Kieron Gillen's workblog

 
             

   
 
 

1/05/2005

 
While I've promised several people further commentary on the Tracks of the year, I really should post about this:

Will Eisner dies, aged 87

Here's what a couple of enlightened comics writers are saying...

First, Neil Gaiman.
"I interviewed my friend Will Eisner a few year ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. At one point I asked him why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman -- remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and gone.

He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of The Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he'd one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for The Note...

Will Eisner was better than any of us, and he kept working in the hope that one day he'd get it right."


Secondly, Brian Michael Bendis.
"You can’t die if you single-handedly invented the language of an entire art form and the concept of the graphic novel. Its impossible. He is immortal.

Will Eisner is the most inspirational, most inventive and most sincerely passionate man I have ever met on this planet. I was not friends with him and my run ins were very brief, but for me very meaningful. They probably could have been more than they were but I felt completely unworthy to be in the same room with him.

Years ago, I had the honor of having my work critiqued by him. He was honest and generous and has given me words to live by that has stayed in my head every day for the last decade.

It was very close to a religious experience. It is one of the true gift’s of my life."


And for those of you who don't know anything about the man, here's DC's obituary. The short version is essentially what Bendis started with: he invented the western graphic novel with "Contract With God". He's as important as anyone in comics has ever been, I think.

I don't think I'm particularly qualified to write more, in addition to what's linked. I'm the absolute opposite of someone like Bendis: I never met him. I'd have killed to met him. But I can't end the post without saying something.

Okay, try this: He's the absolute model of what any person who wants to be a creative should be pushing towards.


 

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