Will Eisner: The Spirit of Comics (NYCGraphicsNovelists.com)

Will Eisner, image via Wikipedia

Words: Christopher Irving 

When Will Eisner spoke on the comics page, it was in a language that was distinctly no one else’s but his own. What Jack Kirby did with visual power, Will did for the art form and language of comics, bringing them on par with film and pushing (sometimes gently, others with force) for the medium to go beyond it’s juvenile beginnings and grow into an actual –
    Art.
    Form.

    Not bad for a kid who grew up poor in the Depression, a kid who grew into a self-made young man who managed to reinvent himself as an older man.


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Graphic NYC Honors Will Eisner Week

Friday, March 5, 2010

This week, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, The Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation, and seven locations throughout the country celebrate the life and works of the late, great Will Eisner! This second annual celebration encourages a widespread knowledge of the graphic novel and comic book, in honor of the trailblazing Eisner. Graphic NYC celebrates the father of the graphic novel in our own inimitable way: with a profile on March 9, in honor of the father of the graphic novels' birthday.
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Will Eisner - The True Master of Comic Stroytelling (Inside Jeff Overturf's Head)

March 6, 2010

Born March 6th in 1917, the great Will Eisner would be 93 years old today!


This man did more to establish common tools in great comic storytelling than anyone. The things that Eisner experimented with and perfected are tools all good comic storytellers employ to this day.

He innovated different formats as well. He and partner Jerry Iger were part of the very first wave of comics "packagers" that supplied content to comic book publishers in the 1930's and '40's, creating whole comics to Quality Comics. Characters like Plastic Man, Uncle Sam, Black Condor, The Ray, Blackhawk, Midnight, Firebrand, The Phantom Lady and Quality's entire stable of super hero titles (see more in my on-going "Slight History of the Golden Age of Comic Books: Super Heroes" series here in this blog) were all produced by the Eisner-Iger studios.

Artists from Lou Fine, Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, Jules Feiffer, Jack Cole and the wonderful Mr. Eisner himself all cranked out genuine comic gold from this art house. All the while perfecting the storytelling tools created, designed and perfected from Eisner's own head.

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Will Eisner Week Educational Materials: Notes on Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy

By Tom Kaczynski 

March 3, 2010 11:42 PM

"Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams" - Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953.

With A Contract With God (1978), the earliest book of the trilogy, Will Eisner was inventing a new format: the graphic novel*. The 'graphic novel' coinage was a kind of sleight of hand that turned ordinary comics into works with ambitions of becoming literature. As such it's describing the content, rather than a medium. It was the literary ambition of A Contract With God that set it apart from the cheap children's comic-books that dominated the market at the time. Eisner of course cut his teeth on comic-books having previously drawn the iconic and long running series The Spirit. In creating a graphic novel, Eisner was distancing himself not only from other comic-books, but also from his own formative work. But, new terminology was insufficient to distinguish the work from its cousins and Eisner relied on a number of formal and visual inventions to underscore the difference.

The Spirit (1940-1952) superficially resembled most of the comic-books on the stands at the time. It mostly consisted of colorful 8 page pulp romps full of crime and violence. But, unlike the vast majority of 4-color funnies The Spirit stories were intense nuggets of clever writing, brilliant layouts, and inventive typography. They were packed with innumerable characters and locations. The sheer density of the stories was matched by the density of the art. Pages were filled with 9 to 14 (or more!) panels filled with frenetic action, detailed sets and wrinkled suits.


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Will Eisner's John Law: Detective #1 (Eclipse Comics 1983)

DCWhoCares

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Being an Eisner fan, especially of the Spirit, I searched for this particular one-shot published by Eclipse for years, finally running across a copy of it a few weeks back at a local flea market for 50 cents. Basically rehashed Spirit stories....and that, my friends, in the hands of Eisner is not a bad thing at all.

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First Amherst, Then Main Street (Loose Cruse; Howard Cruse)

Cover of The Will Eisner Companion

At four in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 2, the campus of UMass in Amherst will be the site of a panel discussion about comics and graphic novels featuring two relics—I mean, veterans—of the underground comix movement of the 1970s, plus a member of today’s emerging generation of adventurous comics creators. One of the aforementioned veterans will be Gary Hallgren of Air Pirates fame; the other one will be me. Sharing the stage with Gary and me will be Sophia Weideman, who will have to wait a few years before attaining the relic/veteran status that Gary and I enjoy but who appears to be making good use of her talents in the meantime. Gary and I are longtime friends and I’m looking forward to meeting Sophia. Furthermore, if you’re near enough to Amherst to come and be part of our audience in Room 227 of Herter Hall, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you, too! Moderating our panel, by the way, will be another old friend: N. C. Christopher Couch, co-author with Stephen Weiner of The Will Eisner Companion.

Above: Gary Hallgren’s character Tom Turkey, as seen in the Marvel/underground hybrid Comix Book in the mid-seventies, is flanked by a photo of Gary taken at the 1976 Berkeley Con and a snapshot I took of him a year or so ago. At left: A photo of yours truly, also taken at the same 1976 convention, garnished with one of my own drawings from that era. Both 1976 photos were taken by Clay Geerdes, the legendary chronicler of and cheerleader for the underground comix movement.

At right: I couldn’t find a current photo of our third panelist, Sophia Weideman, and I certainly couldn’t find one from 1976, since it’s highly unlikely that this 2008 graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York had even commenced to exist by then. I can, however, show you the cover of her new book The Deformatory, which she self-published with funding provided by the Xeric Foundation.

Our UMass panel is named "Will Eisner’s Ideals," and as the title suggests we’ll be discussing how our own work has been affected by today’s expanding recognition of comics as a medium for serious artistic expression. Many cartoonists of my generation who cut our teeth in underground comix have been And while a lot of pioneering went on in the pages of underground comix, those who pay attention to comics history know that a trailblazing comics creator named Will Eisner had begun leading the way well before underground comix made the scene.

Amazingly, Will Eisner continued to show what comics are capable of in the parade of acclaimed graphic novels he contined to draw tirelessly until his death in 2005 at the age of 87. In honor of his achievements a host of events will soon be taking place as part of a national celebration called Will Eisner Week. It’s cool that our March 2 panel will be among them.

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Toy-A-Day Day 153: The Spirit (Will Eisner)

The Spirit (Denny Colt) is a crime-fighting fictional character created by writer-artist Will Eisner. He first appeared in Spirit Section #1 (June 2 1940), a seven-page insert into American Sunday-newspaper comics sections. He currently appears in comic books published by DC Comics.

The Spirit chronicles the adventures of a masked vigilante who fights crime with the blessing of the city's police commissioner Dolan, an old friend. The stories range through a wide variety of styles, from straightforward crime drama and noir to lighthearted adventure, from mystery and horror to comedy and love stories, often with hybrid elements that twisted genre and expectations.

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