Customer Reviews

Will Eisner Reader

5 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
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Will Eisner, who died in 2005, reinvented comics as sequential art. The details in each of his panels tell stories within stories. Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words would have upped that count had he seen an Eisner panel.

All that said, this book has a nice selection of Eisner's take on regular life, mostly centered around the Jewish community in Brooklyn (see The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (A Contract With God, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue) for his magnum opus on the subject). This shorter tome is a very nice introduction to his work, if you haven't encountered Eisner before, and a must have for those of us who know him well.

THE WILL EISNER READER is the latest entry in publisher W.W. Norton's softcover reprint series of Eisner graphic novels. It collects 7 short stories - A Sunset in Sunshine City, The Telephone, Detective Story, The Long Hit, Winning, The Appeal, and Humans. These stories feature more of Eisner's signature observations on life and human nature, with the stories and art being just as good as you'd expect. There's one thing that prevents me from giving this book, or actually the whole series of Norton paperback editions, a high rating: you can pick up one of the longer graphic novels like A CONTRACT WITH GOD, which is 192 pages, or you can pick up a shorter one like THE WILL EISNER READER, which is 96 pages... they cost the same. $17 for each book, regardless of page count. What makes this even more annoying is, Norton was able to publish 3 hardcover Eisner collections of selected stories, each around 500 pages and priced at $30! Where's the consistency?

While I'd love to pick up every softcover volume in this series, the cost doesn't make it worth it. Until I can get some softcovers that are reasonably priced, I'll stick to the 3 hardcover volumes.