Publisher: TwoMorrows
Writer: Bob Andelman
Introduction: Michael Chabon
Foreword: Neal Adams
Release date: OUT NOW!
Price: $39.95 (Hardback)

Confession, so Mrs Hooker tells me, is good for the soul. So, I will get the ‘bad thing’ out of the way first.

However, first a preamble – heavily disguised as an intro – my comic book reading career is littered, some who know me well, would say strewn, with missed comic book opportunities.

Neal Adam’s signing in London’s Forbidden Planet in the late 1970s? Not going. Giant Sized X-Men #2, £15.00? Too expense for my blood in 1980. Coffee with Archie Goodwin? Too tongue-tied to continue a conversation with Archie on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shinning.’ Because nodding your head like a loon does not, I understand now, constitute a conversation.

And on and so forth….oh, yeah, meet and greet with one Will Eisner at London’s FP, after work in the 80s. Yep, you guessed it, not going either!

Here’s the really bad bit though; hold on to your comic collections and have those Mylar bags to hand to throw up into.

On my first exposure to Will Eisner what did I do? What would any self-respecting comic book fan do? Well, I brushed him off. There’s my good friend (and now re-found friend), Dave Hornsby, jumping up and down, clutching a copy of Kitchen Sink Publishing’s ‘Spirit Magazine’ and I just do not get it. Worse, I did not want to get it either. What was the big deal anyway? Some tall, bald old guy, some old character from the 1940’s? What was the big deal? Old stuff sucked thirty-five years ago.

I was so dismissive of Eisner and The Spirit I did not even registrar the character Ebony as a concern. None, as Stan Lee, might suggest, are as blind as those who cannot see.

But I could rationalise things out back then, mostly to suit my own tastes. The Spirit was before I was born, what did I care? The future belonged to the X-Men, Howard The Duck and The Guardian’s of The Galaxy, and two out of three – as Meatloaf once suggested – isn’t that bad. Pity about HTD though.

However, that did not alter the fact, I could not see what was very obvious. In many ways I have come to feel like the Comic Book Guy in the episode of The Simpsons where he meets the nuclear missile and concludes he might just have wasted his life – certainly on Aquaman – but you see my point? I have realised I have wasted much of my comic book reading life not reading Eisner, not embracing the genius.

Worse. 2005.

I had to wait till Will Eisner died before I took the blinkers off. TwoMorrows published a tribute Comic Book Artist and, for some reason, sense prevailed and I brought a copy. May be, I surmised, there might be something to this Eisner guy; the TwoMorrows Comic Book Artist tribute was pretty weighty tomb. Needless to say, I devoured it, twice. I took out a second mortgage, set up an eBay Eisner alert and started collecting those DC Spirit Archives. I had been such a fool.

And now TwoMorrows are back with Will Eisner A Spirited Life (Deluxe Edition). And whilst you might be thinking: Oh, Steve’s gone a bit giddy making up for his Will Eisner faux pas, nothing could be further from the truth. Will Eisner A Spirited Life (Deluxe Edition) is less tribute and more ‘warts and all’ look at the life and times of Eisner. The man does not always come out of his own history looking particularly good in some instances, which I was pleased to read. Not so I can fall back on my old assumptions of Will Eisner but because it makes the man human, reachable, readable. Understandable.

Author Bob Andelman is no gushing Eisner fanboy either; I do not envy the task he sets out in this book, to lift Eisner’s life and comic book history off the page and into the minds-eye of the reader. Andelman succeeds though, the early history of Eisner and Iger, Howard Chaykin’s criticisms of a misunderstanding between the two men, will leave you pondering something akin to the great unknown. And all that just for openers in Will Eisner A Spirited Life (Deluxe Edition).

Neal Adam’s states in his foreword: ‘When people say, ‘Who do you like in comics?’ the two people I mention are Will Eisner and Joe Kubert. Everyone else is a skilled artisan. When it comes to human beings, it’s Will Eisner and Joe Kubert, and then it’s hard to keep counting.

Is there any higher praise? I doubt it.

In Will Eisner A Spirited Life (Deluxe Edition) Bob Andelman seems to make it clear, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, Will Eisner was one such giant.

And do I kick myself daily that I once turned my nose up at meeting Eisner? Well, that is the Pope’s hat and the bear in the woods answer.

 

Reviewer: Steve Hooker