Will Eisner Week Comicdom
]]>
]]>
A Building, A Soldier, A Conspiracy: "I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece." John Updike, 1960. (Gravett)
Updike's speculation played out in a more substantial sense than he anticipated. However, the current spate of graphic novels was far from unprecedented, even at the time some saw Updike's remark as prescient. The graphic novel had its origins in the 1890s woodcut novels of Franz Masreel and the 1930 Milt Gross wordless novel He Done Her Wrong (Gross). The Drake/Waller/ Baker sensationalist paperback It Rhymes With Lust billed itself as a "graphic novel" in 1950 (Drake).
(read full paper:
D. Green Einser week 2010.pdf
Diana Green (BFA, Comic Book Illustration MCAD; MaLS, Hamline University), has presented academic papers at Comic Scholars Conference, written biographical articles for Kay Worley and Vaugh Bode' and is a contributing editor for the forthcoming Greenwood Press Encyclopedia of Comic Books. As an educator she has taught Comic Art History and Humanities classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Notes on Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy."Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams" - Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953.
With A Contract With God (1978), the earliest book of the trilogy, Will Eisner was inventing a new format: the graphic novel*. The 'graphic novel' coinage was a kind of sleight of hand that turned ordinary comics into works with ambitions of becoming literature. As such it's describing the content, rather than a medium. It was the literary ambition of A Contract With God that set it apart from the cheap children's comic-books that dominated the market at the time. Eisner of course cut his teeth on comic-books having previously drawn the iconic and long running series The Spirit. In creating a graphic novel, Eisner was distancing himself not only from other comic-books, but also from his own formative work. But, new terminology was insufficient to distinguish the work from its cousins and Eisner relied on a number of formal and visual inventions to underscore the difference.
The Spirit (1940-1952) superficially resembled most of the comic-books on the stands at the time. It mostly consisted of colorful 8 page pulp romps full of crime and violence. But, unlike the vast majority of 4-color funnies The Spirit stories were intense nuggets of clever writing, brilliant layouts, and inventive typography. They were packed with innumerable characters and locations. The sheer density of the stories was matched by the density of the art. Pages were filled with 9 to 14 (or more!) panels filled with frenetic action, detailed sets and wrinkled suits.
When Eisner turns to the graphic novel, it's as if he wants to shed the youthful exuberance of The Spirit. The stories in A Contract With God (it consists of four stories, A Contract With God, The Super, The Street Singer, and Cookalein) are drained both of color and density. In the first story especially (A Contract With God) many pages consist of a single beautiful illustration accompanied by a few lines of large text. Rarely does a page have more than four panels. To further distinguish this work from his previous endeavors, he frequently eschews the use of panel borders**. The panel border (along with the word balloon) is probably one of the most iconic and recognizable elements of a comic-book page to the average reader. By avoiding it's use, Eisner is signaling a break from tradition and the arrival of something new. The other three stories tend to be more conventional in their use of panels to structure the narrative, but they too feature the frequent use of borderless juxtaposition of images. In the instances where borders and gutters disappear, Eisner's images begin to bleed into each other, it's figures and spaces mix and match into unusual spacial configurations. This new visual complexity appears to be a deliberate counterpoint to the more decompressed narrative. It also hints to a new approach to visual organization of narrative that Eisner will take up in the future.
All the stories in A Contract with God take place on Dropsie Avenue. Eisner fills this fictional Bronx street with multiethnic (especially Jewish) immigrants, desperate criminals and ragged tramps. Sudden wealth is as possible as instant ruin. Throughout the book it becomes obvious that the real protagonist of the book is the street itself. Eisner lavishes attention on its dilapidated buildings, rain drenched stoops and moody street-scapes. He's clearly enamored of the urban patina of the place. With each subsequent story, Eisner increasingly begins to use the architecture of the street as a substitute for the panel border. In effect he trades the comic-book gutters for the gutters of the street.
In the next book of the trilogy, A Life Force (1985), the exuberance that exemplified The Spirit returns again. The pages have more story and more panels. The book as a whole has more characters and their stories interweave in more complex ways. The sheer density of the narrative is mirrored by the complexity of the visuals. Eisner continues his experiments with architecture as structure. In A Contract With God, we saw a small glimpse of the possibilities of this approach. But for the most part, the street appeared as little more than a theatrical backdrop. In A Life Force, Eisner pushes this technique much further. The panel-less 'collages' of street-scapes become more daring and inventive. Silhouettes of buildings in one image morph into the skyline of another. A wall stretches vertically on a page to become both the entrance to an alley and the alley itself. Windows, alleys, balconies and doorways become panels. The street and the city becomes the structure of the narrative. Literally! A new and complex geography of the city emerges on the page.
In 1955, the Situationist Guy Debord defined psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Debord's definition is an apt description of Dropsie Avenue (1995), the third book of the trilogy. If, in the first two books we suspected that the street was the protagonist, in the third one we no longer have any doubt. Interestingly when Eisner finally turns his brush to the built environment, the architecture as structure technique is used less frequently. In some ways Dropsie Avenue is the most conventional of the tree books. There are still a few bravura juxtapositions but in general it resembles the average comic-book much more then the others***. The book makes up for that in spades. Spanning four centuries - it tells the tragic trajectory of Dropsie Avenue - from it's early settlement by the Dutch to the neighborhood's rise and fall and it's final transformation. The book is a kind of novel length version of Robert Crumb's A Short History of America where a pristine wilderness turns into a teeming urban nightmare. In Eisner's hands the farm houses of the early Dutch settlers give way to narrow alleys garlanded with drying laundry, small crowded apartments, multi-story dilapidated tenements presided over by slumlords. Dropsie begins to wither, crack and crumble as it's best residents trade the urban neighborhood for the illusive utopia of the suburbs. Eventually the street succumbs to the Urban Renewal policies of the 60's and 70's by becoming a series of empty rectangular lots strewn with rubble; a tabula rasa ready to be redeveloped into something new.
Even though the stories take place in Bronx, New York, its most famous borrough, Manhattan is barely mentioned at all. It exists only as a distant skyline, always looming but mostly inaccessible to the characters on Dropsie Avenue. It's a distant beacon of hope and wealth casting a long shadow on the Bronx. If Manhattan represents the triumphant city, Dropsie is it's less visible cousin. It's filled with immigrants and the poor who do much of the work making the glorious metropolis possible. In the final sequence of Dropsie Avenue, the rubble of the destroyed neighborhood is transformed into Dropsie Gardens, A Residential Community. Single family homes line the streets. Each house has an immaculate lawn and trees dot the lots. Urban Dropsie becomes a suburb. In reality suburban growth happened outside of the cities, but here it springs in the middle of New York. Eisner's neighborhood becomes the magical seed of something new. Like one of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, it morphs into something else altogether. The Manhattan skyline disappears as if it was never there to begin with.
As the city undergoes profound transformation, the characters of Dropsie stay curiously the same. Decades pass as waves of immigrants ebb and flow through the neighborhood. Different ethnicities move in and out, but the tension between the old and the new remains the same. The fear of difference and foreigners animates the stories of the inhabitants. 19th century resembles the 20th. Eisner avoids the question of the original inhabitants of New York, the Lenape tribe of Native Americans displaced by European colonialism. Perhaps that is the original sin that haunts the tragic streets of Dropsie Avenue. As if the stories followed some grander logic of eternal recurrence. Psychic scars are etched deeply into the geographical area now known as the Bronx. It's stories piled up and stratified into geological layers of meaning. Will Eisner was the cartoon archeologist who excavated a small part of the city buried underneath.
* The term 'graphic novel' predates A Contract With God, but the book's success popularized the term. At the time of it's publication (1978) 'graphic novel' was sufficiently unknown and undefined as to be considered new.
** Of course Eisner doesn't do away with panel borders entirely. In fact, he uses them quite frequently, but as a whole the first story, A Contract With God, feels much more open and less contained that of the average comic-book. There are examples of similar approaches in The Spirit as well, but they are never used to such an extent.
*** Perhaps that can be attributed to the fact that by the 1990s the graphic novel and comics in general had achieved significant gains in respectability. In 1992 Art Spiegelman's Maus was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Creating comic-books (literary or not) didn't carry the same kind of stigma as before. It was therefore a kind of return to tradition.
Tom Kaczynski learned English by reading American capitalist comics in communist Poland. He studied Art and Architecture as preparation for becoming a cartoonist. His comics have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, MOME, Punk Planet, The Drama, and other publications. Even though he's lived in Minneapolis (with his girlfriend Nikki and two black cats) for a couple years now, many people still think he lives in New York. The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is excited to have him teaching Experimental Comics Spring term 2010.http://www.transatlantis.net/blog/
]]>
Introduction to Comic Art. For this assignment we will illustrate a two-page biography of a Comic/Manga artist or writer. In can be a memorable moment from the Artist's life or cover a lifespan.
Our first step will be to study an excerpt from Will Eisner's "The Dreamer."
Will Eisner published "The Dreamer" in 1986. It tells the story of the burgeoning comic book field in the 1930s; a story Eisner was quite familiar with having lived it. In Will Eisner's own words, "Intended as a work of fiction, (The Dreamer) ultimately took the shape of a historical account. In the telling it, it was inescapable that the actors would resemble the real people. Their names, however, are fictitious, and they are portrayed without malice. It all comes out of the cluttered closet where I store ghosts of the past, and from the yellowing memories of my experience."
The excerpt from the Dreamer (pages 22-32) introduces us through a series of vignettes to the Eyron & Samson bullpen (a play on the Eisner and Iger Studio name. Lou Fine becomes "Lew Sharp," Jack Kirby becomes "Jack King", etc).
Eisner deftly uses quick defining moments, narrated by "Eyron" to give us a clear idea of who these characters are. Then the spotlight is turned on the central character as he has an after hours drink with his secretary where romance is in the air. Dancing between the words and the pictures Eisner ends the sequence wordlessly, rain falling, as our protagonist ends up the solitary figure at his drawing table...pursuing his dream.
The ability to know how much to say with words and how much to say with a glance or gesture is illustrated her beautifully and worth careful consideration.
Some of the most widely recognized and prestigious works done by Cartoonists are the personal stories drawn from their own lifetime of experiences, from Keiji Nakazawa's "Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)" to Art Spiegleman's "Maus."
In "Barefoot Gen" the title character is a stand-in for the author as he gives a first hand account of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. In "Maus" Jews are represented as mice and Germans as cats as Spiegleman relates the story of his own father's experiences during the Holocaust.
Granted, this type of narrative can also take a more light-hearted route. Eddie Campbell's "Alec" stories use brief episodes from the artist's life to chronicle his artistic career, where Rick Veitch uses a dream diary for his source material for "Rare Bit Fiends."
For the assignment: Researching an artist's bio is of course essential, but I'd also recommend searching out any podcasts so you can hear the artist's words firsthand, then sketch out ideas while you listen. Another option (that was brought up in class) is to follow the Artist's Tweets, then use that as the driving narrative for a memorable moment.
As with any story you try to illustrate, if you aren't interested in it neither will the reader. Find an aspect that grabs you, something you can relate to, and run with it. Eisner mined his own personal history and experiences to great effect to produce his Contract with God trilogy. It's the personal stories, told masterfully, that will always strike the biggest chord with the reader.
(Following the completion of the students work, we will return to share it with you on this site).
Jim Keefe is a graduate of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art,
He has worked extensively with King Features Syndicate coloring such strips as Blondie, Beetle Bailey and Hagar the Horrible, ghosting Secret Agent Corrigan for his mentor, George Evans, and was the writer and artist of the Flash Gordon strip from 1996 to 2003. His current Clients include King Features Syndicate, Viz Media, Jantze Studios and Manuscript Press. As an educator Jim has taught/guest lectured at SVA in Manhattan, Hofstra's UCCE Youth Programs, and most recently at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. http://jimkeefe.com/
ILLUSTRATIVE TEXT:
TRANSFORMED WORDS AND THE LANGUAGE OF COMICS
By Sara Witty
Introduction
The art of story-telling is as old as mankind. Our cultures are defined by the stories we are told by our elders and the stories we pass on to our children. These stories serve as indoctrination into the system of our culture, allowing us from an early age to understand morality: right and wrong, virtue and vice, good and evil, from the perspective of our respective culture.1
In the era of human history predating literacy, oral traditions took on the task of engendering these concepts within a given populace. Writing, which originates in pictography2, allowed a further scope of indoctrination. With the evolution of writing from pictograph, which is essentially an image of a word, to abstract symbols meant to represent sounds, the speed of writing and thus distribution was increased. The creation of the alphabet allowed for a myriad of cultural advances including the ability to document history and record previously oral-only traditions.3
The idea of story-telling is not restricted to literature alone, but runs the gamut of the arts. Even the vernacular remains the same; it is asked of a painting, "What is the artist trying to say?", "what is the narrative in this painting?", and "what does it mean?" Both writing and imagery function under the umbrella of language, employing a variety of signs and symbols to express the narrative that they wish to relay.
However, regardless of their similar forms of communication and the fact that both rely upon a framework of language, both writing and imagery utilize completely different and seemingly opposed methods of conveyance. Simon Morely describes the differences between the two4: writing tells, imagery shows; writing presents, imagery represents; writing creates time, imagery creates space. Even our perceptions of the two widely differ. Reading is a left-brain specific action, employing our use of logic and analysis. Seeing is a right-brain specific action, utilizing our imaginations and our ability to free-associate. Although the use of sign is constant, the sign that is a letter, which makes up a word such as 'mountain' is read, where as the sign that is an image of a mountain is perceived. (more...Witty IllustrativeText.pdf)
*Sara Witty is an artist and art historian pursuing her PhD at the University of Madison Wisconsin. Her primary research area is the architecture of 19th century mental hospitals and an extensively study of comics, and archetypal imagery. "While some of my artwork is derived from my primary research field, ALL of it is rooted in oneiromancy, alchemy, gnostic mythology, hermetic mysticism, and magic." http://sites.google.com/site/biblioneiric/
]]>N.C. Christopher Couch has generously shared his syllabus for his Will Eisner course.
Course Description
This course will examine the works of Will Eisner, the innovative comic book artist and writer who created the Spirit, and the father of the graphic novel, an increasingly important artistic and literary medium. It will also examine writers and artists whose work influenced Eisner, or whose work shows the impact of Eisner's career and legacy.
Eisner's career began with the creation of comic book short stories, of which those in The Spirit are the most famous. He then moved to the creation of educational comic books, primarily for the military. In the 1970s, Eisner began the series of graphic novels that would secure his literary reputation outside the field of sequential art, and help to bring about the explosion of creativity in the graphic novel field that continues today. The course will examine Eisner's work both chronologically and thematically, and in terms of the sources of and influences on Eisner's work. In addition, the course will include consideration of Yiddish theater and literature, of American realist fiction, of contemporary writers including Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Umberto Eco and other novelists and literary historians and theorists.
(Read full syllabus:N.C. Will Eisner.pdf)
N. C. Christopher Couch Ph.D., is the author of numerous books and articles on Latin American art and on graphic novels and comic art, including The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel (with Stephen Weiner), Will Eisner: A Retrospective (with Peter Myer). He was senior editor at Kitchen Sink Press (Northampton), editor in chief at CPM Manga.
Now through March 5th we will be adding content to our Educational Materials generously donated from comic educators: N.C. Christopher Couch, Diana Green, Karen Green, Tom Kaczynski, Jim Keefe, Zak Sally, and Sara Witty.
Browse through our archives from last year for posts on Will Eisner from Paul Karasik, Diana Green, Ivan Brunetti, Dr. Frenchy Lunning, and Diana Schutz.
To begin we would like to share with you an article Karen Green wrote last year on "Graphic Novels and Academic Acceptance." This opens this years theme of "The Reading Revolution: Will Eisner and the American Graphic Novel," perfectly for the educational section.
Cupcakes for EVERYBODY!!
By Karen Green
It's now exactly four weeks since the panel I moderated at New York Comic-Con, "Graphic Novels and Academic Acceptance." There's probably not much I can add to describe it that hasn't been covered in Paul DeBenedetto's terrific and incredibly thorough summary. So, I'll try to pull out a few points that were made in the course of the evening and take them out for a spin.
Who was there?
I had hoped to have a panel that was balanced between academics and creators and, for the creators, I wanted a balance between superhero and independent comics work. I also wanted creators whose work I admired as well as who had names that would pull in a crowd. The panel went through a lot of permutations but, in the end, in the corner for the academics, Kent Worcester of Marymount Manhattan College, co-editor of A Comics Studies Reader and Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium; Bill Savage, a senior lecturer in the English department at Northwestern University; Gene Kannenberg jr, director of ComicsResearch.org, editor of 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide, and co-editor of Erotic Comics, vols. 1 and 2; and Greg Urquhart, Comics Editor at Alexander Street Press, and editor in charge of their forthcoming online collection, Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels. And in the corner for the creators, Dean Haspiel, Peter Kuper, and Jonathan Hickman. Do I really need to tell you who those guys are? Surely not! (more...)
Jeremy is an American artist. His work includes drawing, painting, sculpture, comics, and new media. He received his B.F.A. at Penn State University and his M.F.A. at Florida State University. He has taught at Florida State University, Art Institute of Philadelphia, and La Salle University.
http://www.jeremywaltman.com/
The public is invited to join us for our Mini-Comic Expo on Thursday March 25th from 12:00 PM to 6:30 PM. Student work from Will Eisner Week will be on display and available for sale in comic form to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Students will also be displaying their own mini-comics and books. Guest speaker Kevin Huizenga, author of the graphic novel Curses, The Wild Kingdom, and Ganges will give a public lecture at 1:00 PM in Auditorium 150.
"Everybody who follows our website and our further activities can tell that Comicdom respects and honors Will Eisner's creative intelligence. This year we participate actively via comicdom.gr to Will Eisner Week, entitled for 2010 "The Reading Revolution: Will Eisner and the American Graphic Novel". From Sunday February 28th until Saturday March 6th, comicdom.gr will host a series of articles dedicated to the work of Will Eisner, one of the most important and inspiring creators".
Comicdom
]]>
]]>
Minneapolis, MN at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD)
The Comic Art students and faculty at MCAD will share their exploration of this year's Will Eisner Week theme: The Reading Revolution: Will Eisner and the American Graphic Novel. Throughout the week, faculty and students will post new lectures and studio assignments from the classroom to this website. On March 25th, the public is invited for the MCAD Mini-Comic Expo.
Savannah, GA at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD)
The Sequential Art Department at SCAD invites students, faculty, and friends to express themselves at an exhibit of self-portraits using expressive anatomy. The exhibit will be from March 1st to the 14th in Norris Hall with with a lecture and workshops starting at 1:00 PM on March 5th in Room 101, Norris Hall. For more information click on the poster below.
Athens, Greece via the Comicdom Website
Comicdom.gr will host a series of articles dedicated to the work of Will Eisner, one of the most important and inspiring creators. Will Eisner Week will take place on the website with a week of posts, reviews and articles dedicated to Graphic Novels and Will Eisner. There will be interviews and contributions from Greek artists. Make sure to visit the Comicdom Website on a regular basis.
Hartford, CT at Trinity College
Trinity College welcomes three comic strip artists for a lively panel discussion of "From Comic Strips to Comic Books to Graphic Novels." On Friday, March 5, 2010 at 1:30 PM, hear artists Jerry Craft, Joe T. Staton, and Andres Vera Martinez, and moderator Professor Thora Brylowe in Boyer Auditorium in the Albert C. Jacobs Life Sciences Center. For more information visit the Will Eisner Week Panel at Trinity College.
Lincoln, NE at the University of Nebraska
Don't miss the theatrical reading of a Jennifer Olson adaptation of Will Eisner's "A Contract with God" along with the award-winning feature-length documentary, "Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist." These are bring held at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center at 1:00 PM on Saturday, March 6th. For more information visit the Ross Website.
Amherst, MA at the University of Massachusetts
Don't miss Will Eisner's Ideals: A Panel Discussion on Comics and Society with three comic artists - Howard Cruse, Gary Hallgren and Sophia Wiedeman. On Tuesday, March 2nd at 4:00 PM in Herter Hall, Room 227. For more information visit Will Eisner's Ideals.
Philadelphia, PA at La Salle University
Visit the Community Gallery at the La Salle University Art Museum located on the lower level of Olney Hall to see their exhibition of Digital Art. For more information go to www.lasalle.edu/museum.
New York City at Columbia University
Visit Butler Library at the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan to see their graphic novel exhibition. Seven themes are presented and for each theme an image from traditional art is matched with three images from graphic novels. For more information go to the Butler Library Blog.
If you would like more information about the events scheduled for Will Eisner Week this year, you've come to the right place. There are events, panels, classes, and contests scheduled in Amherst, Hartford, New York City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Diego, Savannah, Tucson, and Athens, Greece. There's still time to add your event to the list.
Watch this space for links to the organizations involved. Or click here to receive information about events at specific cities.
