There really isn’t a literary equivalent to comic book pioneer Will Eisner. As a teenager in the 1930s, he founded a superhero-factory comics company during the medium’s primordial days. And nearly 50 years later, he penned the first successful adult comic book — the “graphic novel.”
It’s as if an aging Johannes Gutenberg had knocked out “On the Road.”
Eisner died in
2005 at 87, but that didn’t hurt his career one bit — seven collections of his work have been released since his death.
Perhaps the most personal is “Life, in Pictures,” a nearly 500-page compendium of five Eisner stories written between 1985 and 2003. Subtitled “Autobiog-raphical Stories,” the book could just as well have been named “Those Anti-Semitic Bastards.” The overtly Jewish Eisner grew up and broke into an obscenely cutthroat comics business at a time when “kike” had not yet been sanitized into “the K-word.”
Later, when Eisner was universally hailed as “the grand old man of comics” (since 1988, the industry’s top award has been called The Eisner), he enjoyed the freedom to write about whatever captivated his interest. Starting in 1979 with “A Contract with God” and continuing decades later with “Fagin the Jew” and “The Plot: The Secret History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” what interested Eisner was Judaism.
Now we know why.
The heart of “Life, in Pictures” is the aptly named chapter “To the Heart of the Storm,” an engrossing vignette told in flashbacks recalling the Eisner family history while a young Will gazes out the train window on his way to World War II basic training.
It’s no wonder Eisner felt an affinity with Fagin; his own family’s story is a Yiddish-inflected Dickensian tale. His mother grew up under the thumb of a tyrannical half-sister in a Cinderella-like existence; her parents were long dead and her siblings either descended into street crime or ascended into a professional class that mandated they shed their Judaism.
His father was a gifted Austrian artist who fled Vienna to escape conscription, married quickly in New York City to, once again, avoid conscription, and spent his productive years toiling at manufacturing jobs that didn’t always keep his family fed.
Eisner grew up exchanging blows with Irish and Italian bullies (“Dem Jew kids don’t fight fair!”) and among German-sympathizing friends and in-laws who damned him with the faint praise of being “the good kind of Jew.”
Eisner’s ear for dialogue — ranging from rough immigrant English to upper crust established German Jews’ attempts at keeping up appearances — is impeccable. But he is a graphic novelist, after all, so graphics matter.
And he wasn’t the grand old man of comics for nothing. His layouts vary from page to page; some have panels and others are more free-flowing. If variety is the spice of life, it’s even more so in comic books. Eisner’s panels are so well laid-out that the reader is likely to breeze through them too quickly. This is a shame, because his artwork deserves a more leisurely pace.
“Life, in Pictures” is always top-notch, with “To the Heart of the Storm” at the top of the top. Although “The Dreamer” is detailed enough to warrant six pages of footnotes to explain all the loosely veiled 1930s comics figures in Eisner’s autobiographical tale, some of the other sections are cute but insubstantial. And “The Name of the Game,” a family history
of the awful
blue-blooded German Jews in Eisner’s wife’s family tree, presents characters whose odiousness overpowers Eisner’s artistic and storytelling skill.
Perhaps the best analogy to Eisner with a pen in his hand is Arthur Rubinstein or Vladimir Horowitz hunched over a piano, hammering out a Liszt rhapsody, transforming a frenetic jumble of ink on paper into an evocative and even whimsical
creation.
In the end, Will Eisner didn’t just draw comics. Will Eisner was comics.
“Life, in Pictures,” by Will Eisner (496 pages, W.W. Norton, $29.95)