World Famous Comics: Comics and Sequential Art (Will Eisner Instructional Books)
Comics and Sequential Art (Will Eisner Instructional Books)
By: Will Eisner Publisher: W. W. Norton Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: W. W. Norton Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 164 Publication Date: August 25, 2008
Product Description: A classic drawing textbook from an American comics pioneer, revised and enhanced for a new generation.
Based on Will Eisner's legendary course at New York's School of Visual Arts, this guide has inspired generations of artists, students, teachers, and fans. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner reveals the basic building blocks and principles of comics, including imagery, the frame, and the application of time, space, and visual forms. With examples from Eisner's own catalog and such masters as H. Foster, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Milton Caniff, Al Capp, and George Herriman, this book distills the art of graphic storytelling into principles that every comic artist, writer, and filmmaker should know. 2-color art and text.
Amazon.com Review: Based on the popular course Eisner taught for several years at New York's School of Visual Arts, this lovingly written book on visual storytelling contains an accumulation of his ideas, theories and advice on the practice of graphic story-telling and the uses to which the comic book art form can be applied. Whether you're a film student, literature student, artist or simply a fan of good storytelling, you'll love this book filled with Eisner's cartoons.
Heavily Illustrated Essays about How Comics and Sequential Art Communicate My guess is that a hundred people have heard of this work for every one who has actually read it. At the time the book was developed, you could only find this information by taking Will Eisner's class at the New York School of Visual Art.
Unless you haven't been paying attention to comics, you will probably find that you already understand most of the key messages: words and illustrations combine to form imagery; time elapses between panels and the pacing of the time involved affects how you react to the story; the frames around the panels and pages as a mechanism for tying the story together; using anatomy and expression to extract emotion from readers; how to combine words and illustrations for best effect; the potential to use sequential art in more than comic strips and books; and new technologies for making comics and sequential art.
As for me, the only section that I found rewarding was the extensive middle section on panels. Maybe I'm obtuse (I probably am), but I've often found it difficult to follow and understand the choice of panel structure on pages in Golden age comics. Mr. Eisner thoughtfully provides extended sections from The Spirit to demonstrate why he made the choices he did and what he hoped to accomplish. It was like a Rosetta Stone for translating what some of those odd pages are supposed to do. For that section, it was worth reading the book. The other sections I could have skipped and not missed anything.
I also recommend you read Scott McCloud book's about comics and sequential art: They are more rewarding in terms of setting out the issues and opportunities.
A Must for all Comic writers & artists! I just received this book yesterday, and I've been devouring it ever since! Mr. Eisner is a master storyteller, and he does a wonderful job of explaining the how's and why's of it in this book. The book is loaded with examples as well, mostly from his "Spirit" series. Trust me, you are going to be blown away by these things that were created a good 50 years ago! If you want to improve your comic book storytelling ability, this is an excellent place to start!
What a disappointment... After reading the reviews of this book here on Amazon, and running across mentions of this book in lots of other places that talk about comics & graphic novels, I was really looking forward to reading it. But on the whole, I've been very disappointed. Although the book covers a lot of relevant topics, it does so in a way that seems sloppy and self-congratulatory. The book could do with a thorough proofreading to catch the numerous typos and other errors, and the author seems more concerned with impressing the reader than in making the topics easy to grasp and apply. I'm really surprised to find that this isn't a better introduction to the art & craft of visual storytelling.
The Sequential Artist's Bible Hey, why not take the analogy further? Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' is the Sequential Artist's New Testament... and Fredric Wertham's 'Seduction of the Innocent' is the Sequential Artist's 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'.
'Understanding Comics' didn't exactly make 'Comics & Sequential Art' obsolete - in many ways they compliment each other, and they take somewhat different approaches to explaining this wonderful and fascinating art, although of course there are many similarities (McCloud clearly states that Eisner's work was his biggest influence, and it shows in the text). McCloud's book is more entertaining and reader friendly, that's for sure, and in many ways covers more ground and goes deeper - but it's important to remember that McCloud had the benefit of an extra decade in which the medium developed more rapidly than ever before, as well as that of Eisner's work as a reference. Eisner's work is the first true academic examination of sequential art and its potential as a medium, and was written at a time when the big revolution in comics - which he himself helped agitate more than fifteen years before - was just reaching its crucial stages.
Aside from giving solid ground to several definitions - sequential art, graphic novel, the Gutter - which would become basics of the medium - Eisner's work took deeper consideration than anyone before him of the enormous potential the form has, and was an integral part of the artistic revolution is so-called comics. By many it was considered definitive; such a thing, of course, does not exist. 'Understanding Comics' builds on Eisner's work and in many ways is more complete, just as another, more complete work, may appear ten or twenty years from now. McCloud, of course, had the benefit not only of Eisner's work but also of artists like Dave McKean, who stretched the very same ideas that Eisner talked about to new extents. My main complaint about Eisner's book, in fact, is that he uses only his own work to illustrate his points, rather than draw some examples from great contemporaries like Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman.
While 'Understanding Comics' is friendlier and better suited for beginners and casual readers, 'Comics & Sequential Art' is more complex and more academic, and directed at those with an artistic background - after all, the material was taken from a series of lectures Eisner gave in the School of Visual Arts in New York. If you're new to the business, 'Understanding Comics' is a better pick, but if you have professional interest in comics, then both these works are essential reading, and 'Comics & Sequential Art' is remarkably important and inspiring.
Bring A Thesaurus I have no doubt Will Eisner's intentions were noble in writing this book. I'm also not here to disparage a widely acknowledged great in the comics industry. And yet... It comes as no surprise that this emanates from a series of academic lectures as it smacks of a non-academic striving desperately both to sound learned and informed and to give serious academic weight to a subject generally percieved as throwaway entertainment. Will Eisner was a great, but a great of a very different era and as such he has very little relevance visually to the world of comics today. That's not to say he's inferior to a lot of the hacks passing themselves off as 'cartoonists' these days, but if you want to work in that industry as an artist (thus producing sequential ART) then this book is a fraction of the use of the superior (that's right SUPERIOR) Scott McCloud book "Understanding Comics". So do yourself a favour and buy that instead. Oh, and using lots of big (and inappropriate to the medium) words doesn't make you sound smart, either. Sorry.
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