Influential Jewish comics legend Will Eisner gets a retrospective in Chelsea
Gallery is showing 79 works by the ‘father of the graphic novel’ through mid-March
An exhibition spotlighting the 60-year career of Jewish cartoonist and writer Will Eisner, considered the father of the graphic novel, is on view in Manhattan.
A retrospective of the comic book pioneer’s work will be displayed at Chelsea’s Philippe Labaune Gallery, at 534 West 24th St., through March 8. The venue claims to be “the first contemporary art gallery in the United States specializing in high-end narrative art and illustration.”
Eisner, who showed an interest in and talent for drawing at a young age, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents in 1917. It’s not surprising that he became an artist — his father was well-known as a church painter before he left Austria, and painted theatrical sets after he got to America. After some early misadventures in art education, Eisner largely was self-taught as he developed his skills.
The family had moved to the Bronx, which then was more suburban in feeling, and Eisner went to DeWitt Clinton High School, where he created illustrations for school publications. In 1936, his friend Bob Kane — a fellow Jewish cartoonist who would go on to co-create Batman — encouraged Eisner to enter the then-burgeoning comics scene.
The gallery show spotlights 79 original works from Eisner’s prolific career, including pieces he created while serving in the army during World War II, selections from “The Spirit” — a comic about a masked crimefighter that launched in 1940 — and others from “New York: The Big City,” his collection of vignettes about city life.
In addition, a nearly complete sequential presentation of “The Super” — one of the stories that constitutes Eisner’s magnum opus, “A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories” — will be on display. Considered by insiders to be the first graphic novel, the stories revolve around the poor Jewish residents of a Bronx tenement building.
“Eisner was committed to fighting anti-Semitism on all levels, both in his own life and on a greater social level,” Matthue Roth wrote in an overview of the artist in MyJewishLearning.
Eisner’s commitment to fighting anti-Jewish sentiment was made clear in his final projects, including “Fagin the Jew,” from 2004, which retells the story of Charles Dickens’ miserly Jewish character from “Oliver Twist” from Fagin’s point of view.
“In Eisner’s version, Fagin grows up in London’s Ashkenazi communities, forced into crime by cruel fate and crueler prejudice,” according to a Publishers Weekly review.
Just before he died in 2005, at 87, Eisner completed “The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which documents the making of the infamous hoax about a Jewish plot to take over the world, which was first published in Russia in 1903.
As a press release from the gallery says, “this survey of work showcases Eisner’s unparalleled influence in shaping comics as both an art form and a powerful medium for graphic storytelling.”
Eisner’s work influenced myriad Jewish artists. They include Art Spiegelman, whose semi-autobiographical graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
As Roth wrote in MyJewishLearning: “The comic industry’s highest awards, their equivalent of the Oscars, are known as ‘The Eisners.’ But the most enduring part of Eisner’s legacy will be his own work — a form which, as Eisner himself always hoped, would speak for itself.’”
Jewish Week/Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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