I’ve always heard Will Eisner’s name prefaced with “comic book legend.” Why? What’d he do? Sure, he created The Spirit. What else did he do? Is he really part of the pantheon, up there with Stan the Man and Jack Kirby? Should he be remembered with the same sense of awe as Bob Kane and Shuster and Siegel?
In any competition of quality of writing and art, Eisner has the guys you mentioned beat by orders of magnitude. Yes, they created icons. But far better writers and artists were soon brought in to ghost over their names.
The Spirit is one of the finest strips of all time. There is literally nothing in the comic book world of the 1940s that comes remotely close to it. Some of the best comic strips may be challengers, but Eisner had the advantage of doing a combo product that brought out the best in both worlds. He could concentrate on a single 8-page story each week, one that was much longer than a normal Sunday strip and allowed for true storytelling rather than a serial extended over many weeks, but he didn’t have to churn out lesser works for the audience of illiterates that comic book readers were then presumed to be.
Eisner also invented the graphic novel, so if you want to go strictly by creations and their impact, that alone puts him up there.
When it comes to awe, Bob Kane and Shuster and Siegel don’t belong anywhere near a pantheon. Will Eisner does.
Father of modern comic book narrative, after “The Spirit” made a series of grown up comics like “Contract with god” that became classics, the “Oscars” of comic books are named “Eisners” in his honor.
Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Comic book buffs will usually place him way above any of your mentions.
Short answer: absolutely. Start with his wikipedia page for more info.
Despite The Spirit, A Contract with God is up there with the finest works of the medium.
What they said. Also, as compared with guys like Lee or Kane, who were really good at making concepts and characters that were perfectly calibrated to what comics were at the time, Eisner actively pushed the envelope of graphic storytelling with every issue of The Spirit. He (and Kirby, as well) actually viewed the medium as artists, rather than businessmen, and tried to stretch it and play with it in ways that nobody ever had before. Look at an issue of “The Spirit,” with its shading, panel variation, shadows, colors, hell, everything, and then compare it to an issue of “Spider-man” from early on and you’ll see it immediately. There’s nothing wrong with how Lee, Kane, or anybody else did it; they revolutionized the industry, but Eisner revolutionized the medium. It’s a pretty gross oversimplification, but the core truth is, I think, there.
(For a fantastic read, pick up Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones; it’s an absolutely riveting picture of the evolution of comic books and geek culture in general.)
That’s actually a link to an eBay merchant page…
Even if was just The Spirit, Eisner would have been among the top comic creators.
Not only was he a terrific artist, but The Spirit was decades more advanced in its characterization, storytelling, and everything else (some comics are still trying to catch up). If you read through the strips* you’ll be amazed how he expanded the genre beyond superheroes and his stories were all different – humor, horror, drama, and philosophical tracts. And all entertaining.
Compare what he was doing with The Spirit with what Siegel and Shuster was doing with Superman, and Kane (and Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson, his overlooked collaborators) were doing at about the same time.
A Contract with God – sometimes billed as the first graphic novel, and possibly the first work marketed as such – is even better, one of the greatest of all time (I’d rank it with Watchmen and Maus as the three best. His other graphic novels are also great literature, especially The Building, A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue.
*The Spirit was actually neither comic book nor comic strip, but a special supplement to Sunday papers.
The world of comics has changed so much that it’s impossible for people to understand the world of the 30s and 40s.
Comic strips were the important - and adult - medium then. Sure, lots of strips were aimed at kids. But like the best animated movies today, even the kids strips had elements that adults could appreciate. With many top strips, it was the other way around: they were aimed at adults but kids could appreciate them too.
Here’s some awe for you: most of the kids who got into comic books in their early years did so because they weren’t good enough to write or draw for comic strips. Strips were big business. And they were cultural icons before [and after] Batman and Superman. Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Popeye, Alley Oop, Mickey Mouse, Little Orphan Annie, Prince Valiant, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Li’l Abner, Pogo.
One of the brickbats - Krazy Kat homage, because George Harriman had already set a level of art for others to follow - thrown at comic books in the 1940s was that their crudeness debased the adult art that was the comic strip.
And strips were huge business. A major Sunday color strip could take up a whole page, in a newspaper whose pages were literally physically bigger than those today. They were flagships for newspapers in a day when every city had a multitude of newspapers fighting for circulation. Comic strips were important. Comic books were junk.
Eisner got started in comics but was one of the very few with the wit and talent to see what a crummy business it was and get out on his own terms. He started his own agency in order to create his new artform. Why didn’t the others do so? Mostly because they simply weren’t good enough. Walt Kelly was about the only exception.
I agree that Men of Tomorrow is a must read for anybody interested in the birth of the comic book. There isn’t anything similar for comic strips, both because the subject is so much larger and fuzzier and because all attention has switched to comic books. A few collections, none of them in print, but easily and cheaply to be had used, are important.
100 Years of Comic Strips, edited by Bill Blackbeard
The Funnies: 100 Years of American Comic Strips, by Ron Goulart
Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, edited by Bill Blackbeard [This comes up in about 50 separate hits. Click around for the best deal.]
In addition to all the above, he ran a comics production studio that started or advanced the careers of Wally Wood, Jules Feiffer and Larry Hama, among others. His Rock n Roll equivalent would be John Mayall or Robbie Robertson: Not a headliner who can fill arenas solo, but a formative influence on nearly everyone who could. The average comics reader may not appreciate his importance, but few pros do not.
Read some really early Batman and Superman comics: Kane, Siegel and Shuster are famous because of what their characters later became, but at their inception the art and writing were embarrassingly primitive. Bob Kane had a fairly good rough eye for layout and composition, but Joe Shuster pretty much couldn’t draw. Will Eisner, along with Milton Caniff and Alex Raymond, was on a whole different level of sophistication: and of those three, Eisner was the best writer. Eisner is like a musician’s musician: he might not get the name recognition in the street, but there’s a reason an award is named after him.
I’d compare Eisner to Buddy Guy, if you wanted to go to Rock and Roll.