The Spirit of Will Eisner

Will Eisner died yesterday. If you're a serious fan of the medium of comics, you know who he was. He was the Grand Master of Sequential Art.

He's famous for a bunch of things, not the least of which is having the foremost awards of the comics medium named after him. While he was still very much alive, no less. Heck, he hadn't even retired yet. (In fact, he never did. His next book comes out later this year.) The thing is, it was only slightly awkward when Eisner himself won an "Eisner".

In 1940 he created the landmark Sunday newspaper insert "The Spirit", which (to please his editor) had the trappings of a "masked adventurer" (like those trendy new "super heroes"), but was so much more than that. The character, the setting, and the strip itself had depth. And the art... the sequential storytelling... was groundbreaking, doing previously-unseen things with the page as a structure for conveying the narrative. It was Eisner who transformed the comic strip (panel, panel, panel...) into the comic book (page, page, page...).

As if that weren't enough, in the 1970s and 1980s he pushed to gain new respectability for the medium as more than just a vehicle for pictures of men in spandex hitting each other. And more importantly, he showed the way... first with A Contract With God a "graphic novel" which demonstrated the subtlety and seriousness and length that comics could aspire to, and later with Comics & Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narratives, how-to books that explained so much about the craft and vocabulary of the medium.

And as if that weren't enough, he never stopped, even in his late 80's. He averaged a graphic novel per year. His output after "retirement age" was greater than many cartoonists accomplish in their whole lives. And the number of comics conventions, seminars, classes, etc. he participated in was amazing.

And he did it all with such warmth and class. He treated everyone with respect, and received it in return. In the comics industry, where feuds and rivalries abound, I have never heard a single person say anything negative about him. Even artists who couldn't be coerced into agreeing with each other about anything ("The sky is blue!" "No, it's cyan!") will agree about what a great artist and what a great person Will Eisner was. You could fill a book with all the fond memories, the inspiring anecdotes, the encouraging bits of advice that followed in Eisner's wake.

I'm saddened to say that I don't have an "Eisner story" to share. I never met him. Which means I also never got any direct encouragement from him regarding my own work (as oh so many others did). But he left behind a great body of work, including some excellent teaching tools.

As a writer and an artist, I'll never be anywhere close to Eisner. But considering how much he did, even when much older than I am... that helps motivate me to keep working on it. And considering that even Eisner's work has now come to an end... that helps motivate me not to put it off.