More about the new biography for Will Eisner

The Forward wrote about a new bio based on the life of cartoonist Will Eisner, previously written about here. At the beginning though:

In 1992, Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer prize.

The first graphic novel to win the award, Maus testified both to Spiegelman’s singular brilliance and to the graphic novel’s acceptance as a serious medium. This owed a great deal to one man: Will Eisner.

The problem is that Spiegelman's politics are far different from Eisner's, veering far more to the left than the late Eisner ever did. Perhaps that's why Spiegelman won the Pulitizer? Also, who knows if Spiegelman ever really thanked Eisner for what good he did for the medium when he first published A Contract With God?

A legendary figure within the comic book and graphic novel industries, yet comparatively lesser-known without, a new biography of Eisner from longtime graphic novelists Steve Weiner and Dan Muzur introduces Eisner to a new generation.

And to do justice to the life and career of the man who coined the term graphic novel, the duo have written — you guessed it — a graphic novel, entitled Will Eisner: A Comics Biography.

“What, it should be an opera?” Mazur joked, when I met him and Weiner over Zoom. “If you want to learn about Will Eisner, and you don’t want to read a graphic novel, I don’t know how that works.”

Mazur and Weiner had moved in the same comics circles in Cambridge, MA, for several years. Their work had even appeared side by side in 2017’s Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. But they officially met only in 2022, when Weiner pitched Mazur a graphic novel about Eisner-the-artist and Eisner-the-man.

The pair clicked immediately. “We just started talking about the books and comics we liked,” said Weiner, who has a shock of curly white hair. “I thought: This is going to work.”

Well that depends on if they're going to explore all the most relevant creations Eisner developed in his time, right down to The Plot, his last GN, which he thought of working on after doing research on Islamic antisemitism. Something which, I suspect, quite a few leftists in the industry today are against, and for all we know, they might ban Eisner's works one day if they consider even that anathema, right down to the very award ceremony dedicated to his name.

I guess a vital query is whether Mazur and Weiner's planned biography will acknowledge any of Eisner's most challenging works, and if memory serves, he also disapproved of feminism, so of course one must wonder if they'll acknowledge Eisner's exact beliefs on anything. Why, for all we know, it might be a great idea for Mazur and Weiner to discuss how Frank Miller threw Eisner under the bus, after all the good Miller's mentor tried to do for him. What Miller did was uncalled for, and just another example of how we doubtless have a certain segment and generation in the medium who don't have what it takes to appreciate the past veterans.

For now, however, Mazur and Weiner's book, unfortunately, may still have a flaw:

Interestingly, though the biography is about Eisner’s work, we don’t see examples of his drawings; the duo are less concerned with the specifics of Eisner’s art than with the life that made it possible and the stories he told.

I fully agree his life and times obviously make important components for a discussion, but even so, publishing some samples from his art can still convey the subject better. I realize that if this is a GN itself, the focus is foremost on what Mazur/Weiner have illustrated. Even so, I'm sure it could still be possible to put samples of Eisner's art on display.

Towards the end, this article, most unfortunately, bounces back to a troubling bias:

It’s a worthy tribute to a man who, first with The Spirit, and later with Contract with God, laid the foundation for Spiegelman’s Pulitzer win.

The bio may be worthy, but the writer seems to be looking for a regrettable excuse to gush over Spiegelman in the process. Considering what a bad lot Spiegelman is by contrast, one who doesn't respect his ethnic heritage in contrast to Eisner, that's exactly why it's insulting to the intellect Spiegelman should even be brought up here. There are doubtless other cartoonists who could make better side allusions. Citing Spiegelman seems awfully deliberate, and suggests the writer isn't really so respectful of Eisner as he is of Spiegelman, all because of the latter's shoddy leftist politics.