7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and Informative Thoughts from Eisner and Miller, Two Leaders of the Comics Industry!, August 3, 2006
This review is from: Eisner/Miller (Paperback)
If you like either Will Eisner or Frank Miller, you will likely enjoy this book. I have been a fan of Will Eisner since the 1970s Warren Magazine reprint series of THE SPIRIT! I am not a big fan of Frank Miller, (his work is too violent and raunchy for me), but Frank and Will together have plenty of interesting insights during this extended conversation between the two comics legends.
The book is nearly 350 pages of text and b/w photos and artwork! It is a real page-turner if you enjoy comics and/or Miller and Eisner! I read it all in a single weekend, well spent time and money.
In fact, the book itself was recorded over a weekend, in Florida, at Eisner's home and office, then went through a transcription and a couple of rounds of approvals, updates, corrections, and such.
The book came out after Will Eisner passed away. Frank Miller writes a nice 2005 Introduction, kidding about Eisner's love of argument, because supposedly that is what old Jewish men love to do, argue. It is a friendly, joking introduction, and Eisner would have enjoyed it, judging by other comments inside this book.
Throughout the book, they talk and argue about many topics: other friends and acquaintances from the comics industry and fun anecdotes, how the business started and evolved, how to break-in for a newcomer (or maybe not how anymore), art and page composition, color versus black & white, working methods of operation, inking, washes, character and story creation, who else's work they admire and why, zipatone, the Comics Code Authority and the 1950s witch hunts against EC and comics, the history of pre-comics and pre-comics characters, etc.
Eisner prefers to pencil and finish a completely inked page of a story, then on to the next page; while Miller likes to do mass quantities of penciled pages, then mass quantities of basic inked pages, then mass quantites of fine tuned, detailed inking to finish the pages.
Miller hates the size and shape format of standard comics, which we learn is derived from the size of standard press room sheets, from the 1930's, or so. Eisner discusses how THE SPIRIT format was based on the standard newspaper insert sizes of those times, way back then.
Actually, after reading this book, I found Frank Miller to be a little more substantial in my opinion, not just all about gratuitous sex and violence like his SIN CITY comics; while I was a little disappointed with Will Eisner's careless remarks about his religious viewpoint, which seems to come off as negligible, from my reading of this book.
It's a nice, intelligent read for any adult comics fan! It reminds me of the extremely long, in-depth interviews from Fantagraphics and their COMICS JOURNAL, (but without the overtly hostile, liberal overloadings that downgrade the COMIC JOURNAL, to me). This book is from Dark Horse Books, and I'd like to see more of this type of stuff from Dark Horse--in-depth but more balanced than the COMICS JOURNAL's stuff.
All and all, this is a worthy purchase and read for any grown up comics fans, and I would be interested in buying more of this type of book from Dark Horse, if and when they decide to do a similar book with different professionals featured.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Hitchcock, Not Truffaut, September 21, 2011
The legendary film text commonly known as Hitchcock/Truffaut (though that isn't its actual title) features French nouvelle vague director Francois Truffaut (aka the French Guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) conducting an exhaustive interview with Alfred Hitchcock. It's a terrific book.
This book, featuring an exhausting dialogue between legendary comic-book writer-artist Will Eisner (The Spirit, A Contract with God, Fagin the Jew) and semi-legendary comic-book writer-artist Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, 300, Sin City), consciously emulates the earlier book in its title while severely underperforming in pretty much every other comparison between the two volumes.
Truffaut was a critic and a film historian as well as a writer-director, and he did tons of preparation and contextualization for his book, supplying a lengthy introduction that explained Hitchcock's body of work to the casual reader and structuring the interview chronologically so that the two men could work their way through Hitchcock's life and work from past to present. Neither Miller nor interview "conductor" Charles Brownstein (the latter of whom is completely silent in the transcription of the interview) supply these things. A casual reader will have almost no idea why either Eisner or Miller is important to the history of comic books at the end of this book. Or care.
That casual reader won't make it to the end of the book unless he or she has a high tolerance for tedium. This is probably the worst conducted long-form interview I've ever read. Miller seems to have absolutely no clue as to how to ask follow-up questions or press a point, and the late Eisner was (famously) reticent about offering anything other than the most superficial analysis of his own or other people's work.
Eisner was a shrewd businessman at a time -- the 1940's -- when most comic-book writers and artists weren't. This comes up again and again, and Eisner reveals himself to be something of a prick whenever the topic of artists and writers who weren't shrewd businessmen (say, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, or writer-artist Jack Kirby) comes up. It's not a pleasant side of the man, but it's pretty much the only substantive thing that the 60,000-word interview reveals.
Miller, famously a champion of creator's rights since the 1980's, pretty much allows Eisner to go unchallenged in this area and others. Inadvertantly funny moments occur whenever Miller and Eisner clearly and emphatically disagree with one another while both stating and re-stating how they actually agree.
If I were cynical, I'd guess that this interview sat on the shelf for three years (it was conducted in 2002 but not published until 2005) because publisher Dark Horse was well aware of what a stink-bomb it had. But when Eisner died, the interview gained some heft as Eisner's last long-form discussion of his life and career, so onto the stands it went. It certainly seems like a rush job for something ostensibly three years in the making -- there isn't even an index. If I were cynical. Not recommended at all except as a sleep aid.
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