Thursday, December 25, 2008
Miller and Eisner before The Spirit movie
The bringing of The Spirit, one of the coolest and off centered of all comics excurisions, to the screen will be more of an event to me than all of the recent years of Spidey, XMen, Dark Knight, Hell Boy and Iron Man,(although this last one I mention has a lot of quirkiness to make it somewhat endearing.) The Spirit was a comic book supplement that came with the Sunday papers during twelve years of the forties and early fifites. In form, execution, and content it was a bit of gene splice between the Milton Caniff/Hal Foster/Al Capp sunday comic stips and the superhero comic books. Will Eisner created a comics noir with adventure, a sense of comedy at times, and relished with explorations of mortality and good vs. evil. The Spirit wore a goofy mask, loved a lot of women, was more durable than most human models, and fought crime. Any questions?
Before I go to the movie, I wanted to get myself in the zone. I don't own any reprints of the Spirit any longer. Ironically, I traded them in years ago for a two book set of Art Spiegelman's Maus. Ironic because Will Eisner's A Contract with God was a canguard publication that helped inspire Spiegelman to create Maus in the format we call graphic novels, although Spiegelman and many of his peers don't use that term.
What I did have at my disposal was a book length collection of conversations produced by Dark Horse between Eisner and Frank Miller, the artist who turned Batman into a Dark Knight and pushed comics into crime and historical genre in recent years. Eisner is around 87 in these discussions, which took place apparently not too many months before he died. Miller's Sin City film left me pretty cold so I wanted to find a way to prepare for the Spirit, which Miller wrote and directed, that wouldn't bias me against the enterprise at the start.
The conversations in Frank Miller/Will Eisner are more engaging and lively than I had expected. Eisner started in comics before they began, ran a shop that sold stories to comics before the war, began The Spirit, created educational comics during the war at the Pentagon, resumed duties as the primary author of The Spirit (but trained folks like Jules Feifer along the way), continued to be in the info graphics comics training business for many years. And then at age 60, wrote the book that is considered the beginning of the graphic novel movement. And for the last 28 or so years of his book published many more long form comics with stories of New York primarily. He also taught and published two volumes that along with Scott McCloud's books serve as the foundation and key literature for volumes about comics and how they work.
Miller will make a statement about the business and practices of commercial comics and Eisner will counter or make him defend it. You can tell that Eisner loved a good exchange and had a razor-sharp memory filled with details from his past and the history of his life with comics.
Two and a half hours of Brazilian television documentary series on Eisner released in 1999 was even more insightful. Will Eisner Profession Cartoonist featured three episodes filled with rough animations of his work along with lots of interview material with Eisner and those he influenced around the world. Brazilian and French comic book artists have the same geeky kind of intensity about them that they do in the US. Art Speigelman in one part talks about how Eisner's output of a page a day and nearly a book a year dwarves that of men half or a third his age.
There is one moment in the last episode of the documentary, called Master Class, that impressed me most fron any exchange between Miller and Eisner in the book or any other element of the television mini series on him. This is a scene where we see Eisner at work applying the brush work to a page he was inking. I look at his work differently after watching him apply the small number four brush with repetitive strokes, in a clear and determined way.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:09 PM
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