Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisnerwas an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. He was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series The Spiritwas noted for its experiments in content and form. In 1978, he popularized the term "graphic novel" with the publication of his book A Contract with God. He was an early contributor to formal comics studies with his book Comics and Sequential Art. The Eisner Award was named in his honor,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth6 March 1917
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
All professionals should teach at some time in their career because they are obliged to pass on what they have learned.
Recent events make this a particularly challenging and somewhat anomalous time for our company,
(Visitors) now have time to spend money and do other things, and they are much happier not waiting in line,
There has been (talk on Wall Street) that major media companies are out of favor. I have seen this chicken-little behavior before, ... I have worked in the industry for four decades. At least once a decade they fall out of favor, but each time they emerge stronger than ever. This is for cyclical economic reasons.
I've been doing this a long time and you spend a lot of time trying to do what's right and concentrate on the bottom line, concentrate on creative excellence, and sometimes you have disagreements with people,
The time has come to put this matter behind us and to focus on our business initiatives,
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I did not have the dreams that the other artists working with me had, of 'moving uptown,' becoming an illustrator or a gallery painter, or those others who said, 'I'm going to go uptown and be a writer, I'm going to work for The New Yorker one day and escape this ghetto.' For me, there was no escape.
Memory is a very amorphous thing. It is selective and shaped by emotion . . . people are constantly in pursuit of the details of their past because it is from that they determine their own identity upon which they can base their strategy of survival.
The term "comics" long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. "Sequential Art" is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.
The work we do is as demanding as any of the great painters because nothing that happens on the page of a comic is accidental. It has to be imagined first in your mind before you do it. Those of us who know something about the art of painting know that working on a canvas, very often a lot of serendipitous things happen that work to the advantage of the painter ultimately.
I've spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.
In the beginning of the century, in 1900, the newspapers in this country began running comic strips, and they were called jokes or funnies. The word comics developed later, but it is that that began to give the name - the ambience of comics - the feeling of being a frivolous kind of art-form.
In comics, images are generally impressionistic. Usually, they are rendered with economy in order to facilitate their usefulness as a language. Because experience precedes analysis, the intellectual digestive process is accelerated by the imagery provided by comics.