Mauricio writes...
Story 15 - The Spirit of Will Eisner
Mauricio de Sousa tells the story of how he met Will Eisner and learned from his comics.
Mauricio de Sousa tells the story of how he met Will Eisner and learned from his comics.
As I explained in a previous chronicle ("Navigating the ABCs...), I learned to read by "deciphering," with my mother’s help, an early Mandrake the Magician story.
After that, no one could stop me. I wanted to read everything that fell into my hands.
And it was during that time of fantastic discoveries of texts and figures in the comics that I came to know The Spirit, the masked hero of tales of wrongdoing, created by the genial American artist, Will Eisner.
Comic strips and color pages of The Spirit were published in Brazil in the children’s section of the Globo newspaper and in comic books. From the latter, I would cut out all of the colored adventures, collect them, cut pieces of cardboard for the covers, then sew the pages together to make my own private album -- I really did sew them, with needle and thread, because we didn’t have a stapler -- and finally I would write the titles I had selected on the cover and it was ready. I had the first comic book in which only The Spirit appeared, thirty years before anyone thought of publishing one. I still have them, stashed away.
Eisner drew The Spirit all through the 40s decade. He stopped in 1952 to dedicate his time to other activities, mainly publishing.
But as time passed, people who studied and researched comics began to "rediscover" his work. Until finally, beginning at the big European festivals, Eisner was raised to the heights as the great revolutionary of figures and texts.
To many, Eisner is the Orson Welles of comics for his intriguing narrative; his super-creative story lines; his live, human characters with explicit virtues and defects; and for his drawing, perfect in the layouts and in his command of the chiaroscuro technique.
During the period of the "rediscovery" of Eisner in the 70s, I visited him at his house near New York City. With me were a group of artists from my studio, on a trip aimed at getting to know our American colleagues.
Eisner found it somewhat strange that we expressed so much interest in the work he had discontinued many years before. But that interest and the increasing activity around him eventually bore the best fruit: he went back to creating, to drawing, with greater vigor and maturity. And then came books of comics that are anthological, like the last one, launched in Brazil, entitled "In the Heart of the Storm," brought out by the Abril publishing company. It was a brilliant album, in which Eisner shows how to draw comics (which he calls "sequential art").
Eisner now lives in Florida, near Tamarac, and dedicates his time to new books and helping Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) with the activities of the attractive comics International Museum of Cartoon Art located in Boca Raton, north of Miami.
I was with them recently and visited the cartoon museum (the subject of a future story), thrilled with the vigor and intelligence of my childhood idol. In a few days, he would be eighty years old.
I could not fail to thank Eisner once again for what he had given me in the days when my mind was absorbing everything (like a blotter): a whole narrative style that influenced, and still today continues to influence the comics that bear my name.
Thank you, Eisner.
Mauricio de Sousa
March 20, 1997
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