Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [134]
Ultimately, The Dreamer is a fascinating failure, a book that should have been two or three times as long. It could have told a more detailed story about the early history of comics, which would have highlighted Eisner’s important contributions, and it could have addressed the larger issue of anti-Semitism that had forced so many talented artists into the business. The book includes an abundance of interesting stories, but the reader walks away dissatisfied, like someone expecting a feast, only to be served delicious but insubstantial appetizers.
Though he’d been working in comics for nearly fifty years, Eisner found his instructional text Comics and Sequential Art a difficult book to organize and write. At the School of Visual Arts, he lectured off the top of his head, using minimal notes. Student questions and interests guided him when he needed to add emphasis to a topic or when he wasn’t being clear enough for his art students to understand. When he set out to write the book, which began as a series of essays in The Spirit Magazine, Eisner was on his own.
“I couldn’t find any textbook on the medium that dealt with comics as a discipline, as a true discipline,” he told interviewer Jon B. Cooke. “Most of the comic books at that time—books on comics, rather—dealt with how to draw feet, and how to draw noses, and [took] a very simplistic approach to the drawing aspect of it. Very few of them had attempted to develop a theoretical discussion on the discipline of the medium.”
The lack of available texts, Eisner felt, could be traced to the continuous perception of comics as a type of pop art unworthy of serious scholarly study. “While each of the major integral elements, such as design, drawing, caricature and writing, have separately found academic consideration, this unique combination took a long time to find a place in the literary, art and comparative literature curriculums,” he wrote. “I believe that the reason for slow critical acceptance sat as much on the shoulders of the practitioner as the critic.”
Comics and Sequential Art was not an instructional book on how to draw feet, noses, or any other part of the human body. In one chapter entitled “Expressive Anatomy” (which he would expand into a book-length study of the same name twenty years later), Eisner wrote and gave examples of how an artist could use the body and gestures as means of expressing emotion; but this was not a book that intended to teach someone how to draw. Instead, Eisner directed Comics and Sequential Art at the artist who already knew how to draw and ink but needed guidance on how to apply those skills to creating comics. Chapters included “Imagery,” “Timing,” and “The Frame,” and in writing the book, Eisner was revealing as much about his thoughts and methods as he’d ever allowed outside the classroom. Heavily illustrated with examples from his graphic novels and his work on The Spirit, the book showed how to write scripts, do breakdowns and rough pencils, create catchy splash pages, and move on to the finished work. Later editions included a chapter on how to create comics with computers.
One of the more arresting examples offered in the book was a complete ten-page modern adaptation of the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet. Eisner and writer/editor Dennis O’Neil had been at a party, engaged in a spirited discussion about the limitations to comics, and Eisner’s piece seemed to rise out of their disagreement.
“I said there were intrinsic limits to what comic books could do,” O’Neil recalled, “and I cited Hamlet’s soliloquy as an example. Six months later, Will Eisner’s Quarterly came out with Hamlet’s soliloquy, done by a teenager