Happy Will Eisner Week!
To celebrate this week (or month, because there will be a special Will Eisner panel at Emerald City Comic Con at the end of the month), I went to to the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium special event. Tonight’s special event was Paul Levitz reading a chapter from his upcoming book on Will Eisner! The book, currently titled Will Eisner: The Dreamer and the Dream, will be published next year (hopefully in time for SDCC!) by Abrams ComicArts. Levitz says that he realizes there are already several books about Will Eisner and everyone who is really into Comic Book History (or just Eisner himself) have likely already read them, or own them, or own everything about and by Eisner. His hope for this book is to reach people not in that world, to reach out to people who don’t know who Eisner was and what he did, and share his story to a wider audience. The chapter he read for us was about “Searching for the Father of Graphic Novels”. He recognizes several contenders for the title, Art Spiegelman (Maus), Harvey Kurtzman (Jungle Book), and Burne Hogarth (Tarzan), in addition to Will Eisner (Contract with God).
Levitz discussed how the term “graphic novel” is used. Picky comic-people (like myself and my friend Emily) will say that a “Graphic Novel” is an original story produced in a longer format with a better binding than staples. Previously published material with a similar length and binding is termed a “Trade Collection”, or just “Trade” followed by paperback or hardcover, depending on binding. But that leads to an issue with two of the most important (one for social impact, one for commercial success) American “Graphic Novels”: Maus (Spiegelman) and Watchmen (Alan Moore). Both of these are generally considered graphic novels, even by picky comic nerds. But they were both originally published as serials. Is the distinction important? Levitz offered more insight into the term, discussing who used it to describe what back in the term’s early days, as well as highlighting some examples of what was published as “Graphic Novels”.
Levitz also discussed the European and Japanese influence to American comics. Several European countries have strong comic book culture, as does Japan. And generally speaking, most of these countries take comics and their creators more seriously than we do (as a culture as a whole), and give the work more respect. Eisner wanted to be taken seriously and respected as a creator, and his work took him in that direction.
Following the reading was an interesting discussion that was either seriously slanted towards Art History or Literature. I was one of the youngest people in the audience (which I thought was a bit weird), and many of the audience members had at one point worked in comics, libraries, museums, or knew comic book artists. I got a chance to say hello to Mr. Levitz at the end, and he was very friendly. I am excited to see his book on Eisner next year and hope at least some of you will read it, too.
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Wiki articles on Levitz and Eisner, for those of you who don’t know who they are (just the links, no bibliography. I’m feeling lazy):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Levitzhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Eisner
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