Will Eisner Week is an annual series of events celebrating comics and sequential art, graphic novel literacy, free speech, and honoring the legacy of comics and graphic novel pioneer, Will Eisner. Will Eisner was one of the most innovative figures in the history of comics and graphic novels.
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Will Eisner Week occurs at the beginning of March in conjunction with his March 6th birthday. We’re excited because 2017 will be the centennial celebration of Will Eisner’s birth. Will Eisner Week began in 2009 with two events in New York City and has grown every year since then. In 2016 there were over 75 events held in cities throughout the United States and internationally. With your help, we will exceed that number in 2017 and thereby achieve more of Will Eisner’s dreams for the sequential art medium that he championed.Will Eisner (March 6, 1917 – Jan. 3, 2005) was a one-of-a-kind genius, that rare figure of whom it can be said, comics and graphic novels, as we know them today, would not exist without him.
He was one of the pioneers to lead the American comic book industry, proving himself a master of a variety of artistic and literary styles. His landmark comic series The Spirit (1940–1952) was noted for its expressive artwork and breathtaking experiments in content and form.
In 1978, Will Eisner popularized the term “graphic novel” with the publication of his book A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, which was then followed by three decades of extraordinary work, much of it examining topics in comics form that had never before been dealt with in that medium. Some of it, like the works of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, dealt with the Jewish-American experience. His work also explored themes of love, death, loyalty, life in the big city, and more – including humor and science fiction.
Eisner was one of those rare practitioners who was adept at both the creative and business aspects of the medium. He owned most of the properties that he created and was a pioneer in creating the “comics workshop,” where groups of creators worked together. The list of comics creators who passed through his shop for training and employment en route to becoming accomplished, admired comics professionals themselves is amazing. They included Jack Kirby, Jules Feiffer, Al Jaffee, Nick Cardy, Mike Ploog, and many others.
Eisner was an early contributor to formal comics studies with his textbooks Comics and Sequential Art (1985), Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1995) and Expressive Anatomy (2005). He taught at New York’s School of Visual Arts for twenty years, alongside other famous comic creators such as Harvey Kurtzman and Art Spiegelman. He was an evangelist and goodwill ambassador for comics, burning with a passion to show and tell people that comics stood on an equal footing with other storytelling media. As part of this, he lent his name to the prestigious Will Eisner Awards, the Oscars of the Comics Industry, presented each year at the world’s foremost comics convention, San Diego Comic-Con International.
Will Eisner passed away in 2005 at age 87, having just completed The Plot, a work of non-fiction, which was another significant graphic novel achievement. 2017 marks the centennial of Will Eisner’s birth and includes the publication of a centennial edition of “A Contract with God” and two simultaneous traveling original art exhibitions in museums in the US and Europe.
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