Introducing Some Of The Greatest Graphic
Novelists...
Will Eisner
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One of the pioneers of the industry. Like wine, he creations gets
better with age.
He has since left the world but his works will always leave a
lasting impression for many many years to come. Here is a tribute to
the great Will Eisner.
William Erwin Eisner (born March 6, 1917, Brooklyn, New York City,
New York, United States; died January 3, 2005, Lauderdale Lakes,
Florida) was an acclaimed American comics writer, artist and
entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important
contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the
cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The
Spirit; for his use of comics as an instructional medium; for his
leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of
literature with his book A Contract with God and Other Tenement
Stories; and for his educational work about the medium as
exemplified by his book Comics and Sequential Art.
The son of Jewish immigrants — his father a former painter,
marginally successful entrepreneur, and one-time manufacturer in
Manhattan's Seventh Avenue garment district — Eisner attended De
Witt Clinton High School. There he drew for the school newspaper
(The Clintonian), literary magazine (The Magpie) and yearbook, and
did stage design, leading him to consider doing that kind of work
for theater. Upon graduation, he studied under Canadian artist
George Brandt Bridgman (1864-1943) for a year at the Art Students
League of New York. Contacts made there led to a position as an
advertising writer-cartoonist for the New York American newspaper.
Eisner also drew $10-a-page illustrations for pulp magazines,
including Western Sheriffs and Outlaws.
Wow, What a Magazine! #3 (Sept. 1936): Cover art by a teenaged Will
EisnerIn 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist Bob Kane,
future creator of Batman, suggested that the 19-year-old Eisner try
selling cartoons to the new comic book Wow, What A Magazine!. "Comic
books" at the time were tabloid-sized collections of comic strip
reprints in color. In 1935, they began to include occasional new
comic strip-like material. Editor Jerry Iger bought an Eisner
adventure strip called "Captain Scott Dalton", an H. Rider
Haggard-styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts.
Eisner subsequently wrote and drew the pirate strip "The Flame" and
the secret agent strip "Harry Karry" for Wow as well.
In the late 1970s, Eisner turned his attention to longer
storytelling forms. A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories
(Baronet Books, Oct. 1978) is one of the first American graphic
novels, combining thematically linked short stories into a single
square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic
novels that tell the history of New York's immigrant communities,
particularly Jews, including The Building, Dropsie Avenue and To the
Heart of the Storm. He continued producing new books into his
seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year.
Remarkably, each of these books was done twice — once as a rough
version to show editor Dave Schreiner, then as a second, finished
version incorporating suggested changes. 8
In the introduction to the 2001 reissue of A Contract with God,
Eisner revealed that the inspiration for the title story grew out of
the 1969 death of his leukemia-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice,
next to whom he is buried. Until then, only Eisner's closest friends
had even been aware that he and his wife, Ann Weingarten Eisner, had
a daughter. They also have a son, John.
Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of novels
and myths, including Moby Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he
published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical
stories of a West African king, "The Lion of Mali". Fagin the Jew is
an account to the life of Dickens's character Fagin, in which Eisner
tries to get past the sterotyped portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist.
His last graphic novel, The Plot, an account of the making of the
anti-semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was completed
shortly before his death and published in 2005.
Eisner has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist
Society Comic Book Award for 1967, 1968, 1969, 1987, and 1988, as
well as its Story Comic Book Award in 1979, and its highest
accolade, the Reuben Award, for 1988.
He was inducted into the Academy of Comic Book Arts Hall of Fame in
1971, and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1987. The following year,
the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were established in his honor.
"As a soul, Will was generous, ambitious, insightful, and fair. He
did not hesitate to give of himself in these last decades. A
constant presence at conventions, Will made equal time for the
captains of this industry, the aspirants looking to break in, and
the fans whose lives he touched with his body of work. He was always
a gentleman, in the classical sense, where the word actually means
something beyond mere politeness. "
-Charles Brownstein( Executive Director for Comic Book Legal
Defense Fund )
"...I'm going to miss him enormously, more than I can say. I made a
speech last year, where I said how strange it was to discover that
the gods of comics, the people who made the medium, were, when I met
them, cranky old Jews. Will Eisner wasn't cranky, and he was never
old. He was, in all ways, a mensch.
And I keep weighing it in my head, the sorrow at losing Will with
the knowledge of how fortunate I was to have known him ("you're
always sorry, you're always grateful," as Sondheim said about
something quite different).
I'm more grateful than sorry. "
- Neil Gaiman.
Read it full here.
Will Eisner died of complications from a quadruple bypass surgery
performed on December 22, 2004 in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida.
David Brin
David Brin is more of a science fiction writer then
a graphic novelist. Nonetheless, I decided to do a bio on him because of some
outstanding graphic novels he wrote. He is well, obviously very smart.
Glen David Brin (born
October 6, 1950) is a well-known American author of science fiction. He
is the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the
Interstella War Award. He lives in Southern California and has been both
a NASA consultant and a physics professor.
Several of his novels have been New York Times Bestsellers. His 1989
ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyber-warfare
and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie,
directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. His novels
have been translated into more than twenty languages. Several
studio-financed screenplays are under pre-development consideration.
Brin's first non-fiction book, The Transparent Society, published by
Perseus/Addison Wesley Inc. in 1998 deals with contemporary concerns
about privacy, accountability and secrecy in the world of the coming
century.
As part of his concern to ensure that young readers get the best
possible bridge to a lifetime habit of reading, Brin has developed a new
series of novels, the OUT OF TIME series, about high schoolers from our
era who get yanked into the future to solve problems and teach their
descendants courage -- before being put back in time for classes the
next day. The first few volumes of this exciting and yet thoughtful
series were penned by Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch and Roger MacBride
Allen.
David Brin's wife, Cheryl Brigham, is also a scientist. They have a
young daughter and two sons. Brin speaks before many groups and schools,
sharing his passionate enthusiasm for the future. His novels have been
translated into twenty languages and non-fiction articles have appeared
in many magazines. Claiming to be -- "in love with this amazing, scary,
fascinating century"-- David Brin makes extensive use of his scientific
training in his writing, bringing to his novels an intense passion for
the exploration of ideas, and the human spirit.
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