Will Eisner: A Spirited Life [Paperback]

Bob Andelman's WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE is a
superb study of a great literary genius. Drawing
enormously from a vast wealth of previously
unavailable resources, the M Press book is made
all the finer by the biographer's decision to
focus on the man and, in doing so, draws a more
acute, highly intimate bead on the influential
work Eisner produced across the greater 20th
century, and beyond.
That being said, I question the logic of the
Publishers Weekly reviewer, who felt that
Andelman's decision to place Eisner's life
as the primary focus, rather than fixate
upon his technique, would somehow limit
the book's readership to comic book
fandom.
One would think that just the opposite would be
true; that a book principally aimed at discussing
technical aspects would have come across as far
too in-clubby and far less audience-spanning for a
biographical work. Too, considering that Eisner's
personal life has almost never been a topic for
audience discretion, one has to wonder what the
Publishers Weekly reviewer had in mind for a more
appropriate biographical subject?
One ponders if that reviewer was the same one
who wondered if the sobering subject of Eisner's
final work, THE PLOT, was appropriate for the
medium of comics?!! It might do such critics
well to actually read the material they're
reviewing, and gain some wisdom -not
stereotypes- about what they purport
to talk about.

Few places could provide a better start into
the inner workings of a classic storyteller
than this book. Drawing from direct interviews
with Eisner, family, friends and professional
associates spanning some 60 to 70 years, this
book is at once the historical goldmine and
an anecdotal treasure house.
Those who have long wondered about Eisner's
art, cultural background, and how he parlayed
all this into a life's work which crosses
idioms and sets standards even now, will
find this book to be a magnificent
revelation into the nature by which
pioneers are born.
Those who know nothing about THE SPIRIT, the
connections with generations of Sequential
storytellers from Kubert and Kirby to Miller
and Gaiman, or the vast reshaping of an art
form some 30 years after "retirement", will
simply find a most absorbing read about a
man who grew up poor, hungry, and oppressed,
yet refused to live his life as a victim.
A SPIRITED LIFE is the tale of a talented
man who made his aesthetic mark upon the
ages, and made a lucrative living without
selling out.

How Eisner did this in a field still
largely known for robber baron business
practices, while exuding a charm and
grace which complemented the succinct,
no-nonsense demeanor of his images and
words, is the magic which comprises
Andelman's book.
WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE. Clearly,
a read which is more than worth the
lifetime that many have waited for
its pages to be filled, and its
heart-stirring tale to be
wondrously told...

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.

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