Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Will Eisner was a great innovator in comic books who spent his entire adult life working in the field. Michael Schumacher’s biography of the man, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, is a chronological review of his life and major works. Several things set Eisner apart as a comics writer and artist. From the beginning of his career, he thought comics could be serious art that could be more than cheap entertainment for kids. Unlike many comics artists, he was also a savvy businessman. He expanded the scope of comics from entertainment to education. Though his early work in comics is of high quality and displayed great creativity, he pushed himself to do more and better things with his chosen medium. Comic books were held in low regard in their early days, even by the writers and artists who created them. Most of the creators who worked in the field were just biding their time and making ends meet until they might move into more lucrative and respected work in books, magazines, and commercial art. It was also a market open to Jews, like Eisner, and other minorities who had a hard time breaking into other markets. In contrast, Eisner always saw potential in comic books to be serious art that could communicate to people in unique ways. While publishers were interested in gimmicks and characters that sold magazines, and Eisner provided them with that kind of material, Eisner’s desire was to focus on great storytelling through comics. He got his chance when he produced The Spirit, a comic made to be a weekly insert for newspapers. He negotiated a level of creative control over the comic that was uncommon in the industry. Eisner enjoyed the process of negotiation. This had much to do with his success as a businessman. For most of his career, Eisner ran his own shop producing comics for other publishers rather than working as an employee for freelancer. He was intelligent and flexible in his business dealing. He reaped the financial reward of his artistic work in a way few comics artist of the time did. Schumacher attributes this dual nature as artist and businessman to his parents. Eisner’s father was a painter who barely scraped through the depression; his mother wanted to see her children to something practical and have stable jobs. When comics began to face troubles in the postwar years, Eisner was already moving on to the education market. He had proven the concept of educational comics while he was in the army and created comics that supplemented preventative maintenance programs. He expanded this work later, contracting to produce a preventative maintenance magazine for the army during the Korean War, and expanding educational comics to other customers. In the last decades of his life, Eisner returned to telling stories through comics. Rather than returning to the genre stories he told earlier, he told longer, deeper, more personal, and sometimes autobiographical stories. Though not the inventor of the term "graphic novel," he was an innovator in telling longer stories through comics, tackling subjects that previously were the realm of mainstream literature and nonfiction. He developed relationships with publishers and editors that pushed him to produce great work. Schumacher doesn’t find all the work of this period to be great, though some is incredible. It seems to be a complaint that not all of Eisner’s work was as good as his best work. Though their may be something to this, we see in Eisner a man who is pushing into new areas of the art and publishing of comics when most of his contemporaries had long retired. If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon American Splendor (Film) Maus by Art Spiegelman Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwyn Cook