Will Eisner is gone. He was 87.
Others who knew him have eulogized him with great eloquence, and I feel at a loss to say anything about his passing because I never met the man. I deeply, deeply regret this fact.
The closest I came to meeting him was when he came to the Motor City Comic Con a while back, around 1997, I think. I didn't go to the comicon -- couldn't afford to -- and my buddy Ric Conway went to the show, stood in line and brought me back the official program with The Spirit on the cover, autographed by none other than Eisner himself. Ric had said to Will, "This is for my friend Jane. She's writing her own comic book." Will smiled and said, "Good, we need more girls making comics." And that was it. That's the closest I've ever come to meeting the King of Comics, one of my greatest artistic heroes, right up there with Jim Henson.
I cannot speak about Eisner himself, but I can speak about his work. I remember distinctly the first time I ever saw Eisner's stuff. It must have been 1994 or 1995, and I was in a bookshop in Stratford Ontario. A pack of friends and I were there to see some Shakespeare plays, and we had a few hours to kill between the lunch and dinner performances, and of course we all gravitated towards books.
It was probably the first book I picked up, wedged in there between Amphigorey and some other cool art books. It was Dropsie Avenue, Will's amazing story that follows a plot of land in Brooklyn from its earliest days as rural farmland, as it becomes a squalid tenement, and finally, sanitized condos. It's a paraphrased story of the South Bronx -- I didn't believe it was true until I started doing some research. I thought he'd made up the transformation as poetry, as an urban extreme. No, he'd written this thing by looking out his window. I was stunned. Couldn't put it down. I sank underwater, enraptured by the story. While everyone else milled around, I stayed in one spot, eyes wide and transfixed, hunkered down behind the Graphic Novels rack until someone forcibly hauled me away. I was hooked, thunderstruck. Eisner had me by the throat from the second I opened the cover, in the same way the Spiegelman had years before with Maus.
Probably the thing that I like the best about Eisner's books are his characters: They're unvarnished human beings. They are not polished gems of humanity; they hate, scheme, trick, lie. They love, caretake, toe the line, pine for things they shouldn't. There're moments of unfocused racism from all sides: Black, White, Italian, Jew, Pole, Latino. There is poverty, there is wealth, there is shame, there is dignity. Most of his stories play out in a large ensemble cast where each set of individuals step into the spotlight, deliver their scene, then step back, enfolded into the largest character of all: the city. No one is ever lost: all characters influence each other, even a hundred years in the future. Eisner is a master, capable of seeing superbly defined individuals within their greater whole and treating both as a palpable character within his plot.
Above all, there is humanity. Eisner's stories are all unabashedly human, and find their tragedy and comedy in the living of life: individual moments drawn with stunning clarity into remarkable stories. Eisner doesn't require external stories to make his characters interesting: their individual moments are their stories, are the focus of their lives, are what makes them interesting.
There are moments when his characterizations veer off into charicature. Yes, he did have unnervingly racist characters in The Spirit. There's no getting away from it, and I won't defend these characters nor dignify them by saying "Well, those were the times" any more than I will allow older relatives of mine to continue using racial slurs because "That's how they were raised." It's inexcusable. In Eisner's later work, especially that after A Contract with God, he continually gets into race issues, some stories more gracefully than others. Still, it is my belief that Eisner's intent was not to degrade or insult. I believe that his stories were comprised of powerful characters who embody both the best and worst in humanity, and that he did his damndest to portray people as individuals as opposed to races. You see Italian mobsters and shylock Jews on one page, and on the next, the neighboring italian tailor and jewish shoemaker whose children marry and force the two men to get over their differences. He tells stories of racism and stereotypes because those stories exist -- but he also tells stories of those who break those molds, because those stories also exist. Eisner is an observer -- an observer of culture as well as of humanity, and that means portraying the best and worst moments.
Will, you were an observer of life, an artist of life, and an inspiration to us all. Your books told me that my stories were worth telling. Your works gave me faith to continue on with a seemingly unending project. You will always remain one of my greatest heroes.
Peace to you, Will Eisner.
Posted by Jane | TrackBack