American Literary Studies
Will Eisner
New York Times
June 11, 1998
Comics Grand Master is Unrecognized
Filed at 12:02 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) -- He revolutionized the comics, but you've likely never
heard of Will Eisner.
Most in the medium agree: ``The Spirit,'' a superhero strip appearing
in no more than 20 newspapers 50 years ago, turned the comics from a pidgin
of pulp fiction and cheesecake drawings into a language with its own vocabulary
and syntax.
Though feted in Europe, Eisner is neglected in the United States, reflecting
the orphan his medium in its homeland.
Hoping to redress that imbalance, Kitchen Sink, a comics publishing house
that specializes in grown-up and historical material, has launched "The
Spirit: The New Adventures.'' The third issue of tributes by an array of
industry stars hit the stands May 27.
"Will Eisner is the single person most responsible for giving comics
its brains,'' said Alan Moore, a British writer celebrated for his work
on "Watchmen'' and "Swamp Thing.''
Decades before Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning ``Maus'' cast
Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, Eisner was exploring how comics more than
any other medium had the potential to expose truths about the culture by
subverting familiar icons.
"He was an early master of the German Expressionist approach in
comic books,'' Jules Feiffer once wrote of Eisner.
Eisner, 81 and still working, hopes the paean will help establish a legitimacy
for comic books, an art form he had made his life's work in his native land.
``I see the beginnings of the medium becoming `adult' here,'' he said
on a recent visit to New York, the model for ``The Spirit'''s mood-infested
Central City.
He cites as examples the work of Frank Miller, whose successful ``Dark
Knight'' Batman series 15 years ago inspired film director Tim Burton, and
the Hernandez brothers' acclaimed magic-realist ``Love and Rockets'' series.
It's a realization of what Eisner set out to do in 1940 when he left
the still-infant comic book industry to pitch a new type of Sunday comic
supplement to newspapers: a whole comic book with three lengthy, self-contained
stories. He hoped to reach adults through the newspapers. At the time, comic
books were seen as strictly for kids.
``I had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas,''
he said. Now, he wanted to aim for ``a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen
on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.''
He wanted to combine the pace and length of comic book stories with the
seriousness and technique that had been confined to a few newspaper comics.
``I had come to believe that this would be my life's work, and I believed
fanatically that it had all I aspired to,'' he said.
Soon he acquired enough subscribers to sustain his studio, and entertain
ambitions of revolutionizing the form.
"I told the Philadelphia Record in an interview in 1941, `I believe
this medium is a valid literary form and fine art form,'' he recalled. "When
I got back to New York, I was castigated by my colleagues for being uppity.
I never said anything about it again.''
They may have resented his attitude, but they watched him closely. Soon,
the impact of "The Spirit'' was being felt throughout the industry.
Before Eisner, a page of comics -- in a comic book or in a Sunday comics
section -- was a bland affair, nine or 12 square panels of equal size, occasionally
broken up by a circular panel. Compositions were standard, as if shot by
a primitive fixed camera.
Eisner began thinking of the "rhythm'' of a page, how panels could
be manipulated to suggest speed (small panels running into each other) climax
(two or three small panels, then a large one), even nausea (panels cast
at odd angles).
``Eisner wouldn't worry about varying the design of the page,'' said
Dave Gibbons, Moore's ``Watchmen'' partner and a ``Spirit'' contributor.
``One page had 20 pictures, followed by a page with three tall pictures
on it.''
Comics artists are famous for ``swiping'' material from others, and Eisner
was no exception: He admits borrowing from contemporary masters, like Milton
Caniff's ``Terry and the Pirates.''
But with the luxury of a seven-page story, Eisner could take a typical
Caniff scene-setter like footprints in snow, and use it as leitmotif, re-establishing
a mood throughout a story. Eisner also borrowed unsettling shooting angles
from the movies. From the static panels of a few years earlier, now scenes
could be perceived through skylights, or from below a sewer grate.
He was the first to use ``silent'' -- balloonless -- panels to emphasize
emotions, by focusing the reader's attentions on finely wrought facial expressions.
No less important for him was the story. He abandoned the blood and guts
approach he helped invent in the 1930s for a gentler, more quixotic style.
The Spirit -- a coroner named Denny Colt believed murdered by a mad scientist's
potion, but actually buried alive -- became less important than the other
characters in each story.
With a sensitive ear for dialogue, Eisner addressed topics considered
unthinkable in comic books and rarely seen, at the time, in newspaper comics:
wife beating, tax audits, urban blight, graft.
Each story was different, and Eisner angered marketing executives by
refusing to design a permanent logo. Instead, the letters of ``The Spirit''
were subtly incorporated into each splash page, as a wall, as scraps of
paper slipping into a sewer, as reflected light.
Moore recalled encountering ``Ten Minutes,'' a story often appearing
in reprint anthologies, when he was a teen-ager.
``Every element in the story was geared to this perfect effect,'' he
said.
In the story, Sammy, an otherwise decent young man desperate to get out
of an inner-city slum, plans to rob his soda shop boss.
Eisner ruptures convention in the first panel, telegraphing the outcome:
He asks the reader to consider the last 10 minutes in Sammy's life. He uses
a girl reciting an alphabetical skip-rope song as a recurring theme; each
time she reappears, approaching ``Z,'' you know Sammy's death is closer.
Memorable characters are established in just three or four panels. When
Sammy shoots and kills his boss, the boss slumps behind the counter smiling,
not believing that a ``good boy'' has killed him.
``The smile on his face was so stark and horrifying,'' Moore said.
The Spirit only appears in the final few panels, when Sammy spots him
in a subway station. Mistakenly believing he has been found -- the superhero
is actually chasing another crook --Sammy grabs the closing door of a departing
train and is crushed between a pillar and the train. Upstairs, on the street,
the little girl is restarting the alphabet.
By 1952, Eisner grew tired of the strip, and newsprint prices made it
less profitable. He disappeared into educational publishing.
But like his hero, his legacy would not die. His techniques, considered
revolutionary a few years earlier, had become standard, first in the hugely
popular E.C. horror comics of the 1950s, then in the Marvel comics that
revitalized the industry in the 1960s.
His influence eventually seeped into the more conservative newspaper
comics; without Eisner, Bill Waterson's imaginative panel breakdowns for
``Calvin and Hobbes'' would be unimaginable.
Still, a modicum of recognition had to wait until 1965, when Feiffer,
gaining attention as a political cartoonist, a playwright and a screenwriter,
celebrated the comics as his primary influence in ``The Great Comic Book
Heroes.''
Most of the figures in the illustrated essay -- Batman, Superman, Wonder
Woman, Captain America -- were still familiar.
But Feiffer reserved his greatest praise for the virtually unknown ``Spirit.''
``(Eisner's) world seemed more real than the world of other comic book
men. He was a cartoonist other cartoonists swiped from,'' Feiffer said.
Trademarks associated with Feiffer's famed satirical strip -- the silent
panel for emphasis, the repetition of a phrase to examine it from different
angles -- had been innovated by Eisner. This is not surprising, considering
that Eisner had given Feiffer his first job. The young Feiffer even makes
an appearance in a 1950 issue, as a psychotic cartoonist's assistant who
kills his boss.
Feiffer's praise prompted comic book fans to start searching, and soon
reprints of ``The Spirit,'' bootleg and legitimate, appeared, to influence
a whole new generation of emerging comics artists.
``Spirit'' contributor Gibbons bought his first bootleg ``Spirit'' as
a teen-ager in the 1960s, during a family vacation in a British seaside
resort.
``It didn't look like any comics I'd seen,'' he said. ``The depth, the
completeness, his human touch, the nuances of human behavior, the awareness
of fallibility.''
Others as diverse as Miller and Robert Crumb acknowledge Eisner as a
primary influence.
Yet, while Crumb was the subject of a successful documentary, and Feiffer
has earned a retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution, Eisner remains
uncelebrated beyond the faithful who gather at comics conventions -- at
least in the United States.
Eisner recently addressed the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, discussing
his published treatises on what he prefers to call ``sequential art.'' In
Amsterdam, a popular cafe is named for "The Spirit.'' French comics
critic Maurice Horn calls Eisner's influence tremendous.
But in the United States, Eisner says the medium itself is to blame for
his lack of recognition. ``Superheroes are mostly aimed at young teen-age
males concerned with their manhood,'' he said. ``The medium will have to
address itself more to content.''
Many in the industry are pessimistic about that happening.
J.R. Cochran, a comics critic with the New York Daily News, blames the
industry for not matching the challenge Eisner has set.
``It's one-note -- all geared to adolescent boys,'' Cochran said. ``It
is an American form, but the United States is not a particularly grown-up
country. This country isn't ready for sophisticated comics.''
``I see 22 year olds draw massive Schwarzenegger types, outfitted with
metal studs, pressing a mostly naked woman to their breastplates,'' Eisner
sighs. ``And I think `Poor girl, that's got to be cold.'''
Kitchen Sink hopes early sales returns for the new ``Spirit'' will dispel
such pessimism; each of the first two sold in the top 100, highly unusual
for a nonmainstream house.
Eisner likes the product, although it violates one of his basic rules
-- that the artist and writer should be the same person.
The most successful collaboration is between writer Neil Gaiman (``The
Sandman'') and artist Eddie Campbell (``From Hell''), in Issue 2. A screenwriter
suspiciously resembling Quentin Tarantino is dedicated to stripping his
scripts of sentiment and romance, until he gets caught between the Spirit
and a gorgeous villain.
Eisner won't touch ``The Spirit'' again, but the interest in ``The Spirit''
20 years ago helped rekindle his career. His most recent graphic novel,
due to appear this summer, ``A Family Matter,'' deals with assisted suicide.
He works five days a week at his studio in Tamrac, Fla., and keeps trim
playing tennis.
He may be the last of the pioneers of the American medium that was born
in the last, raucous decade of the 19th century. Caniff and Roy Crane (Buz
Sawyer) gave the comics light and shadow; Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) gave
it movement; E.C. Segar (Popeye) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) perfected
self-contained, imagined universes.
Eisner, perhaps along with Mad Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman, gave
comics syncopation and improvisation.
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July 3, 2006
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