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Tuesday, January 04, 2005
His spirit is alive
This is hardly the best way to kick off the year, is it?
I’ve enjoyed reading the memorials for Will Eisner that so many have posted on-line. I’ve especially enjoyed the ones that are really personal like Mark Evanier’s and Johnny B’s. We are all writing about the same man, but they are stories only we can tell. Here is my story of Mr. Eisner.
For the longest time The Spirit felt like a great secret that everybody knew but me. The archive editions were too expensive for me to get and the back issues of reprints by Warren and Kitchen Sink were not the easiest books to find. Will Eisner was a man I know I was supposed to respect and admire but I didn’t know why.
That changed when looking through the rather poor comics and graphic novels section of my library I picked up what was one of the few quality selections, The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics. Here were reprints of books created before my father was born that lay the groundwork for so much of the works I enjoy now. Besides the origins of such well known corporate properties like Batman and Superman there was important works by Harvey Kurtzman, Bernie Krigstein, Walt Kelly, Carl Barks and so many more. I enjoyed them all even though something was bugging me. I was currently enjoying comics, many of the superhero variety, that were much more sophisticated than the kinds found here. Sure, I knew the simple superhero timeline learned from countless price guides. The Golden Age was when most of these ideas came about; the Silver Age was when they were getting perfected and the Modern Age was when they get more serious and, in my estimation at the time, better. I still couldn’t figure out where those two godheads of 1986, Alan Moore and Frank Miller, got the ideas to do something really smart with these superhero comics.
That’s when I got to the near-end of the book, the part that reprinted Will Eisner’s The Spirit. These comics were just as meaningful to me as Miller’s and Moore’s were, and they had the nice air of legendary to them to boot. One strip from 1941, when Eisner was just beginning to unleash his gifts before the draft interrupted him, and then two more strips, one from 1947 and another from 1948, when those gifts came on full force. These read better than any of the other Golden Age superhero books I had read. The artwork was as bold and characteristic as the noir films of the same time. Eisner was one of the first Americans who created a comic book page that was alive, that was truly impressive and a sight to behold. Those splash pages set the mood in a different and wonderful way every week. Characters lived in an urban world that breathed and lived as much as the characters themselves did. It was an environment that had no trouble expanding past the comic pages it was printed on. It delved into the minds of the readers who knew that we were getting a quick glimpse at a place that was always hustling and bustling, regardless of what hour it was or what comic book story it was depicting. The writing popped and crackled loudly and briskly before writers like Stan Lee and John Broome would begin make stimulating stories decades into the future.
And those stories! The tamest of the trio, the strip from 1941, featured a man who condensed time into liquid. This was an incredible imagination in action while Jack Kirby was still learning his craft in the Eisner-Iger shop. The second story of Gerhard Schnobble, the man who could fly, used that imagination of Eisner’s (and at this point Jules Feiffer’s as well) to make the fantastic poignant, tragic and impossibly memorable. It was that last story, “Ten Minutes,” that proved to me Will Eisner was one of the greatest the comic medium will ever see. We get all of these elements better than ever in just that small amount of pages. Life, death and the neurosis they embark on us all were given to millions who opened their paper on that Sunday, September 11. For creating works like that we will always remember and cherish Will Eisner. Works we always enjoy like The Spirit, A Contract with God, Comics & Sequential Art, one of the earliest and greatest deconstructions of the medium, and so much more.
Even if some dared to forget what Eisner gave to us they couldn’t. The man taught so many to look at comics in a different way, a way that challenged them and made them create works better than they would have anyway. For that we can only thank him for the years he spent providing us with so much.
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