NEXT WEEK AT THE largest comics convention in the world, the San Diego Con,
the industry bestows the Eisner
Awards for the best comics of the preceding year. Like all arts awards,
they wrestle for resolution between the poles of commerce and art. The
Eisners, which reach their twentieth anniversary this year, could not
possibly be more aptly named.
Will Eisner (1917-2005) was a great cartoonist, but he was also a shrewd
businessman with his finger on the throbbing, erratic pulse of popular
culture, trying to predict, manoeuvre, and exploit the next trend using his
very specific set of skills. He spent his life wrestling with those
demanding twins, art and commerce.
In 1936 when he was 19, Eisner had his first professional work published in
Wow, What a Magazine!, one of the first comic books to publish new work in
the format that we are familiar with today. As he put it in an interview in
1984: “Pulp magazines were dying and pulp publishers were looking for other
popular publishing ventures, and so comics represented that opportunity.”
Eisner himself never missed an opportunity. Overnight, dozens of new
comic-book titles and publishers erupted to mine the bonanza begun by the
1938 publication of Superman in Action Comics. Simultaneously all these
publishers were putting out beefy 52-page comic books. They needed stories
and art, and they needed them last week.
Eisner and his partner Jerry Iger formed a company to package the guts of
comic books and sell them to various publishers based on a simple and sound
method perfected by Henry Ford: the assembly line. Each page in the bullpen
studio was literally handed from writer, to penciller, to letterer, to
inker, to colourist, with Eisner gripping his non-repro blue pencil at the
end of the conveyor belt.
“There again,” Eisner continued, “it was a question of seizing the
opportunity. There was a need and I attempted to supply it.”
Eisner and Iger quickly made a small fortune but soon Eisner saw another
opportunity in an offer to publish a Sunday newspaper insert comic book. He
sold his share of the bullpen to Iger and for the next ten years, Eisner
created the weekly stories of the barely costumed crimefighter The Spirit.
Each Spirit story is a tidy, crisp eight-page package of satisfying
storytelling. Often Eisner pulled off the trick of creating tales that were
all at once funny, sad, clever, revealing about the human capacity for greed
and compassion ... and fun to read. Week after week in The Spirit Eisner
delivered the goods. He had to. Working under a deadline and with a group of
sizzling assistants (including a young Jules Feiffer, later a Pulitzer
prizewinner himself) fired up by Eisner's perspicacity, the best Spirit
stories crackle.
These noir-ish picaresque tales have a jazzy sense of New York humour. Eisner
drew it as he knew it. A main character in most of Eisner's work is the city
itself, providing opportunities to run rivers of ink down garbage-strewn
alleys, creating deep perspective and threatening shadows.
Eisner was greatly influenced by the cinema - an influence that will come full
circle with the Sin City creator Frank Miller's screen adaptation of The
Spirit (due to be released in the UK next year). Drawing on 1930s movies,
Eisner populates his stories with wise-cracking tough-as-nails guys'n'dolls
concealing their hearts of gold or sludge within a rat-tat-tat mise en
scène. His smart framing and vertigo-inducing point of view was also pure
Warner Brothers. And my God, did the man like to draw rain.
One of the primary tasks of the cartoonist is to control the path of the
reader's eye as it absorbs the comics page. A true artist can control the
speed of the eyeball, plant hidden subcontexts and symbols on a given page
until the cornea lands at the magic lower right-hand panel where (if the
cartoonist has done his job) the mind is helplessly held under a vexing
spell compelled to turn the page. At this Eisner was, indeed, a master.
In fact, in the first major US comics exhibition (Hammer Museum, 2005) Eisner
was chosen as one of the nine Masters of American Comics. Yet almost all of
the works displayed were Spirit pages, work done before Eisner was 35.
Nothing else that he was to do in his long career had the lasting impact of
The Spirit.
Eisner explained in a 1983 interview that in his
youth “It was not uncommon for those of us who were doing comic books, when we
went to a cocktail party, we'd say we did illustrations...If you said comic
books, some nice lady would stand there and say, ‘Oh, really?' This is in
very small letters in a large balloon, and then she'd say: ‘How nice.'
Second pause. And go off somewhere else.”
He carried that four-coloured newsprint chip on his shoulder into old age.
Eisner did not want to be remembered solely as the creator of the jaunty
Spirit. For most of the 1950s through the 1960s he held a contract with the
US Army to produce instructional comics for the digest-sized PS Magazine. If
anyone could teach a GI how to care for his M16 it was this master of
eyeball control...plus, he could draw dames. Much later Eisner (again
seizing the market moment) would write several How to Cartoon books.
Opportunity knocked - and there was Eisner.
Often touted as the first American “graphic novel”, Eisner's book-length A
Contract with God (1978) - actually a group of thematically entwined short
stories - led the way for longer non-genre-based comic books.
In the recently reprinted City Books stories done late in his life, Eisner
used all of his considerable storytelling might to create “mature” stories.
The irony is that he had become reliant on outdated stock characters from
the Warner Brothers lot, melodramatic situations and, well, irony. Over and
over again in City Books clichéd characters are trounced by predators and
misfits, but most of all by Fate giving them a drubbing they often do not
deserve. Eisner would love to have been dubbed the “Dreiser of Comics”, but
he should have been quite content to be the “Eisner of Comics”.
Still, a cartoonist-in-training would do well to study these late pages. In
his exodus from the lowbrow comic- book ghetto, Eisner left behind
straight-ruled panel borders that smack of “comics”, forcing him to find
alternative graphic methods to drag readers' eyeballs across the page.
Windowsills, tunnels, doorframes and smoke are all used to define spaces and
frame action. The sheer inventiveness of the work on a page-by-page level is
remarkable.
Yet sometimes, because of extreme shifts in layout from one page to the next,
the reader may be unsure when turning a page if it is still the same story.
In interviews, Eisner often proselytised about the power of
comics-as-literature. It might be a stretch to call anything that Eisner did
himself “literature”. His genius was, rather, in successfully melding
comics-as-commerce and comics-as-art, securing his status as patrician of
the genre.
The San Diego Comic Con, July
24-27, 2008
Paul Karasik is a comics artist who studied under Will Eisner. His graphic
novel co-adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass is considered a
classic of the genre, and his most recent book, I Shall Destroy All the
Civilized Planets, has been nominated for two Eisner awards.
Eisner essentials
The Best of The Spirit (DC, £9.99 Buy
the book )
Read this to understand why Frank Miller would want to make the film.
Comics and Sequential Art (Norton, £12.99 Buy
the book )
Useful advice for novices from a guy who practiced what he preached.
The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (Norton, £18.99 Buy
the book )
A good dose of Eisner's late work.
