Last night a documentary about Will Eisner premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. I attended. I had high hopes for the movie, and I those hopes were certainly justified.
The documentary featured interviews from a virtual pantheon of the medium: Stan Lee, Joe Kubert, Jerry Robinson, Bob Kane, Gil Kane, Art Spiegalman, etc as well as Eisner's wife, the charming and funny Anne, Dennis Kitchen, Michael Chabon, and a long time fan of the Spirit dailies that ran in the Chicago Tribune in the 30's- Kurt Vonnegut.
In addition to these filmed interveiws, the documentary was peppered with audio interviews that Eisner taped himself with the likes of no less than Jack Kirby and Neal Adams from his legendary "Shop Talk" series of taped conversations.
Eisner carries the show throughout the documentary, delivering candid intelligent stories of the beginnings of the medium, his time away from it, his experiences in World War 2, and much much more. I was particularly impressed with the honesty and explaining of the Ebony character, an embarassing relic of the minstral era that Eisner makes no excuses for.
The story that Kitchen tells of Eisner's first contact with the Underground Comix of the 70's is priceless. (Eisner on Art Speigalman:"We both smoked pipes, but not the same stuff out of them.")
Eisner's conversations with Kirby about thier shared childhood experiiences living in the ghetto during the Depression grant you an unprecedented look at the formulative years of two of the great innovators of an artform.
The story of Will Eisner's life is the story of comic books. From it's beginnings as a daily advnture newspapaer strip spun out of the pulps, to the first pamphlets known as the modern comic book, to it's maturing into the Graphic Novel, a term that Eisner coined and format he may have invented.
The jazz soundtrack is great, the looks at Eisner's original art is drool inducing. This is cheesy, but by the end of the movie I was holding back tears, not because I was said, but because I was simply in awe of this man's work. Hopefully this film gets picked for wide release and finds a distributor- New Yorkers, it's playing all week in the Tribeca Film Festival, I can't recommend it enough.
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