Will Eisner Week is an annual series of events celebrating comics and sequential art, graphic novel literacy, free speech, and honoring the legacy of comics and graphic novel pioneer, Will Eisner. He was one of the most innovative figures in the history of comics and graphic novels.
Autobiographical Comics
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A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.
Creating Comics As Journalism, Memoir and Nonfiction
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This book provides student journalists, artists, designers, creative writers and web producers with the tools and techniques they need to tell nonfiction stories visually and graphically. Weaving together history, theory, and practical advice, seasoned nonfiction comics professors and scholars Randy Duncan, Michael Ray Taylor and David Stoddard present a hands-on approach to teach readers from a range of backgrounds how to develop and create a graphic nonfiction story from start to finish. The book offers guidance on: -how to find stories and make use of appropriate facts and visuals; -nonfiction narrative techniques; -artist's tools and techniques; -print, digital, and multimedia production; -legal and ethical considerations. Interviews with well-known nonfiction comics creators and editors discuss best practices and offer readers inspiration to begin creating their own work, and exercises at the end of each chapter encourage students to hone their skills.
Make It Yourself! Comics and Graphic Novels
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Learn about makerspaces with Make It Yourself! Comics & Graphic Novels! Young makers will discover what makerspaces are and how to hold maker events. Kids will develop characters, write stories, create graphic novels, and more. Each project has color photos and easy-to-follow instructions. Special techniques and tips help kids make the most of their makerspace experiences. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Checkerboard Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Making Comics
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"Magnificent! The best how-to manual ever published." -- Kevin Kelly, Cool Tools Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture in 1993 with Understanding Comics, a massive comic book about comics, linking the medium to such diverse fields as media theory, movie criticism, and web design. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud took this to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are generated, read, and perceived today. Now, in Making Comics, McCloud focuses his analysis on the art form itself, exploring the creation of comics, from the broadest principles to the sharpest details (like how to accentuate a character's facial muscles in order to form the emotion of disgust rather than the emotion of surprise.) And he does all of it in his inimitable voice and through his cartoon stand-in narrator, mixing dry humor and legitimate instruction. McCloud shows his reader how to master the human condition through word and image in a brilliantly minimalistic way. Both comic book devotees and the uninitiated will marvel at this journey into a once-underappreciated art form.
When Storyworlds Collide
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When Storyworlds Collide shows that metalepsis possesses a unique dynamics in popular storytelling and has become an essential device for pop-cultural self-reflection - while still retaining an immense potential to create amusing and entertaining narratives.
Comic Book Movies
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Comic Book Movies explores how this genre serves as a source for modern-day myths, sometimes even incorporating ancient mythic figures like Thor and Wonder Woman's Amazons, while engaging with the questions that haunt a post-9/11 world: How do we define heroism and morality today? How far are we willing to go when fighting terror? How can we resist a dystopian state? Film scholar Blair Davis also considers how the genre's visual style is equally important as its weighty themes, and he details how advances in digital effects have allowed filmmakers to incorporate elements of comic book art in innovative ways. As he reveals, comic book movies have inspired just as many innovations to Hollywood's business model, with film franchises and transmedia storytelling helping to ensure that the genre will continue its reign over popular culture for years to come.
Movie Comics
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As Christopher Nolan's Batman films and releases from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike might assume that the "comic book movie" is a distinctly twenty-first-century form. Yet adaptations of comics have been an integral part of American cinema from its very inception, with comics characters regularly leaping from the page to the screen and cinematic icons spawning comics of their own. Movie Comics is the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Alan Ladd, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. With a special focus on the Classical Hollywood era, Blair Davis investigates the factors that spurred this media convergence, as the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands. While analyzing this production history, he also tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, considering the many formal elements that each medium adopted and adapted from the other. As it explores our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms, Movie Comics gives readers a new appreciation for the unique qualities of the illustrated page and the cinematic moving image.
Superhero Synergies
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In the age of digital media, superheroes are no longer confined to comic books and graphic novels. Their stories are now featured in films, video games, digital comics, television programs, and more. In a single year alone, films featuring Batman, Spider-Man, and the Avengers have appeared on the big screen. Popular media no longer exists in isolation, but converges into complex multidimensional entities. As a result, traditional ideas about the relationship between varying media have come under striking revision. Although this convergence is apparent in many genres, perhaps nowhere is it more persistent, more creative, or more varied than in the superhero genre. Superhero Synergies: Comic Book Characters Go Digital explores this developing relationship between superheroes and various forms of media, examining how the superhero genre, which was once limited primarily to a single medium, has been developed into so many more. Essays in this volume engage with several of the most iconic heroes--including Batman, Hulk, and Iron Man--through a variety of academic disciplines such as industry studies, gender studies, and aesthetic analysis to develop an expansive view of the genre's potency. The contributors to this volume engage cinema, comics, video games, and even live stage shows to instill readers with new ways of looking at, thinking about, and experiencing some of contemporary media's most popular texts. This unique approach to the examination of digital media and superhero studies provides new and valuable readings of well-known texts and practices. Intended for both academics and fans of the superhero genre, this anthology introduces the innovative and growing synergy between traditional comic books and digital media.
Will Eisner (1917 – 2005) was one of the pioneers in the American Comic Book Industry, proving himself a master of a variety of artistic and literary styles. His landmark comic series The Spirit (1940–1952) was noted for its expressive artwork and breathtaking experiments in content and form.
Eisner was a one-of-a-kind genius, that rare figure of whom it can be said, comics and graphic novels, as we know them today, would not exist without him.
Will Eisner
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Will Eisner's innovations in the comics, especially the comic book and the graphic novel, as well as his devotion to comics analysis, make him one of comics' first true auteurs and the cartoonist so revered and influential that cartooning's highest honor is named after him. His newspaper feature The Spirit (1940-1952) introduced the now-common splash page to the comic book, as well as dramatic angles and lighting effects that were influenced by, and influenced in turn, the conventions of film noir. Even in his tales of crime fighting, Eisner's writing focused on everyday details of city life and on contemporary social issues. In 1976, he premiered A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, a collection of realist cartoon stories that paved the way for the modern "graphic novel." His 1985 book, Comics and Sequential Art, was among the first sustained analyses and overviews of the comics form, articulating theories of the art's grammar and structure. Eisner's studio nurtured such comics legends as Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood, Lou Fine, and Jack Cole. Will Eisner: Conversations, edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, collects the best interviews with Eisner (1917-2005) from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner's career with in-depth information about his creation of The Spirit and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the development of the graphic novel.
Will Eisner
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An expanded, full-color deluxe edition of the out-of-print biography thatexplores the fascinating life of Will Eisner, detailing a more than 70-yearcareer where he spearheaded comics for adult readers and created the firstwidely accepted graphic novel, A Contract with God. Eisner's influence has been felt by such diverse talents as Batman creatorBob Kane and Jack Kirby, as well as underground comics legend R. Crumb andPulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman -- allhave hailed Eisner's cinematic approach to comics, and his enduring characterThe Spirit. From his childhood to famously turning down a proposal forSuperman, to educating Army soldiers in P.S. Magazine, Eisner's personaland professional life is told in dramatic detail. Author Bob Andelman spentalmost three years interviewing Eisner prior to his passing, researching hislife and work and interviewing friends, family, and colleagues including AlanMoore, Dave Gibbons, Neil Gaiman, Denis Kitchen, Joe Kubert, Stan Lee, JulesFeiffer, Neal Adams, and Patrick McDonnell. In addition to hundreds of full-color images from Will's archives andprivate collections (not found in the original edition), this expanded DeluxeEdition includes a series of new interviews with Drew Friedman, Howard Chaykin,Darwyn Cooke, Sergio Aragones, Michael Uslan, and others, which clear the air onsome topics left unfinished by the first edition, and add depth to the reader'sknowledge of Eisner's body of work. Featuring an insightful introduction by Michael Chabon.
Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel
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Will Eisner (1917-2005) is universally considered the master of comics storytelling, best known for The Spirit, his iconic newspaper comic strip, and A Contract With God, the first significant graphic novel. This seminal work from 1978 ushered in a new era of personal stories in comics form that touched every adult topic from mortality to religion and sexuality, forever changing the way writers and artists approached comics storytelling. Noted historian Paul Levitz celebrates Eisner by showcasing his most famous work alongside unpublished and rare materials from the family archives. Also included are original interviews with creators such as Jules Feiffer, Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, Jeff Smith, Denis Kitchen, and Neil Gaiman--all of whom knew Eisner and were inspired by his work to create their own graphic novels for a new generation of readers. NOTE: The cover is a high-quality photographic reproduction of Eisner's original art. The design intentionally reveals tape and other stray markings that are part of the artist's process and reflect the age of the artifact that was photographed.
Will Eisner
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This is a biography of celebrated American cartoonist Will Eisner.
Classics and Comics
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Since at least 1939, when daily-strip caveman Alley Oop time-traveled to the Trojan War, comics have been drawing (on) material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history. At times the connection is cosmetic-as perhaps with Wonder Woman's Amazonian heritage-and at times it is almost irrelevant-as with Hercules' starfaring adventures in the 1982 Marvel miniseries. But all of these make implicit or explicit claims about the place of classics in modern literary culture.Classics and Comics is the first book to explore the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern popular literature, the comic book. This volume collects sixteen articles, all specially commissioned for this volume, that look at how classical content is deployed in comics and reconfigured for a modern audience. It opens with a detailed historical introduction surveying the role of classical material in comics since the 1930s. Subsequent chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the incorporation of modern theories of myth into the creation and interpretation of comic books, the appropriation of characters from classical literature and myth, and the reconfiguration of motif into a modern literary medium. Among the well-known comics considered in the collection are Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City, DC Comics' Wonder Woman, Jack Kirby's The Eternals, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and examples of Japanese manga. The volume also includes an original 12-page "comics-essay," drawn and written by Eisner Award-winning Eric Shanower, creator of the graphic novel series Age of Bronze.
Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels
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This text examines comics, graphic novels, and manga with a broad, international scope that reveals their conceptual origins in antiquity. * Includes numerous illustrations of British satirical prints, Japanese woodblock prints, and the art of prominent illustrators * Includes a chapter on the latest developments in digital comics
From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels
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This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative - realized in various different formats, including comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels - as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. The contributions assembled in this volume test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the 'single work,' consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology.
Insider Histories of Cartooning
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Many fans and insiders alike have never heard of Bill Hume, Bailin' Wire Bill, Abe Martin, AWOL Wally, the Texas History Movies, or the Weatherbird at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And many insiders do not know why we call comic books "comics" even though lots of them are not at all funny. Robert C. Harvey, cartoonist and a veteran comics critic, author of several histories of comics and biographies of cartoonists, tells forgotten stories of a dozen now obscure but once famous cartoonists and their creations. He also includes accounts of the cartooning careers of a groundbreaking African American and a woman who broke into an industry once dominated by white men. Many of the better-known stories in some of the book's fourteen chapters are wrapped around fugitive scraps of information that are almost unknown. Which of Bill Mauldin's famous duo is Willie? Which is Joe? What was the big secret about E. Simms Campbell? Who was Funnyman? And why? And some of the pictures are rare, too. Hugh Hefner's cartoons, Kin Hubbard's illustrations for Short Furrows, Betty Swords's pictures for the Male Chauvinist Pig Calendar of 1974, the Far East pin-up cartoon character Babysan, illustrations for Popo and Fifina, and Red Ryder's last bow.
The Origins of Comics
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In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form.
Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling
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When Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, it marked a new era for comics. Comics are now taken seriously by the same academic and cultural institutions that long dismissed the form. And the visibility of comics continues to increase, with alternative cartoonists now published by major presses and more comics-based films arriving on the screen each year. Projections argues that the seemingly sudden visibility of comics is no accident. Beginning with the parallel development of narrative comics at the turn of the 20th century, comics have long been a form that invites--indeed requires--readers to help shape the stories being told. Today, with the rise of interactive media, the creative techniques and the reading practices comics have been experimenting with for a century are now in universal demand. Recounting the history of comics from the nineteenth-century rise of sequential comics to the newspaper strip, through comic books and underground comix, to the graphic novel and webcomics, Gardner shows why they offer the best models for rethinking storytelling in the twenty-first century. In the process, he reminds us of some beloved characters from our past and present, including Happy Hooligan, Krazy Kat, Crypt Keeper, and Mr. Natural.
The Rise of the American Comics Artist
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Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic-book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Millera?'s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbonsa?'s Watchmen (1987) revolutionized the former genre in particular. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention beyond comics-specific outlets, as best represented by Art Spiegelmana?'s Maus . Publishers began to collect, bind, and market comics as a?graphic novels, a? and these appeared in mainstream bookstores and in magazine reviews. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts brings together new scholarship surveying the production, distribution and reception of American comics from this pivotal decade to the present. The collection specifically explores the figure of the comics creatora?--either as writer, as artist, or as writer and artista?--in contemporary U.S. comics, using creators as focal points to evaluate changes to the industry, its aesthetics, and its critical reception. The book also includes essays on landmark creators such as Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, as well as insightful interviews with Jeff Smith ( Bone ), Jim Woodring ( Frank ) and Scott McCloud ( Understanding Comics ). As comics have reached new audiences, through different material and electronic forms, the publica?'s broad perception of what comics are has changed. The Rise of the American Comics Artist surveys the ways in which the figure of the creator has been at the heart of these evolutions."
