Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [177]
“He did a rough dummy that ran about 112 pages. He had a lot of false starts. It was my job to sift through all this stuff and kind of structure it. I started the book based on Will’s notes and what I thought it should be. I made a list of what I thought should be changed, because he already used material in previous books when he was discussing this basic idea. He was repeating stuff from the other two sequential art volumes, and you don’t want to repeat yourself. I had to go through everything he ever did and find more appropriate examples.”
Expressive Anatomy, although not as strong as Comics and Sequential Art, was a worthy addition to the Eisner instructional canon, expanding upon what he had written in the earlier book and underscoring his value as a teacher. In the classroom and his two previously published instructional books, he’d taken a practical approach to sharing a wealth of experience with a strongly diverse group of students and readers. In Expressive Anatomy, he was teaching from beyond the grave.
Neil Gaiman once asked Will Eisner why he continued to work well into an age when so many of his contemporaries had retired. Eisner considered the question and responded by mentioning a movie he’d once seen about a jazz musician who kept playing because he was in search of “The Note”—the elusive symbol of perfection, the indication that he had achieved all he could ever hope to achieve. This search was what kept Eisner in the game.
“I never felt, in talking to Will, that there was a list of things that he had to do before he died,” Gaiman said in 2009, “that he had this book and that book, and that book and that book, all lined up in his head like planes coming in, all in a holding pattern, and they had to be landed before the night comes. What I felt was he was pursuing The Note, and it’s as if there was somebody just beyond the horizon, just out of sight, playing something on a flute, and Will wanted to try to reach that person before the night came. But in order to reach that person, he was going to have to keep walking down that street, and he was going to have to head into the forest or wherever you went next.”
“The wonder of Eisner is he never stopped questioning,” Frank Miller observed, agreeing with Gaiman’s assessment of Eisner’s life and art as a continual quest. “Had he lived another thirty years, we still would have been asking that question: Where else was he going to go?”
*There were three published anthologies of graphic novels, including The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue, which included A Contract with God, A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue; Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, which gathered New York, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People; and Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories, with three graphic novels and two stories (“A Sunset in Sunshine City,” The Dreamer, To the Heart of the Storm, The Name of the Game, “The Day I Became a Professional”).
N O T E S
NOTE: In its long history, The Spirit was printed and reprinted in newspapers, magazines, and books. The feature had its own magazine with two different publishers and its own standard-sized comic book. In these chapter notes, when I quote directly from one of the specific Spirit entries, I cite the specific date on which the episode appeared in the Sunday newspaper supplement. When citing interviews and columns appearing in the magazine or comic book, I draw a distinction by citing The Spirit Magazine when I’m citing an entry in the Warren or Kitchen Sink magazines or The Spirit, followed by the number of the comic book and the parenthetical CB, indicating that it is from the Kitchen Sink Press reissue.
CHAPTER ONE: THE DEPRESSION’S LESSONS
1 Epigraph: Will Eisner, preface to The Contract with God Trilogy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. xiii.
1 Eisner family background and Will Eisner’s childhood: Will Eisner, “Art and Commerce: An Oral Reminiscence by