Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [135]
Eisner included “Hamlet on a Rooftop” in Comics and Sequential Art as an example of how body language and facial expressions could be used to accentuate the written text. Eisner would always insist that The Spirit had been influenced by the movies, while his graphic novels were informed by plays he’d seen.
Eisner applied his love of plays to his later graphic work, particularly in his graphic novels. “Hamlet on a Rooftop” became an exercise in applying body language as a means of enhancing text. (Courtesy of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.)
“The Spirit was originally done with a cinematic approach because I felt that the language at the time was being impacted by cinema and cinematic ideas,” he told Time magazine’s Andrew D. Arnold in 2003. “[But] I was never really satisfied with it. It was interesting and fun to experiment with, but for me live theatre is a reality.”
“Hamlet on a Rooftop” provided concrete evidence of how to bring the theatrical elements of a story to the printed page. The creation of each panel was fully explained with an annotation affording readers a rare glimpse into Eisner’s creative process. More significant, the piece illustrated Eisner’s lifelong insistence on the importance of writing in comics.
“This represents an example of a classic situation—that of author vs. artist,” he wrote. “The artist must decide at the onset what his ‘input’ shall be; to slavishly make visual that which is in the author’s mind or to embark on the raft of the author’s words onto a visual sea of his own charting.”
In analyzing “Hamlet on a Rooftop,” Dennis O’Neil, lauded for his work on the Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow books, saw the piece as representative of the marriage of story and art that made Eisner so effective.
“That was his art—catching the precise moment when the body is most expressive of what’s going on in the mind, and then sort of freezing that and exaggerating a little bit,” O’Neil said. “The art skill is subordinate to the narrative. It’s not showing off and saying, ‘Look what pretty pictures I can draw.’ That’s a happy skill to have, but it’s not comics. With comics, everything should be subordinate to the narrative. He was doing it with Shakespeare, and he was doing it with the stuff he wrote, too.”
The Dreamer, published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1986, told a story that was half a century old. As Eisner already knew, there were plenty of contemporary dreamers hard at work on graphic novels, and 1986 turned out to be a breakthrough year in the form. In that one year alone, Art Spiegelman, one of the best-known names in the underground comix scene and widely regarded as one of the comics industry’s leading literary practitioners, published Maus: A Survivor’s Tale; Frank Miller, who had already garnered critical acclaim for his reworking of Daredevil, released his four-part novel, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a recasting of the character’s legend accredited with saving the character from extinction; and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a British writer/artist team, were publishing the initial installments of their influential twelve-part Watchmen series. In Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel, comics scholar Stephen Weiner labeled 1986 “a turning point” in the comics industry: “From then on,” he wrote, “cartoonists aimed higher and hoped more than ever that their books would break—or at least peek—out beyond the traditional comic book readership, and focused more on stories holding appeal to readers who didn’t care for traditional comic books.”
Although all four were young enough to have been Eisner’s children, and had learned aspects of their craft by looking at his oeuvre, they were all fiercely individualistic and dedicated to their own work, with colorful histories in comics prior to the publication of these seminal graphic novels.
Spiegelman, a product of the undergrounds, shared Eisner’s passion for the literary possibilities of comics as well as his distaste for superheroics. The son of Polish Jewish concentration camp survivors, Spiegelman