Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [166]
Ultimately, Eisner’s biggest accomplishment in Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood was his ability to present Dropsie Avenue as both a setting and a character. The neighborhood acted as a stage for all of Eisner’s dramas, yet in the greater scheme, it symbolized human life itself, from sturdy developing youth to deteriorating old age. “Neighborhoods have life spans,” Eisner explained. “They begin, evolve, mature and die. But while the evolution is displayed by the decline of its buildings, it seems to me that the lives of the inhabitants are the internal force which generates the decay. People, not buildings, are the heart of the matter.”
Seven decades of working in comics hadn’t dulled Eisner’s enthusiasm for learning about whatever was new in sequential art. He was buoyed by the fact that libraries across the country were routinely stocking graphic novels and that universities were now offering courses in comics history and art. Manga, a form of comic art from Japan, heavily influenced by cinema and appealing to young readers raised on the electronics revolution, was flying off the shelves of comic book and general bookstores, offering further evidence that young readers, even those addicted to video games and not inclined to read, were still letting their eyes travel from panel to panel of highly stylized art. Movies based on graphic novels drew long lines at the box office. At one time, comic books had been described as little movies on paper; motion picture producers and directors finally seemed to have taken notice.
“We’re in a visual era,” Eisner offered.
We have to communicate today with imagery, because there’s need for speed of communication. Comics—the comic medium, the idea of sequentially arranged images with some text to convey an idea and tell a story—have found the place between text and film. We deliver information at a very rapid rate of speed. Very often, our information is not as deep as a body of text, but a lot of people haven’t got time to read a large body of text any longer. So I would say the growth of our society, the conduct of our civilization, is on our side.
To create something new for this quick-paced society and readership, Eisner turned to straightforward social commentary—an area offering great potential but rarely explored in comics. Newspapers had a tradition of pushing the limits in one-panel editorial cartoons or in daily cartoon strips. Garry Trudeau had successfully skewered social and political issues in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Doonesbury, and before Trudeau, Walt Kelly (Pogo) and Al Capp (Li’l Abner) had issued stinging commentary in their newspaper strips. These had been satires, however, maintaining the comic in comics.
Eisner wanted to present commentary as serious as he had in his other graphic works, but in a bold, new way. In the past, he had been reluctant to assert his political beliefs on his work, other than his obvious stance against anti-Semitism or occasional references to social issues, both subtext to his stories. He was now prepared for a full-scale assault, to use his art as pamphleteers used prose in their polemics.
In the 1990s, while reading European fairy tales and classic literature for possible adaptations in his children’s book projects, he’d noticed that many modern stereotypes could trace their roots to these tales. Eisner had no quarrel with stereotypes per se: comic book writers and artists, like comedians, used stereotypes for the sake of brevity, as a type of shorthand not needed in prose but almost required in comics, where time and space were limited. What mattered, in Eisner’s view, were the ways in which stereotypes were used—the intentions of the writers and artists. The more Eisner pondered the use of stereotypes over the years, especially in books regarded as classics, the more concerned he became about racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other poisonous ideas that could be planted in literature with damaging effects. When introduced to children, stereotypes wormed their way