Will Eisner: A Spirited Life [Paperback]

Bob Andelman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 6, 2005

This beautifully illustrated biography explores the fascinating life of Will Eisner, detailing a career that exceeds six decades in which Eisner spearheaded the cause of comics for adult readers and created the first widely accepted graphic novel, A Contract with God. Eisner's influence has been felt by such diverse talents as Batman creator Bob Kane and Jack Kirby. Underground comics legend R. Crumb and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman have hailed Eisner's cinematic approach to comics and his enduring character The Spirit. From his childhood to educating Army soldiers to famously turning down a proposal for Superman, Eisner's personal and professional life is told in dramatic detail. Bob Andelman spent almost three years interviewing Eisner, researching his life and work and interviewing his friends, family, and the creative talents he inspired over a seventy-year career. Among those who spoke about their personal experience with Will Eisner were: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Neil Gaiman, Denis Kitchen, Joe Kubert, Stan Lee, Jules Feiffer, Neal Adams, and Patrick McDonnell.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It is highly fortunate that Andelman got to write this authorized biography of the towering American cartoonist Eisner before his death this year at age 87. Following Michael Chabon's insightful introduction, Andelman states that he will not critique Eisner's work, and so barely describes Eisner's innovative "The Spirit" or the contents of his pioneering graphic novels. Andelman thus limits his audience to comics aficionados who are already thoroughly familiar with Eisner's oeuvre; others will be left puzzled as to why he merits a biography. Thoroughly researched, the book confusingly jumps back and forth in time, while presenting vivid portraits of Eisner's colleagues like Jerry Iger, Denis Kitchen and Cat Yronwode. Eisner is depicted as a hardworking, almost universally beloved artistic visionary. Yet Eisner's work indicates that he was a far more complex figure. Andelman briefly touches on intriguing issues, like Eisner's capacity for anger, his obsessive penny-pinching, his religious doubts, and his anguish over his daughter's death, but never probes them sufficiently. A future biography should delve beneath Eisner's public persona to draw connections between his life and his art. Still, so far there are few serious biographies of important figures in American comics. In authorizing this book, Eisner has proved a pioneer yet again.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Michael Chabon contributes a heartfelt introduction to Andelman's first-ever biography of Will Eisner (1917-2005), and the story that follows is a real-life Kavalier and Clay. Present at the comics industry's birth in the 1930s, Eisner revolutionized the field not just creatively in work spanning from his 1940s stories featuring masked crime fighter the Spirit to his later, pioneering graphic novels but also as businessman and entrepreneur, teacher, mentor, and the inspiration of countless young artists. Andelman covers all those roles and points up Eisner's uniqueness among his peers: he retained ownership of his creations, and that allowed him to reprint the Spirit stories at a time, decades after their original publication, when so doing cemented his reputation in a new era of comics fandom and facilitated launching a new career as a graphic novelist with A Contract with God (1978). Besides verifying Eisner's impact on nearly every artist who drew comics in his wake, Andelman shows that Eisner's influence extends to such film directors as Spielberg and Tarantino. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: M Press; 1st M Press Ed edition (December 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595820116
• ISBN-13: 978-1595820112
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,805,010 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bob Andelman is the author or co-author of several best-selling biographical, business, management and sports books, including:

* Mind Over Business (March 2012), self-help, motivational nonfiction written with spports and business trainer Ken Baum.

* The Consulate (March 2011), fiction written with former CIA and FBI agent Thomas R. Stutler.

* The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths (Hyperion/Voice, May 2010), written with nationally recognized criminal profiler and frequent CNN contributor Pat Brown. http://patbrownprofiling.blogspot.com/

* Will Eisner: A Spirited Life (Dark Horse/M Press, 2005), the biography of the legendary artist and writer who is often credited with taking comic books out of the ghetto in the 1940s and establishing the market for adult, long-form comics - graphic novels - in the 1970s. A Spirited Life has been translated for Spanish and Italian editions. Andelman also read for the audiobook edition. http://www.aspiritedlife.com and http://www.aspiritedlife.com/blog/

* Four Seasons: The Philosophy of a Business (Portfolio/Penguin, 2009), by Isadore Sharp, founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. Andelman did not author or co-author this book but came in and helped Sharp near the end of the writing process by conducting dozens of interviews with Four Seasons managers and executives and contributing additional material to the finished manuscript.

* The Profit Zone: Lessons of Strategic Genius from the People Who Created the World's Most Valued Companies (Times Books/Random House, 1997), with Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison, partners in Boston-based Mercer Management. The Profit Zone is Andelman's best selling book overall with more than 100,000 hardcover copies in print after 10 printings. Worldwide, The Profit Zone has been translated into Chinese (Complex and Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

* Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion (Times Books/Random House, 1999), on which he collaborated with Home Depot co-founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. CNBC's "Mad Money" host Jim Kramer endorsed the timelessness of Built From Scratch when he told his viewing audience, "Built from Scratch is the best of all those business biographies." Built From Scratch was translated for a Japanese edition.

* Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great (Times Books/Random House, 1996), with Albert J. Dunlap, chairman and CEO of Sunbeam. Published in hardcover, paperback and audiocassette. Mean Business was a finalist in the Financial Times of London Global Business Book Awards.

Since February 2007, Andelman has also produced and hosted the popular "Mr. Media Radio" celebrity and media newsmaker online interview show heard on his own site, http://www.mrmedia.com, as well as syndicated to iTunes, Facebook, BlogTalkRadio, Posterous, Stitcher, Callisto.FM, MediaFly, Podfeed.Net, Podbean, Podcast.De, Blubrry, Zencast, Zimbio, MeFeedia, Podcast Alley, Vimeo, Livestream.com, Ustream.TV, MySpace, Tumblr, Podcast Directory, MeThings, Networked Blogs, LoadedWeb, No Control, Podcast Blaster, Podomatic, Castroller, Podcast Pickle and Odeo. The show averages approximately 2,000 visitors/archive downloads a day.

Andelman and his wife of 22 years, Mimi, live in St. Petersburg, Florida with their 14-year-old daughter.

For more information:
Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, mbourret @ dystel.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobandelman
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mr-Media-Interviews-by-Bob-Andelman/10847855738
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/andelman
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/MrMediaRadio
Archive: http://www.andelman.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Spirited Summation of a Master Artist., November 1, 2005

By 

Michael F. Hopkins "A Deeper Groove" (Buffalo, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Will Eisner: A Spirited Life (Paperback)

Bob Andelman's WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE is a
superb study of a great literary genius. Drawing
enormously from a vast wealth of previously
unavailable resources, the M Press book is made
all the finer by the biographer's decision to
focus on the man and, in doing so, draws a more
acute, highly intimate bead on the influential
work Eisner produced across the greater 20th
century, and beyond.
That being said, I question the logic of the
Publishers Weekly reviewer, who felt that
Andelman's decision to place Eisner's life
as the primary focus, rather than fixate
upon his technique, would somehow limit
the book's readership to comic book
fandom.
One would think that just the opposite would be
true; that a book principally aimed at discussing
technical aspects would have come across as far
too in-clubby and far less audience-spanning for a
biographical work. Too, considering that Eisner's
personal life has almost never been a topic for
audience discretion, one has to wonder what the
Publishers Weekly reviewer had in mind for a more
appropriate biographical subject?
One ponders if that reviewer was the same one
who wondered if the sobering subject of Eisner's
final work, THE PLOT, was appropriate for the
medium of comics?!! It might do such critics
well to actually read the material they're
reviewing, and gain some wisdom -not
stereotypes- about what they purport
to talk about.

Few places could provide a better start into
the inner workings of a classic storyteller
than this book. Drawing from direct interviews
with Eisner, family, friends and professional
associates spanning some 60 to 70 years, this
book is at once the historical goldmine and
an anecdotal treasure house.
Those who have long wondered about Eisner's
art, cultural background, and how he parlayed
all this into a life's work which crosses
idioms and sets standards even now, will
find this book to be a magnificent
revelation into the nature by which
pioneers are born.
Those who know nothing about THE SPIRIT, the
connections with generations of Sequential
storytellers from Kubert and Kirby to Miller
and Gaiman, or the vast reshaping of an art
form some 30 years after "retirement", will
simply find a most absorbing read about a
man who grew up poor, hungry, and oppressed,
yet refused to live his life as a victim.
A SPIRITED LIFE is the tale of a talented
man who made his aesthetic mark upon the
ages, and made a lucrative living without
selling out.

How Eisner did this in a field still
largely known for robber baron business
practices, while exuding a charm and
grace which complemented the succinct,
no-nonsense demeanor of his images and
words, is the magic which comprises
Andelman's book.
WILL EISNER: A SPIRITED LIFE. Clearly,
a read which is more than worth the
lifetime that many have waited for
its pages to be filled, and its
heart-stirring tale to be
wondrously told...

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master and Man, May 14, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Will Eisner: A Spirited Life (Paperback)

Andelman writes with an excited glee that bounces the story along in hoops and bounds, from one heroic moment to another. After awhile I forgot I was reading about a comic artist, for the tone is so reverential you might think you were reading the life of a great freedom fighter or martyr like Martin Luther King. Maybe A SPIRITED LIFE needs a few drops of (I won't say "reality") perspective to make it really stand out and be the book that it wants to be, but uniformly everyone apparently loved Eisner and only occasionally, by mistake as it were, do you get the feeling of a three dimensional man beneath the glossy surface. But how can you blame Bob Andelman, I would have written this exactly in the same way. I do wonder however why Eisner is always right. He stops drawing The Spirit--it's a complex artistic decision. He starts drawing again--it's fate bringing back a neglected American master. To pull this off, Andelman's strategy insures that he has to make everyone else look bad, especially Jerry Iger. And what about poor Cat Yronwode? While Andelman admits she brought some needed assistance to the lives of overworked Will and Ann, so that they began to depend on her almost as a daughter, he otherwise makes her seem like a crude, sexually aberrant nudist without an ounce of couth--a wild Maenad in fact, who tells Howard Cruse that homosexuality is sick, so that Eisner seems like a besozzled idiot for keeping her around. Why trash the woman, did she do something terribly wrong to Andelman in private life?

When Michael Chabon began rseearching KAVALIER AND KLAY he interviewed Eisner about the early days of comics and what it wa slike being a young American Jew in the era when Hitler was rising to power, a shadow across Europe. Was there something special that drew Jews to comic work, is what he essentially wound up asking. In response Eisner commented, "We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems." Struck by the wisdom and beauty of this remark, Chabon turned it into the epigraph of his novel. There's a recent biography of Ray Bradbury with some of the hagiographic tone of A SPIRITED LIFE, but this work is superior because of its massive research and its real insight into the mind of Ann Eisner and the terrible tragedy that was Alice's death at 16. He makes the readers of the future sorry they never met the legend who invented the graphic novel.