Will Eisner Quotes (16 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

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


    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.

    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 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.

    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.

    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.

    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, that's got to be cold.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.


    More Will Eisner Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Emotions - World - Necessity - Memory - Idea - Work & Career - Society & Civilization - Communication - People - Mind - Jokes & Humor - Excellence - Creativity & Innovation - Thought & Thinking - Reading - Art - Name - Language - Hatred - View All Will Eisner Quotations

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