Editing Will Eisner (section)

==1970s–2005: Godfather of the graphic novel==

===Graphic novels===
Eisner credited the 1971 [[Comic Art Convention]] (CAC) for his return to comics. In a 1983 interview with CAC organizer [[Phil Seuling]], he said, "I came back into the field because of you. I remember you calling me in [[New London, Connecticut|New London]], where I was sitting there as chairman of the board of Croft Publishing Co. My secretary said, 'There's a Mr. Seuling on the phone and he's talking about a comics convention. What is that?' She said, 'I didn't know you were a [[cartoonist]], Mr. Eisner.' 'Oh, yes,' I said, 'secretly; I'm a closet cartoonist.' I came down and was stunned at the existence of the whole world. ... That was a world that I had left, and I found it very exciting, very stimulating".<ref>{{cite magazine|first=Gary|last=Groth|author-link=Gary Groth|url=http://archives.tcj.com/267/e_groth.html|title=Will Eisner: Chairman of the Board|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110320043853/http://archives.tcj.com/267/e_groth.html |archive-date=2011-03-20 |magazine=[[The Comics Journal]]|issue=267|date=May 2005}}</ref>

Eisner later elaborated about meeting [[underground comics]] creators and publishers, including [[Denis Kitchen]]:
{{blockquote|I went down to the convention, which was being held in one of the hotels in New York, and there was a group of guys with long hair and scraggly beards, who had been turning out what spun as [[literature]], really popular 'gutter' literature if you will, but pure literature. And they were taking on illegal [sic] subject matter that no comics had ever dealt with before. ... I came away from that recognizing that a revolution had occurred then, a turning point in the history of this medium. ... I reasoned that the 13-year-old kids that I'd been writing to back in the 1940s were no longer 13-year-old kids, they were now 30, 40 years old. They would want something more than two heroes, two supermen, crashing against each other. I began working on a book that dealt with a subject that I felt had never been tried by comics before, and that was man's relationship with [[God]]. That was the book ''[[A Contract with God]]''....<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/volume1/issue1/eisner/ | title= Transcript, Will Eisner's keynote address, Will Eisner Symposium| publisher= The 2002 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels}}</ref>}}

[[File:Contractwithgod.png|thumb|[[Trade paperback (comics)|Trade paperback]] edition of ''A Contract with God''; the concurrent 1,500-copy hardcover release did not use the term "graphic novel" on its cover.]]
In the late 1970s, Eisner turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. ''[[A Contract with God|A Contract with God: and Other Tenement Stories]]'' (Baronet Books, October 1978) is an early example of an American graphic novel, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York's immigrant communities, particularly [[Jew]]s, including ''The Building'', ''A Life Force'', ''Dropsie Avenue'' and ''To the Heart of the Storm''. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year. Each of these books was done twice&nbsp;– once as a rough version to show editor Dave Schreiner, then as a second, finished version incorporating suggested changes.<ref>Sim, Dave, "Advice & Consent: The Editing of Graphic Novels" (panel discussion with Eisner and [[Chester Brown]]) and [[Frank Miller]] interview, both ''Following Cerebus'' No. 5 (August 2005).</ref>

Some of his last work was the retelling in [[sequential art]] of novels and [[Mythology|myth]]s, including ''[[Moby-Dick]]''. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published ''[[Epic of Sundiata|Sundiata]]'', based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African king, "The Lion of [[Mali]]". ''[[Fagin the Jew]]'' is an account of the life of Dickens's character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the stereotyped portrait of Fagin in ''[[Oliver Twist]]''.

His last graphic novel, ''[[The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion]]'', an account of the making, and refutation, of the [[antisemitic]] [[hoax]] ''[[The Protocols of the Elders of Zion]]'', was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005.

In 2008, Will Eisner's ''The Spirit: A Pop-Up Graphic Novel'' was published, with [[Bruce Foster]] as paper engineer.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=MacDonald|first1=Heidi|title=When the Gift is a Graphic Novel|website=PublishersWeekly.com|date=Oct 20, 2008|url=http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/11219-when-the-gift-is-a-graphic-novel.html|access-date=18 December 2016}}</ref>

===Teaching===

In his later years especially, Eisner was a frequent lecturer about the craft and uses of sequential art. He taught at the [[School of Visual Arts]] in New York City, where he published ''Will Eisner's Gallery'', a collection of work by his students<ref>{{Cite book|title=Will Eisner : champion of the graphic novel|last=Levitz|first=Paul|publisher=Abrams|year=2015|isbn=9781613128640|location=New York|oclc=930648436}}</ref> and wrote two books based on these lectures, ''[[Comics and Sequential Art]]'' and ''[[Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative]]'', which are widely used by students of cartooning. In 2002, Eisner participated in the Will Eisner Symposium of the 2002 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels.<ref>Eisner, Will. [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/volume1/issue1/eisner/ "Keynote Address from the 2002 'Will Eisner Symposium'"], ''ImageTexT''<!--spelled OK with cap I and two cap Ts-->, vol. 1, No. 1 (2004). [[University of Florida]] Department of English. Retrieved 2011-02-02. [https://web.archive.org/web/20110513105731/http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/eisner/ WebCitation archive].</ref> Before his death, Eisner worked on and outlined a third book, ''Expressive Anatomy For Comics And Narrative'', but would die before its completion. Editor Denis Kitchen and Eisner's family would decide that the book was near completion, and had cartoonist Peter Poplaski finish inking Eisner's art for publication in 2008.<ref>{{cite book |last=Eisner |first=Will |editor-link=[[Denis Kitchen]] |date=2008 |title=Expressive Anatomy In Comics And Narrative: Principles And Practices From The Legendary Cartoonist |url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/Expressive_Anatomy_for_Comics_and_Narrat/T-TlPLd8DxIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PP2&printsec=frontcover |location=New York |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. |page=ix-x |isbn= 978-0393331288 |access-date=May 3, 2025}}</ref>