Will Eisner

Will Eisner (March 3, 1917 – January 3, 2005) was an acclaimed American comics writer and artist who is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium. He is known for the cartooning studio he founded, his highly influential series The Spirit, his use of comics as an instructional medium for the U.S. military, his leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of literature with his book A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, and his educational work about the medium as exemplified by his book Comics and Sequential Art.

Graphic novels

In the late 1970s, he turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. A Contract with God (Oct. 1978) is one of the first American graphic novels, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. He continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York's immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including The Building, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year.

Related Topics:
1970s - New York - Jew - Graphic novels - A Contract With God

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Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of novels and myths, including Moby Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African king, "The Lion of Mali". Fagin the Jew is an annount to the life of Dickens's character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the sterotyped portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist. His last graphic novel, The Plot, an account of the making of the anti-semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005.

Related Topics:
Novel - Myth - Moby Dick - 2002 - Sundiata - West Africa - Mali - Fagin the Jew - Oliver Twist - Anti-semitic - Hoax - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - 2005

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