Will Eisner, pioneer

Will Eisner was a pioneer in both comic books and graphic novels, but that was only the beginning. He also pioneered the use of comics in education, and he devoted the middle part of his career to writing and drawing instructional booklets and posters for the armed services.

Then, too, Eisner was among the first to see comics as something that could appeal to adults as well as children and teenagers. He had little interest in superheroes, and when a couple of Cleveland teenagers named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster offered his company the rights to Superman in 1938, he turned them down. His own most famous character, The Spirit, had no superpowers and wore a hat, glasses and a business suit, not a cape, a mask and tights.

Finally he thought comics could be both art and literature, and he wanted both libraries and bookstores to place his books not among graphic novels but on the same shelves where one might find the works of Tolstoy and Faulkner. Instead of the word comics, because their was nothing comical about his best work, he preferred the term sequential art.

Michael Schumacher covers Eisner's remarkable career in his excellent biography Will Eisner: A Dreamer's Life in Comics (2010).

Eisner was still in his teens when started his first art studio, and unlike most cartoonists, he proved himself an astute businessman. He hired talented newcomers such as Jules Feiffer and Bob Kane (later to create Batman) to work for him. He worked right up to his death in 2005 when he was in his late eighties. His later years may have been his most productive. Although his wife talked him into leaving his beloved New York City to live in Florida, he did not retire there but produced some of his most ambitious work, often autobiographical. He also became a mentor to younger artists just getting started in the business.

Oddly, Schumacher repeats, almost word for word, the same sentence on page 306 of his book: "With any luck, his books might finally escape the comic ghetto and find their way to the shelves of serious literature." At this point in the biography, that seems like the ideal sentence to repeat for emphasis.