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When the comics grew up

Will Eisner, who created dozens of comics characters, also revolutionized the field of graphic novels.

By KIT REED
Published October 16, 2005

WILL EISNER:

A Spirited Life

By Bob Andelman

M Press, $14.95, 352 pp

Reviewed by KIT REED

Everybody knows that there is an asteroid or an alternative dimension out there somewhere in the wild blue, where heroes from the comics - heroes who are super and not-so-super - kick back and tell stories about the good old days. Because there are so many crossover episodes in the history of comics, they all know each other, and gossip abounds.

So do conflicting accounts of what went on. It's a given that in any discussion of what happened, no two characters will agree.

What few people know is that there's a similar fraternity out there in the real world, and it's made up of the artists who created these characters. (Though it may sound sexist, fraternity is the right word here. Women did make it into the comics as characters - Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Sheena the Queen of the Jungle, for example - but in the last century, few comics artists have been women.)

As Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, a detailed biography of the creator of Sheena the Queen of the Jungle, shows, everybody knew everybody else in the comics world of the 1930s and '40s. These artists worked for, sometimes stole ideas from and influenced each other. They included Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who brought us Superman (and who eventually lost the rights to their creation); the cannier creator of Batman, Bob Kane; and artist, entrepreneur, teacher, friend and mentor Will Eisner. What's amazing is that these titans, whose works still are shaping a large portion of the national culture, were just kids when they broke into the field - some not yet out of their teens.

The network they formed exists to this day. Eisner died in January at age 87, but his influence lives on, as Bob Andelman shows in his carefully researched account of Eisner's career, in such contemporary artists as Jules Feiffer, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, all of whom crossed paths with Eisner - and learned from him.

Andelman's book began as a collaboration with Eisner on his autobiography, but quickly morphed when the artist saw how much work was involved in writing his life. In addition to culling two years' worth of conversations with Eisner and his wife, Andelman, who lives in St. Petersburg, interviewed dozens of colleagues, students and business partners to tell the story of the artist's long, productive career.

Cartoonist Mike Ploog, who trained with Eisner, characterizes his style: "He doesn't sweat reality. It doesn't have to look like a car but it has to feel like a car. And he does the same thing with his figures . . . He has a great insight to people, and it comes through in his art."

Eisner created dozens of comics characters, but he is best remembered for Denny Colt, a.k.a. The Spirit, a masked detective who returns from the grave to fight crime. Unlike the caped crusaders found in early comics, Colt was an ordinary guy - a bit of a shlub - with zero superpowers. Yet while many other comics characters have crashed into oblivion, Colt lives on in reprints to this day.

When The Spirit, a 16-page insert, appeared in Sunday editions in more than 20 newspapers from 1940-1952, there were no ethnic heroes in comics. But Feiffer, who was in charge of The Spirit when Eisner was away in the Army, insists the character, despite his upturned Irish nose, was "Jewish - I knew it all the time!" Eisner wouldn't have drawn an obviously Jewish superhero, explains Feiffer, who, like Eisner, is the son of Jewish immigrants, because "public Jewishness was simply not a staple of the culture of the time. If you were an assimilated wannabe, you stayed away from your Jewishness."

Although Eisner claimed Colt was not Jewish, the artist drew on his religious background for his first graphic novel, A Contract With God, in 1978, a groundbreaking work in what was then a new field. The longer storytelling form found a ready audience. "I was struck by the obvious," Eisner told Andelman. "The young preteen comic book reader of the 1940s was now close to 40 years old. He grew up on the medium, but what was there for a mature person to read in this format? It was an enormous opportunity."

Eisner was right. Anybody who's passed a cineplex in the last decade knows that comics have entered the mainstream. The New York Times Magazine is running a continuing saga by artist Chris Ware. Feiffer's work and Art Spiegelman's Maus, which won a Pulitzer Prize, demonstrate that the art did indeed grow up, along with the audience. In Will Eisner: A Sprited Life, Andelman maps the life of one of the artists who brought this about.

- Kit Reed started a neighborhood comics library on St. Petersburg's 14th Avenue N when she was nine years old. Her latest short story collection, Dogs of Truth, is just out.

Bob Andelman will present Will Eisner: A Spirited Life at the Times Festival of Reading Saturday, Oct. 29, on the campus of USF St. Petersburg. His talk is scheduled for 3:15-4 p.m. in Davis Hall 102.

[Last modified October 14, 2005, 12:38:03]