final credits - will eisner
Will Eisner was born March 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx (along with friend Bob Kane, who would later create Batman), and his first work was published in the school newspaper. One of his earliest jobs was to create illustrations for anatomy textbooks. Eisner started a comics production company with friend Jerry Iger in 1937, first releasing collections of strips published in daily newspapers of the day.
Business was good and Eisner soon began creating original works, writing and drawing under five different names. To meet the high demand for comics, a number of young peers were recruited including Kane, Jack Kirby and Lou Fine to help out, and the Eisner & Iger studio became a factory. Eisner erred when he rejected Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's crude character sketch of a caped hero with a fatal flaw. They took their Superman pitch elsewhere.
Eisner's work was pioneering, being the first to use "silent" balloonless panels to emphasize character emotion, instead focusing attention on facial expression. He addressed subjects rarely seen at the time: spousal abuse, tax audits, urban blight and graft. His first comic was the swashbuckling "Hawks of the Sea." In the 1940s, Eisner brought to life characters such as "The Spirit" and "Sheena, the Jungle Girl." "The Spirit" was the tale of a hero unique because of his lack of super powers -- he was a middle-class crime fighter who wore suit and had a manner not unlike Cary Grant. The strip, published in newspapers from 1940 to 1952 in a self-contained four-color insert, melded German Expressionist imagery with the wise slyness of Hollywood's screwball comedies.
Drafted during World War II, the Army had Eisner create "Joe Dope" to teach Jeep maintenance to soldiers with a bumbling comic-strip character. After the war, the Army hired him for more instruction manuals which he produced until the 1970s. In 1952, he retired "The Spirit" choosing to dedicate his labour to advertising and marketing instead of storytelling. His interest in comics was re-ignited later in the 1970s when he saw the underground works of artists such as Robert Crumb. Eisner went back to the drawing board and the "graphic novel" was born.
Eisner's first graphic novel -- a term he detested -- was "A Contract With God," published in 1978. It combined elements of comic books and those of classic literary novels. He continued to create his novels at the rate of about one a year. His last work, "Plot," is set to be released in May, 2005. So great was his impact that since 1988, the comics industry's top award has been called "the Eisner." His textbooks "Comics and Sequential Art" and "Graphic Storytelling," are required reading in the comics field.
For samples of Eisner's work and related links, visit the official Will Eisner web site.