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By Root 530 0

College. The room was arranged like one of his old shops, with rows of drawing desks facing his desk in the front. Huge windows looking out over Twenty-third Street gave the room lots of natural light. Eisner would lecture or, on occasion, bring in a guest speaker. He called his class “Sequential Art,” but as he’d quip in interviews, no one seemed to know what that meant. He liked to differentiate between “comics,” which had an entertainment connotation, and “sequential art,” which included other types of art, such as the work he was doing for P*S and American Visuals. The officials at the school found it confusing. “In the catalogue they say, ‘Mr. Eisner is teaching sequential art,’ and then, in parentheses, ‘See comics,’” Eisner quipped.

In preparing his syllabus, Eisner found himself in the unusual position of considering matters that for more than three decades had been coming to him instinctively.

“I had been dealing with a medium more demanding of diverse skills and intellect than I or my contemporaries fully appreciated,” he wrote in Comics and Sequential Art, an instructional book based on his lectures, published by Poorhouse Press in 1985.

Traditionally, most practitioners with whom I worked and talked produced their art viscerally. Few ever had the time or the inclination to diagnose the form itself. In the main they were content to concentrate on the development of their draftsmanship and their perception of the audience and the demands of the marketplace.

Trying to corral a lifetime’s experiences into a class that met one day a week for three hours involved no small amount of planning, and the class was constantly evolving during Eisner’s 1974–1993 involvement with the school, to such an extent that he wrote three textbooks—Comics and Sequential Art (1985), Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1996), and Expressive Anatomy (published posthumously in 2008)—as a result of the experience. It wasn’t enough just to cover such topics as story breakdowns, panel construction, dialogue, narrative, and point of view in the class; one could understand all there was to know about the art of the comic book and never see his or her work published. Eisner believed that he had an obligation to share his knowledge about the business of comics and how it was as important for artists never to compromise the ownership of their work as it was to be notable.

His students would remember him as a supportive but no-nonsense teacher, a guy who wore a jacket and tie at a time when T-shirts, torn blue jeans, and punk hairstyles were in vogue among many of his students. Award-winning filmmaker John Dilworth, who attended the School of Visual Arts from 1982 to 1985, characterized the students as “paint-splattered torn jeans and sneakers, tee, oversize black portfolio, smokes, dirty fingers, swaggering pride, diamond ambition, and arrogant willfulness immune to objectivity and criticism.” Eisner’s teaching style, he said, was “one of amusement …

“He appeared to be amused by the students and the work they presented to him,” Dilworth said. “He wouldn’t approach the students. The students would present their studies to him for criticism. He was always chuckling. He rarely expressed dramatic comments. He was a gentleman. The studies were ‘corrected’ with tissue paper. The results were immediate. As I reflect, Eisner may have contributed to my belief that comparisons make the best education. Eisner would simply redraw the assignment in front of you. What made the critique so effective was how fair he was in complimenting the good or promising qualities.”

Eisner reminded Batton Lash of someone “sort of like a shop teacher. He had a good rapport with the class, but everyone in that class knew who was in charge. He wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense, and I think that came from his years of running a shop.”

Eisner’s style, his former students all agreed, contrasted strongly with the teaching style of Harvey Kurtzman, whose class was as popular as Eisner’s. Loose and easygoing, Kurtzman wanted his students to be his friends, to the