Drawing Contracts: Will Eisner's Legacy

On January 5, 2005, the New York Times published its obituary for Will Eisner, one of the most lauded figures in the world of comics and graphic novels, who had died three days earlier in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after quadruple bypass surgery. On January 6 the Times ran the following correction: "An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character The Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers."¹ One can only imagine the torrent of e-mails from comics fans pointing out this crucial difference and clucking at the writer's obvious lack of knowledge about the recondite world of superhero comics. It is a difference, of course, that makes even more apt the comparison between Bob Kane's dour, night-stalking masked detective and the dapper, night-stalking masked detective who made Eisner famous in the early 1940s. Both characters were the creations of Jewish comics artists, friends in fact, who attended DeWitt Clinton High School together in the Bronx and grew up during the Depression. It was they and their peers, also primarily Jewish, primarily New Yorkers, who made the comic book form. They helped that form, as Michael Chabon writes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, "articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves."²

But Batman and The Spirit also share something else in common. Because they were human rather than superhuman heroes they exemplified a different kind of balance between the "archetypal" and the "typical," Umberto Eco's terms for the mythic and the mimetic dimensions of comic book characters.³ Both Batman and The Spirit, even in their earliest incarnations, intimated that comic book protagonists and stories were capable of transcending stereotypes and reflecting temporal progression and psychological depth. This is perhaps one reason why Frank Miller chose Batman as the character with which to remake the image of the comic book superhero in the 1980s. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns presented comic book readers with a fallible hero in a surprisingly self-reflexive formula story.

Eisner, on the other hand, retired The Spirit in 1952. In the latter years of The Spirit's twelve-year run Eisner tired of the demands of a formulaic comic strip, and his work evidenced an increasing interest in formal concerns, in applying to his work the visual lessons of Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and film noir. Eisner's turn to educational and commercial work in the fifties and sixties, though a lucrative and smart career move, was, in a sense, a waiting period—waiting for comic books to catch up to him, waiting for the right opportunity to explore characters and stories in a more innovative manner. That period ended in 1972 when, as he recounted in a 1990 essay in the New York Times Book Review, he attended his first comic-book convention: "I met the new breed of comic cartoonists for the first time. Long-haired, wild-eyed and intense, they spoke the language of comics. It was a language that gave voice to their protest and social ideas. I wanted to be part of the excitement again."⁴

Inspired by underground and adult comics of the sixties and early seventies, Eisner took up specifically Jewish characters and topics in a new comics form to which he gave the name "graphic novel." As he says in the introduction to Norton's handsome collection of his first three graphic...