To the Heart of the Storm (Will Eisner Library) [Paperback]

Will Eisner (Author)

Book Description

Series: Will Eisner Library | Publication Date: October 1, 2000

An extraordinary autobiography story from a legend in American comics.

A historical novel touching on prejudice, assimilation, and anti-Semitism, this sweeping saga takes us from New York in the eighteenth century to Vienna before World War I, and finally to America during the depression and World War II.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Structured around the induction of a young man much like himself into the army in 1942, Eisner's ( A Life Force ) autobiographical graphic novel examines the lives of Jewish immigrants and their children in pre-WW II Europe and America. As young Willie's troop train heads south, his window is transformed into a view of his family's past, full of the suffering and blunt anti-Semitism that characterized the times. Willie relives the death of his mother's father, who had immigrated to America in 1880, and the dispersal of her family among relatives and strangers. Willie's father--an aspiring artist in old Vienna--comes to the U.S. after the outbreak of the first world war to become a small-time businessman. Eisner's story is appealing but marred by schmaltzy confrontations and melodramatic graphics. He excels at recreating the family's daily struggle to survive, yet his characters and situations incline toward stereotype and his depictions of emotions--tearful eyes raised to heaven in joy or archly furrowed brows at the delivery of bad news--border on cliche. A vivid but flawed work from an acknowledged master of the comics medium.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Will Eisner was born William Erwin Eisner on March 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. By the time of his death on January 3, 2005, Will Eisner was recognized internationally as one of the giants in the field of sequential art, a term he coined.

In a career that spanned nearly eight decades—from the dawn of the comic book to the advent of digital comics—Will Eisner was truly the 'Orson Welles of comics' and the 'father of the Graphic Novel'. He broke new ground in the development of visual narrative and the language of comics and was the creator of The Spirit, John Law, Lady Luck, Mr. Mystic, Uncle Sam, Blackhawk, Sheena and countless others.

During World War II, Will Eisner used the comic format to develop training and equipment maintenance manuals for the US Army. After the war this continued as the Army's P.S. Magazine, which is still being produced today. Will Eisner taught Sequential Arts at the New York School of Visual Arts. The textbooks that he wrote based on his course are still bestsellers. In 1978, Will Eisner wrote A Contract with God, the first modern graphic novel. This was followed by almost 20 additional graphic novels over the following 25 years.

The "Oscars" of the Comic Industry are called The Eisner Awards, and named after Will Eisner. The Eisners are presented annually before a packed ballroom at Comic-Con International in San Diego, America's largest comics convention.

Wizard magazine named Eisner "the most influential comic artist of all time." Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is based in good part on Eisner. In 2002, Eisner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Federation for Jewish Culture, only the second such honor in the organization's history, presented by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: DC Comics (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563896796
• ISBN-13: 978-1563896798
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,499,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

WILL EISNER was born William Erwin Eisner on March 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. By the time of his death on January 3, 2005, Will Eisner was recognized internationally as one of the giants in the field of sequential art, a term he coined.

In a career that spanned nearly eight decades -- from the dawn of the comic book to the advent of digital comics - Will Eisner was truly the 'Orson Welles of comics' and the 'father of the Graphic Novel'. He broke new ground in the development of visual narrative and the language of comics and was the creator of The Spirit, John Law, Lady Luck, Mr. Mystic, Uncle Sam, Blackhawk, Sheena and countless others.

During World War II, Will Eisner used the comic format to develop training and equipment maintenance manuals for the US Army. After the war this continued as the Army's "PS Magazine" which is still being produced today. Will Eisner taught Sequential Arts at the New York School of Visual Arts. The textbooks that he wrote based on his course are still bestsellers. In 1978, Will Eisner wrote "A Contract with God," the first modern Graphic Novel. This was followed by almost 20 additional graphic novels over the following 25 years.

The "Oscars" of the Comic Industry are called The Eisner Awards, and named after Will Eisner. The Eisners are presented annually before a packed ballroom at Comi-Con International in San Diego, America's largest comics convention.

Wizard magazine named Eisner "the most influential comic artist of all time." Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winning novel "Kavalier and Clay" is based in good part on Eisner. In 2002, Eisner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Federation for Jewish Culture, only the second such honor in the organization's history, presented by Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

You can always find more information about Will Eisner at www.willeisner.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful examination of prejudice, July 28, 1998

By 

Ada Kerman ([e-mail]) (Guilderland, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: To the Heart of the Storm (Paperback)

I just read this book and I can see why Will Eisner is one of the greatest cartoonists around. Framed by Will's train ride when he is drafted for WWII, it tells the stories of his Jewish family.

Without rubbing your face in it, Will Eisner repeatedly shows you prejudices he encountered while growing up and while listening to his parents talk about their lives. There's a natural emphasis on anti-Semitism but other attitudes (anti-Catholic, "those German Jews are so stuck up", etc.) are also shown.

All that aside, it was also a fascinating story and showed something about what life was like from the late 19th century to 1942 - a year when neither of my parents had yet been born.

I would recommend this book to those who like graphic novels, anyone who liked Maus, and anyone who likes the oral history of Studs Terkel. Also, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in European and American politics of the first half of this century - for a viewpoint ! that doesn't often make it into history textbooks.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing, stirring piece of work..., September 27, 2000

By 

Jason R. Tippitt (Jackson, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: To the Heart of the Storm (Will Eisner Library) (Paperback)

Will Eisner tells a thinly veiled autobiographical tale of the anti-Semitic attitudes that lurked in the U.S. even as America headed off to war against the Nazis in Europe. (Though it's never stated in this book, the only *official* aid the U.S. gave German Jews was to let about a thousand immigrate here during the war. Everything else came afterward.)

Through the eyes of a son headed to war, we see his upbringing in various New York neighborhoods, and his parents' struggles to make ends meet in an economy where, even more than today, ethnicity could mean the difference between success and failure. His parents' tales show that things have been even worse in the past, though; from an uncle on his mother's side who changed his religion and cut himself off from the family to get into medical school, to his father's encounters in pre-WWI Vienna with a pro-Nazi artist.

Maybe the most compelling and heartbreaking thread, however, is the relationship between Willie and his best friend, Duke. From a backyard fight, through a building project, and then a meeting as adults, we see the harsh reality of how things so often work out, but also the hope for what can be... and why an artist, just starting in his career, might make the decision to not fight his draft notice and risk losing it all.

Brilliant stuff that warms the heart even as it sometimes hits like a knife in the back. Eisner is at his best here in art, in writing, and in storytelling.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex and personal, October 7, 2008

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: To the Heart of the Storm (Will Eisner Library) (Paperback)

Eisner presents broad, varied, and highly personal view of the American Jewish experience. It has to be varied since there is no one experience. Each differs from all the others, and each contains many parts at odds with each other.

This time, Eisner starts his story on a troop train, one leg of the trip towards the storm of WWII. One character sits silently, gazing out the window. Although he never speaks or even moves, his story plays out as fragments of memory, triggered by each tenement, housewife, or children's game seen through the window.

As such, there's no one linear thread of narrative. Parts take place before immigration from Europe, or the Depression, or the book's 1940s here-and-now. Fragments come from adult life, a child's experience, or an adolescent's ventures into friendship and love. Some parts represent the shared experience of any immigrant, balancing an insular "our kind" mentality against melding into the larger culture. Others display the range of distinctly Jewish experience, with features as subtle as a kind of anti-Semitism directed against one Jewish group by another.

Eisner's graphic novels have led pictorial story-telling out of the "just comics" phase and into real literature. His somewhat cartoony visual style might look unsophisticated to today's media-soaked eye. If any other author tried it, the graphic style wouldn't do much for me. The story is what matters in Eisner's work. It's the kind of fiction that doesn't need to be literally true in its facts to be deeply, personally, and sometimes brutally honest.

-- wiredweird