By: Bob Andelman Publisher: M Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: M Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 352 Publication Date: November 16, 2005
Product Description: Internationally recognized for his genre-busting 1940s art and storytelling style on The Spirit, Will Eisner's greatest legacy may be the graphic novels he championed and created. A Spirited Life explores Eisner's amazing life, detailing a career that spanned seventy years and saw him educate several generations of Army soldiers in the innovative PS magazine and create the first widely known graphic novel, A Contract With God.
Eisner also introduced some of the world's greatest comics art talent: Bob Kane (Batman), Jack Kirby (Captain America, Fantastic Four, X-Men), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jules Feiffer, Dave Berg (Mad), and Joe Kubert (Tarzan, Fax From Sarajevo). He taught a generation of comics and cartoon talent at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, including: Patrick McDonnell (Mutts), Ray Billingsley (Curtis) and Batton Lash (Supernatural Law). And he inspired generations of modern artists and writers, including: Frank Miller (Sin City, Robert Crumb, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods), Brad Bird (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant), and Art Spiegelman (Maus).
Master and Man Andelman writes with an excited glee that bounces the story along in hoops and bounds, from one heroic moment to another. After awhile I forgot I was reading about a comic artist, for the tone is so reverential you might think you were reading the life of a great freedom fighter or martyr like Martin Luther King. Maybe A SPIRITED LIFE needs a few drops of (I won't say "reality") perspective to make it really stand out and be the book that it wants to be, but uniformly everyone apparently loved Eisner and only occasionally, by mistake as it were, do you get the feeling of a three dimensional man beneath the glossy surface. But how can you blame Bob Andelman, I would have written this exactly in the same way. I do wonder however why Eisner is always right. He stops drawing The Spirit--it's a complex artistic decision. He starts drawing again--it's fate bringing back a neglected American master. To pull this off, Andelman's strategy insures that he has to make everyone else look bad, especially Jerry Iger. And what about poor Cat Yronwode? While Andelman admits she brought some needed assistance to the lives of overworked Will and Ann, so that they began to depend on her almost as a daughter, he otherwise makes her seem like a crude, sexually aberrant nudist without an ounce of couth--a wild Maenad in fact, who tells Howard Cruse that homosexuality is sick, so that Eisner seems like a besozzled idiot for keeping her around. Why trash the woman, did she do something terribly wrong to Andelman in private life?
When Michael Chabon began rseearching KAVALIER AND KLAY he interviewed Eisner about the early days of comics and what it wa slike being a young American Jew in the era when Hitler was rising to power, a shadow across Europe. Was there something special that drew Jews to comic work, is what he essentially wound up asking. In response Eisner commented, "We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems." Struck by the wisdom and beauty of this remark, Chabon turned it into the epigraph of his novel. There's a recent biography of Ray Bradbury with some of the hagiographic tone of A SPIRITED LIFE, but this work is superior because of its massive research and its real insight into the mind of Ann Eisner and the terrible tragedy that was Alice's death at 16. He makes the readers of the future sorry they never met the legend who invented the graphic novel.
A Spirited Summation of a Master Artist. Bob Andelman's WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE is a superb study of a great literary genius. Drawing enormously from a vast wealth of previously unavailable resources, the M Press book is made all the finer by the biographer's decision to focus on the man and, in doing so, draws a more acute, highly intimate bead on the influential work Eisner produced across the greater 20th century, and beyond. That being said, I question the logic of the Publishers Weekly reviewer, who felt that Andelman's decision to place Eisner's life as the primary focus, rather than fixate upon his technique, would somehow limit the book's readership to comic book fandom. One would think that just the opposite would be true; that a book principally aimed at discussing technical aspects would have come across as far too in-clubby and far less audience-spanning for a biographical work. Too, considering that Eisner's personal life has almost never been a topic for audience discretion, one has to wonder what the Publishers Weekly reviewer had in mind for a more appropriate biographical subject? One ponders if that reviewer was the same one who wondered if the sobering subject of Eisner's final work, THE PLOT, was appropriate for the medium of comics?!! It might do such critics well to actually read the material they're reviewing, and gain some wisdom -not stereotypes- about what they purport to talk about.
Few places could provide a better start into the inner workings of a classic storyteller than this book. Drawing from direct interviews with Eisner, family, friends and professional associates spanning some 60 to 70 years, this book is at once the historical goldmine and an anecdotal treasure house. Those who have long wondered about Eisner's art, cultural background, and how he parlayed all this into a life's work which crosses idioms and sets standards even now, will find this book to be a magnificent revelation into the nature by which pioneers are born. Those who know nothing about THE SPIRIT, the connections with generations of Sequential storytellers from Kubert and Kirby to Miller and Gaiman, or the vast reshaping of an art form some 30 years after "retirement", will simply find a most absorbing read about a man who grew up poor, hungry, and oppressed, yet refused to live his life as a victim. A SPIRITED LIFE is the tale of a talented man who made his aesthetic mark upon the ages, and made a lucrative living without selling out.
How Eisner did this in a field still largely known for robber baron business practices, while exuding a charm and grace which complemented the succinct, no-nonsense demeanor of his images and words, is the magic which comprises Andelman's book. WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE. Clearly, a read which is more than worth the lifetime that many have waited for its pages to be filled, and its heart-stirring tale to be wondrously told...
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