Will Eisner

Will Eisner is an author of cartoon American born on March 6th, 1917 in the borough New Yorkean of Brooklyn and deceased on January 3rd, 2005 with Lauderdale Lakes (Florida), of the continuations of a quadruple coronary bridging.

A first career

Will Eisner did not cease working during more than sixty years. Its career began in “WOW What has Magazine!” in 1936. Until its death at 87 years, Will Eisner was never determined to take its retirement.

Very early, Eisner and its friend Jerry Iger found the Eisner-Iger studio where draftsmen like Bob Kane, Lou Fine, Jack Kirby make their beginnings.

In 1939, Eisner-Iger association ceases and Will Eisner produced of the cartoons for the press, it is there that will be born, inter alia, its most famous character: The Spirit (June 1940).
In 1942, Eisner is mobilized. It draws posters for moral troops as well as cartoons intended to fight against the negligences of the soldiers.

After war, with the assistance of assistants such as Jules Feiffer then Wallace (Wally) Wood, Eisner takes again the adventures of Spirit, using its character to explore very diversified kinds, science fiction with the exploration of the American daily life. He launches several series apart from Spirit, but none has truly success. It ends up giving up the Spirit series in 1952. In the Years 1960 - 70, Eisner publishes few cartoons and is devoted especially to the educational or advertizing illustration, like with pedagogy as a professor at the school of visual Arts of New York. Ironically, it is at this time there that the critics or the historians of the data base start to discover Spirit. The demand for new adventures of Spirit is done increasingly insistent until Eisner yields and proposes with the public some new adventures of its hero.

One second career

But it does not have any more fire crowned, which interests it now is to tell Brooklyn of its childhood, which it does with a contract with god , published in 1978. This cartoon marks a historical date in the kind, because it is truly the first Roman graph (Graphic Novell) which, for American, a true awakening of the potentialities of the media causes. It is not here any more of superman or counter-culture (as the underground of the years 1960 proposed some), but about a literary form finally become ripe.

Other semi-autobiographical stories follow ( the dreamer , In the middle of the storm), as well as pure fictions telling the life of the every day in New York, and a strange story of policy fiction, the call of space . Come then from the adaptations or second readings from authors literary: Kafka, Cervantes, Melville, Dickens. With the regularity of a metronome, Eisner does not cease any more producing without resting on its bay-trees of alive legend of the cartoon.

The drawing of Eisner is dynamic and talkative, readily caricatural, theatrical, choreographic, more than at any other (his/her son hidden Blutch except, perhaps). One can speak about setting-in-scene and not about “plans” and other “framings”.

It is interesting to know that Will Eisner thought much of its trade. It published two theoretical works explaining its vision of the art of band-drawn which constitute in fact a true analysis of its own Article It also on the occasion to explain its work through many conferences.

Since 1988, a very prestigious price is given to the authors of cartoons under the name of Will Eisner Award S .

Random links: