Will Eisner: A Spirited Life
by Bob Andelman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bob AndelmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-11-16
ISBN: 1595820116
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: M Press
Book Reviews of Will Eisner: A Spirited Life
Book Review: Master and Man
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Will Eisner: A Spirited Life
This beautifully illustrated biography explores the fascinating life of Will Eisner, detailing a career that exceeds six decades in which Eisner spearheaded the cause of comics for adult readers and created the first widely accepted graphic novel, A Contract with God. Eisner's influence has been felt by such diverse talents as Batman creator Bob Kane and Jack Kirby. Underground comics legend R. Crumb and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman have hailed Eisner's cinematic approach to comics and his enduring character The Spirit. From his childhood to educating Army soldiers to famously turning down a proposal for Superman, Eisner's personal and professional life is told in dramatic detail. Bob Andelman spent almost three years interviewing Eisner, researching his life and work and interviewing his friends, family, and the creative talents he inspired over a seventy-year career. Among those who spoke about their personal experience with Will Eisner were: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Neil Gaiman, Denis Kitchen, Joe Kubert, Stan Lee, Jules Feiffer, Neal Adams, and Patrick McDonnell.Artists, Architects & Photographers Books
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