Will Eisner (1917-2005)

WILL EISNER is recognized internationally as one of the giants in the field of sequential art, a term he coined.

His career spanned nearly seventy years and eight decades, beginning with contributions to Wow, What a Magazine while still a teenager in 1936, followed by the start of his buccaneer saga Hawks of the Seas the same year. From 1936 to 1939 the Eisner & Iger Studio provided a steady supply of content to publishers at the virtual onset of the comic book industry. Their staff included such future luminaries as Jack Kurtzberg (later Jack Kirby, co-creator of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four), Lou Fine, Bob Kane (creator of Batman) and Mort Meskin. While partnered with Jerry Iger, Eisner created Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and soon after created Dollman and Blackhawk. Eisner also famously turned down a crude submission called Superman by equally young creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. An autobiographical account of those formative years can be found in Eisner's The Dreamer.

In 1940 Eisner sold his interest in the comic book packaging company to Iger and created his most famous character, The Spirit, a masked crime fighter. The Spirit was the lead feature in an unprecedented format: a 16-page color comic book that was inserted in Sunday newspapers, the first of numerous Eisner innovations. At its height The Spirit insert appeared in twenty major market newspapers with a combined circulation of 5 million readers each Sunday, quintupling the circulation of America's best-selling monthly comic book.

From 1942-45 he served three years during World War II as Warrant Officer in the Pentagon. There he created motivational posters and pioneered the use of cartoons for instructional purposes with the publication Army Motors. His innovative approach, combining hard information within cartoon plots proved so effective that he privately contracted the Army in 1951 to produce P*S, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly and continued to do so for many years afterward. He formed American Visuals Corporation in 1948 to supply similar educational comics to clients ranging from the U.S. Government's Job Corps to General Motors. He also produced a wide array of cartoon-based educational materials for schools across America.

Eisner returned to The Spirit in late 1945 and continued producing it till 1952. Though he "retired" the character that year, it has rarely been out of print since. The seven and eight page stories he wrote and drew each week are regarded as classics of the form. The first comic book reprints were issued by Quality Comics from 1944-50, followed by Fiction House 1952-54, Harvey Comics 1966-67, Kitchen Sink Press 1973 (the "underground" Spirits), Warren Publications 1974-76 (Spirit magazine) and Kitchen Sink Press again from 1977 to 1998 (in various comic book, magazine and book formats). Since 2000 DC Comics has undertaken an ambitious program to reprint all 645 stories in color hard covers as The Spirit Archives.

More than a dozen years after he was already tabbed "a national treasure" by former assistant Jules Feiffer in 1965, Eisner created a new genre: the graphic novel. He coined the term with his seminal 1978 work A Contract with God. Countless fellow professionals were inspired to follow, creating America's fastest-growing literary genre. Eisner produced nearly twenty additional graphic novels, including A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue, To the Heart of the Storm, Family Matter and The Name of the Game — roughly a book per year.

Eisner taught comic art classes for years at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and authored two definitive instructional books on the medium, Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling, both perennial sellers with over twenty reprintings.

Since 1988, one of the comics industry's most prestigious awards, The Eisner Award, is named after him and presented annually before a packed ballroom at America's largest comics convention in San Diego. Nominees are selected each year by blue ribbon committees, with winners selected by a vote of comics professionals. Will Eisner has modestly accepted several Eisner Awards over the years, as well as several Harveys, the other prestigious industry award named after his close friend, the late Harvey Kurtzman. In 2001 Eisner surely broke some sort of record by winning separate Harvey Awards for works created sixty years apart: the 1940 Spirit Archives won "Best Reprint" while his then newest graphic novel, Last Day in Vietnam, published in 2000, won for "Best Graphic Novel." Eisner has also won numerous international awards.

In May 2002 Wizard magazine named Eisner "the most influential comic artist of all time." Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winning novel Kavalier and Clay is based in good part on Eisner. On June 3, 2002 Eisner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Federation for Jewish Culture, only the second such honor in the organization's history, presented by Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman. A film documentary about Eisner's career is underway from Montilla Pictures (Andrew and Jon Cooke). Eisners most recent graphic novel, Fagin the Jew, a reinterpretation of the villain in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, was published by Doubleday in Fall 2003.

Will Eisner's last completed work, THE PLOT: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published by W. W. Norton & Company in May 2005. Umberto Eco has written the introduction to the book.

Eisner also worked closely with Australian artist Gary Chaloner in the development and relaunch of Will Eisner's JOHN LAW both online and in print through IDW Publishing. New adventures are continuing to be produced and can be viewed online for free here.

DC Comics, Inc., has released The Will Eisner Companion, (a career overview by Christopher Couch and Steven Weiner), will continue to publish The Spirit Archives (currently up to Volume 16) and has acquired the rights to produce a new on-going monthly comic book starring The Spirit by hot fan-favorite writer/artist Darwyn Cooke (DC's New Frontier). This project will begin with a special The Spirit/Batman one-shot written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Cooke.

Also recently released from Dark Horse Comics is Eisner/Miller: One on One, a wide-ranging dialogue between Eisner and Frank Miller (Dark Knight Returns, Sin City) and Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, a biography by journalist Bob Andelman.

A career-spanning art exhibit, The Will Eisner Retrospective opened at MOCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) in New York City in May 2005, followed by galleries at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, The University of Massachusetts in Amherst and possibly additional venues.

Fourteen graphic novels comprising The Will Eisner Library will also be re-issued by Norton, beginning with The Contract with God Trilogy, combining three titles which focus on a single mythical block in the Bronx (A Contract with God, Dropsie Avenue and A Life Force), with new art and commentary by Eisner. This trilogy is scheduled for publication in November 2005.

Will Eisner died January 3, 2005, following complications from open heart surgery.

Text © Denis Kitchen

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