Today would have been the 94th birthday of Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and a pioneer in the comics industry, starting us down the road of establishing comics as a respected literary art. In honor of his birthday, Google‘s front page logo is inspired by and dedicated to Eisner and was designed by a younger giant of comic book pedagogy, Scott McCloud, who also shared his thoughts on Google’s blog:
For most of his career, Eisner was years, even decades, ahead of the curve. I saw him debating artists and editors half his age, and there was rarely any question who the youngest man in the room was. It helped that he never stood on ceremony. Everyone was his peer, regardless of age or status. None of us called him “Mr. Eisner.” He was just “Will.”
The Spirit debuted in 1940 and ran for 12 years in newspapers in addition to its series of comic books, a deeply noir series and a product of its time, which is to say beautiful art with an aftertaste of misogyny and racial stereotypes. Outside of his work on The Spirit, Eisner wrote (perhaps the first) graphic novels that took a hard look at life in the tenements and slums of New York City, and at the Jewish faith.
However, in this blog’s opinion, his most important contribution to comics today was not his fiction work, but his pedagogical treatises on how to write comics, where he was one of the first writers to seriously consider and then describe the language of comic books as we use it today. Comics and Sequential Art is a great gift to aspiring comics artists and writers everywhere.
Eisner died in 2005, but lived to see the creation of his eponymous industry award show, the Eisners, which is held yearly at San Diego’s Comic Con.
