (ISBN 0393060454)

Footnotes

  • Template:Fnb Mercer, Marilyn, "The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter", New York (Sunday supplement, New York Herald Tribune), Jan. 9, 1966; reprinted Alter Ego #48, May 2005.
  • Template:Fnb Heintjes, Tom, The Spirit: The Origin Years #3 (Kitchen Sink Press, Sept. 1992)
  • Template:Fnb Panels #1 (Summer 1979), "Art & Commerce: An Oral Reminiscence by Will Eisner", pp. 5-21, quoted in "Rare Eisner: Making of a Genius" (see under "References", below)
  • Template:Fnb Will Eisner interview, Alter Ego #48 (see under "References", below), p. 10
  • Template:Fnb Ibid.
  • Template:Fnb Sim, Dave, "My Dinner With Will & Other Stories", Following Cerebus #4, May 2005
  • Template:Fnb Sim, Ibid.
  • Template:Fnb Dave Sim, "Advice & Consent: The Editing of Graphic Novels" (panel discussion with Eisner and Chester Brown) and Frank Miller interview, both Following Cerebus #5, August 2005

References

External links

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