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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'The Spirit' brings 1940s noir comic to the big screen (StarNewsOnline.com)

Michael Chabon image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ben Steelman

Dec. 17, 2008

Of all the Christmas Day movies this year, I'm more than a little interested in "The Spirit," the latest from comic-book-artist-turned-filmmaker Frank Miller. Once again, we'll see those digitized backgrounds and weird mixes of color and black-and-white, as in "Sin City" and "300," Miller's collaborations with Robert Rodriguez.

Mostly, though, I want to see what they do with one of my favorite comic heroes.

I discovered "The Spirit" late, in the 1970s, when a lot of the old strips were finally being reprinted for a new generation of fans. That's when a lot of us first discovered Will Eisner.

Who's Eisner? A cartoonist's cartoonist who never quite reached A-list popularity but was always known to the cognoscenti. Jack Kirby ("The Hulk, "X-Men," etc.) worked with Eisner back in the 1930s, when he was still Jacob Kurtzberg; later a young Jules Feiffer would understudy for him. Michael Chabon quoted Eisner in the epigram for his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and may have used him as a model for one of his cartoonist heroes. Hundreds of other young pop artists studied his work.

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INDEX to MR. MEDIA INTERVIEWS

TV Stars * TV Producers * Movie Stars * Movie Directors, Producers, documentary Filmmakers and Screenwriters * Politicians and Political Writers * Stand-Up Comedians * Health Experts * Magazine Editors * Radio Stars * Bloggers, Podcasters and Web Producers * Novelists * Musicians and Music Journalists * Sexuality Experts * Culture and Society Experts * Food Experts * Biographers, Historians and A.J. Jacobs * Athletes and Sports Experts * Photographers * Journalists * Crime Experts * CEOs and Business Experts * Comic Book Creators * Cartoonists * Will Eisner Co-Workers, Friends and Experts

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