Will Eisner: A Spirited Life Audiobook Exclusive--Ch. 20: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons of Watchmen

Cover of Watchmen

In 2005, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, Bob Andelman's authorized biography of the late American comic book master, was published by Dark Horse/M Press.

This spring, the audiobook version of the book will finally be released via Audible.com and iTunes.

In celebration of “Will Eisner Week” (March 3-7, 2009) and the release of the much anticipated film adaptation of Watchmen on March 6, 2009, Tampa Digital Studios agreed to release an exclusive audio excerpt of Will Eisner: A Spirited Life for broadcast on the BlogTalkRadio.com network.

Beginning at 10 p.m. ET on March 5, 2009, you can listen to the excerpt here: http://tinyurl.com/bqkk7e

Chapter 20, from which this excerpt comes, deals with Watchmen creatorsAlan Moore and Dave Gibbons reminiscing about creating the first issueof Will Eisner’s The Spirit: The New Adventures. It was their first collaboration in a decade, since the publication of the original Watchmen comic book series in 1986.

Will Eisner: A Spirited Life audiobook is narrated by the book’sauthor, Bob Andelman. It is produced by Michael Piotrowski andengineered by Joshua Agnew for Tampa Digital Studios.

​​Will Eisner: A Spirited Life​​
​
​​Mr. Media's audio interview with Dave Gibbons​

Copyright 2009 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

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Cover of Watchmen

In 2005, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, Bob Andelman's authorized bioraphy of the late American comic book master, was published by Dark Horse/M Press.

This spring, the audiobook version of the book will finally be released via Audible.com and iTunes.

In celebration of “Will Eisner Week” (March 3-7, 2009) and the release of the much anticipated film adaptation of Watchmen on March 6, 2009, Tampa Digital Studios agreed to release an exclusive audio excerpt of Will Eisner: A Spirited Life for broadcast on the BlogTalkRadio.com network.

Chapter 20, from which this excerpt comes, deals with Watchmen creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons reminiscing about creating the first issue of Will Eisner’s The Spirit: The New Adventures. It was the first collaboration in a decade, since the publication of the original Watchmen comic book series in 1986.

Will Eisner: A Spirited Life audiobook is narrated by the book’s author, Bob Andelman. It is produced by Michael Piotrowski and engineered by Joshua Agnew for Tampa Digital Studios.

Will Eisner: A Spirited Life

Mr. Media's audio interview with Dave Gibbons

Copyright 2009 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lightning Review: Watchmen The Complete Motion Comic Blu-ray [Watchmen] (i.gizmodo.com)
• Watchmen Release Week Roundup: Watch, Re-read, or Catch the Cartoon Art Museum Exhibit (laughingsquid.com)
• The "Watchmen" Movie: Too Reverent (cbsnews.com)
• Marshall Fine: Watchmen: The latest distraction (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Annotated Watchmen (tsurch.com)
• Will anyone watch the 'Watchmen'? (cnn.com)
• Filming the Unfilmable: Behind the Scenes of the Watchmen Movie (wired.com)

DVD Review: Will Eisner: Profession: Cartoonist (Newsarama.com)

Image via WikipediaBy Steve Fritz
22 December 2008

WILL EISNER: PROFESSION: CARTOONIST
(Image Entertainment)

With the arrival of The Spirit movie in theaters this week, no one should be surprised that a documentary about Will Eisner just hit the market. After all, the same thing already happened with Alan Moore (Mindscape of...). Can Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, you-name-‘em, be far behind?

The good news is this selection is well worth the effort. An American/Brazilian collaboration, this doc is divided into three key parts; Eisner’s roots and his work on The Spirit, his middle career and move into graphic novels and, finally, a solid analysis of his distinctive graphic style and importance to the industry/artform. Among those heavily interviewed are his wife Anne, Denis Kitchen, Stan Lee, Art Spiegelman and many, many other important colleagues he made through his long career.

The real “star” is Eisner himself, who apparently was quite generous with the documentarians, providing a number of interviews, a tour of his Ft. Lauderdale home and a generous sampling of the work he did over his 70 year career.

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Into the Eisenshpritz

Review by Elif Batuman

London Review of Books

April 10, 2008

The term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be known as ‘comics’. But ‘graphic novel’ can usefully designate a certain type of comic: a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoiristic or novelistic narrative, usually devoid of superheroes. By contrast, the older and more capacious term ‘comic book’ recalls the thinner, serialised, multi-authored or ghost-written publications rife with Supermen and She-Hulks. Some comics, of course, straddle (or elude) both categories; but in broad terms ‘comic book’ and ‘graphic novel’ serve to distinguish two trends in the history and form of comics.

There is no better vantage-point from which to view these two trends than the new collection of Will Eisner’s autobiographical comics, entitled Life, in Pictures. Eisner’s career is a microcosm of the history of American comics, starting with the ‘golden age’ of the 1930s and 1940s. When he was 19, Eisner co-founded one of the first comics studios, Eisner & Iger, whose original titles included Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Blackhawk, as well as the underappreciated Mr Mystic and Doll Man. Mr Mystic – his real name was Ken – crashed a plane in Tibet, where the ‘Seven Lamas’ tattooed an arcane symbol onto his forehead, endowing him with the ability to transform into animals. Then there is Darrell Dane, a research chemist with the ability to ‘compress his molecular structure’ until he has shrunk to a height of six inches; the Doll Man’s crime-fighting techniques involve hiding in handbags, bivouacking in pie dishes and riding a German shepherd dog. In 1940, Eisner created his most famous masked hero: The Spirit was a syndicated series featuring a former detective called Denny Colt who staged his own death and took up residence in a graveyard, whence he made periodic forays into the world of crime.

The virtuosity of The Spirit is such as to belie the idea of a comic ‘strip’. The panels, as if themselves infused by an exuberant ‘Spirit’, leap from their rectangular boxes, assuming the forms of diverse print media: file cards, gravestones, film strips, children’s books, television sets. Eisner’s panels often float against black Expressionist nights or lightly inked Center City skylines. Some scenes are framed by purely visual devices: the beam of a flashlight, the viewfinder of a telescope, the jagged outlines of a bombed wall, the round windows in the door of a restaurant kitchen. Speech bubbles are made to coincide with pillars of cigarette smoke.

Click HERE to Keep Reading!