Will Eisner Quotations

I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form - in this medium - and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.

Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Memory is a very amorphous thing. It is selective and shaped by emotion . . . people are constantly in pursuit of the details of their past because it is from that they determine their own identity upon which they can base their strategy of survival.

I believe that in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner the story is hardly over. Yet it is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.

I believe that in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner the story is hardly over. Yet it is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.

I did not have the dreams that the other artists working with me had, of 'moving uptown,' becoming an illustrator or a gallery painter, or those others who said, 'I'm going to go uptown and be a writer, I'm going to work for The New Yorker one day and escape this ghetto.' For me, there was no escape.

The work we do is as demanding as any of the great painters because nothing that happens on the page of a comic is accidental. It has to be imagined first in your mind before you do it. Those of us who know something about the art of painting know that working on a canvas, very often a lot of serendipitous things happen that work to the advantage of the painter ultimately.

I've spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.

The term "comics" long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. "Sequential Art" is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.

All professionals should teach at some time in their career because they are obliged to pass on what they have learned.

It's very important for me to maintain contact with the reader, because I'm writing to someone, and I'm desperately eager to achieve believability.

In comics, images are generally impressionistic. Usually, they are rendered with economy in order to facilitate their usefulness as a language. Because experience precedes analysis, the intellectual digestive process is accelerated by the imagery provided by comics.

In the beginning of the century, in 1900, the newspapers in this country began running comic strips, and they were called jokes or funnies. The word comics developed later, but it is that that began to give the name - the ambience of comics - the feeling of being a frivolous kind of art-form.

You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.

The great depression left a mark on all of the civilized world. It was a defining moment like a giant earthquake that reminds us of how little control we have over human destiny -- despite our technology and innovation.

Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.

[Before the Spirit] I had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas [I wanted to aim for] a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

Ive spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.

I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.

Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

The term comics long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. Sequential Art is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.

Superheroes are mostly aimed at young teen-age males concerned with their manhood. The medium will have to address itself more to content. . . . I see 22 year olds draw massive Schwarzenegger types, outfitted with metal studs, pressing a mostly naked woman to their breastplates. And I think Poor girl, thats got to be cold.

As for me, I am in pursuit of excellence. I have no time to get old.

Comics, which are really best described as an arrangement of images in a sequence that tell a story - an idea - is a very old form of graphic communication. It began with the hieroglyphics in Egypt, it first appeared in a recognizable form in the Medieval times as copper plates produced by the Catholic church to tell morality stories.

We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.