Will Eisner has a towering place in the modern comics field
– the premier awards in the field are named after him, and for good reason –
due both to his pioneering Spirit
newspaper insert from the ‘40s and ‘50s and to the graphic novels he started
creating in the late ‘70s, after a long hiatus from the field. And that puts
him in an enviable position, in that huge swaths of his work is in print much
of the time. But perhaps that isn’t
all that enviable, since it means that some, well, lesser work gets reprinted as well.

The three books below were brought back into print this year
by W.W. Norton as part of their large and growing Will Eisner Library; they’re
packaged handsomely and would fit well on the shelf along with other books in
that series. But these three titles also show some of Eisner’s most glaring
faults and problems, particularly the biggest issue: his unbreakable addiction
to the most obvious strains of melodrama.

A Family Matter
By Will Eisner
W.W. Norton, July 2009, $15.95

Norton’s cover for [[[A Family Matter]]]­ – originally published in 1998 by Kitchen Sink –
telegraphs the melodrama here, as a dumpy Eisner middle-aged woman bawls, her
hands clenched in front of her dramatically underlit face. (The clichéd pose is
to the negative, but, on the other hand, Eisner is one of the few major comics
artists willing and able to draw realistic, unattractive people regularly and
put them at the center of his stories. And since the majority of humanity is unattractive, it’s important to have artists who show
them as they are.)

The story is set in familiar Eisner territory: a rich patriarch
has been ailing for years, and is essentially unable to communicate now. But it’s
his ninetieth birthday, so the entire squabbling clan – and no one squabbles
like Eisner characters – must gather for the occasion and maneuver for position
in the old man’s good graces. There’s the ne’er-do-well son, the daughter who
married a successful man, another daughter whose husband isn’t quite as
successful, the downtrodden lawyer son (lawyers are always harried and
overworked in Eisner; always small storefront shysters rather than high-powered
white-shoe types), the artistic younger daughter, and a sprinkling of kids from
the next generation. Despite one cell phone, the story feels like it’s set in
the usual Eisner time and milieu – vaguely mid-‘50s, relatively prosperous but
with dark clouds, with domestic servants for middle-class people, and all the
women wearing dowdy dresses and aprons all the time (and probably have
whale-boned foundation garments underneath).

Eisner’s characters also talk a lot, explaining the plot,
their motivations, and dreams to each other – it’s a bit like a musical on
paper in that way, and has to be taken in a similar spirit, as a contrivance
that makes thoughts manifest. (Eisner doesn’t use captions in this story, and
was never much for thought balloons – his people say what they feel, no matter what.) But he’s also
rehashing three generations of family history here, much of it only alluded to
or mentioned once, so there’s a density in Family Matter which is uncommon in a graphic novel outside of the
work of Gilbert Hernandez. But, again, that’s the soap-operatic aspect of Family
Matter: there’s always another
complication, another skeleton in the closet, another grievance.

Family Matter is soapy and sometimes obvious, a comics version of
the mid-20^th century ethnic soap operas. (Though, thankfully, he’d
toned down his most over-the-top Borscht Belt Jewish material and the bold and
dotted E*M*P*H*A*S*I*S in
dialogue that he used so heavily earlier.) It will feel very old-fashioned and unusual
to readers used to the cool, deadpan modern independent comics scene. But
Eisner is wonderful with body language and character types, and his people
never lack for motivation, so books like this will continue to be of interest –
particularly to aspiring creators, who want to see the broad, obvious ways of
creating effects so that they can then work on making those ways more subtle
and quiet.

(more…)

io9 likes to say they come from the future– but it seems that the future in question is 1984 or Brave New World.

We’ve received a number of reports about io9’s, shall we say, stringent commenter policies, many of which are discussed in their FAQ. Lately, they’ve been kicking more commenters off. This is not unheard of in comment management in general, and certainly they said they would– but the people being kicked off are science fiction writers and editors who have been calling io9 to task on many obvious factual errors in their articles. Since their site does a lot with science fiction, we wonder why they’re refusing comments from practitioners in the field. (The writers and editors have requested anonymity, as they don’t particularly want to start a flame war, particularly with a media outlet the size of io9.)

Now, we understand the temptation to limit comments, particularly from the great unwashed who might not be Gawker-media level cool, and fans can just be soooo unhip </sarcasm> but we can at least understand the appeal of snobbery. But cutting off dissenting voices, particularly those who point out any number of minor factual errors, just strikes us as dumb.

Personally, we here at ComicMix think that the best kind of comments come from thoughtful, knowledgeable people who add  information about a topic or correct errors– and the second best are from other commenters who correct the people who mistakenly think they’re in the first category.

Maybe that plate sewn on the head of their logo avatar is designed to prevent new ideas from coming in?